Zambia's Plight Goes Begging in Year of Disasters
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Donor fatigue. When will the ongoing crises end?
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')In January, to stretch its thinning supplies, the United Nations cut its already basic food rations to war refugees in Zambia by almost 40 percent — not just for the Nangweshi camp's 15,100 residents, but also for 57,000 refugees from Congo in four other camps.
The cuts were made after the developed world did not respond to United Nations' pleas for help to feed the refugees. Like similar appeals, they went unheeded in a year of many disasters and what aid specialists call a growing malaise among donors about such emergencies.
PeakOil is You
Rather worrying article...
Re: Rather worrying article...
by MrBill » Thu 23 Feb 2006, 06:33:03
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')One Nangweshi family of 10, its monthly ration exhausted, weathered January's final days by eating leaves plucked from plants growing outside its hut. Other families resorted to begging in villages outside the camp, but the drought last year left local residents so bereft that food or money for needy refugees is scarce. "It's a matter of priorities for the international community," David Stevenson, the Canadian who leads the World Food Program's Zambia operations, said in an interview in Lusaka, the capital. "What could be more obvious than refugee camps?"
Mr. Stevenson said that lapses in international food aid to refugees had been a recurring problem in Rwanda, and that after the earthquake in Pakistan last October the World Food Program came within hours of grounding its food airlifts because it was out of cash.
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')Outside, amid the camp's stick-and-mud-walled, thatched huts, virtually every family had a story about hunger.
Even before the cuts, "what we normally receive was not enough," said Gabriel Vunonge, the 62-year-old, one-legged patriarch of a refugee family of 13. The reduced ration, he said, "won't reach."
I would struggle to feed my wife and eleven chidren. Who wouldn't?
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Food shortages have become so regular in parts of Africa that some governments consider them normal, rather than emergencies — an attitude many aid officials say was at the root of the sluggish response last year to widespread hunger in Niger.
Often, as in Niger, money comes only belatedly, after wealthy donors have been harangued by the United Nations or embarrassed by news media coverage of hungry masses.
That is the crux of the problem, many aid specialists say. Support for global emergencies is purely voluntary, forcing humanitarian agencies to go hat in hand to governments, not just to sustain continuing programs like refugee camps, but for new emergencies like the 2004 tsunami.
And what about preparing for emergencies at home? Maybe an outbreak of human to human transmitted bird flu.
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"We are professional beggars," said one Europe-based United Nations official on condition of anonymity for fear of angering donor nations. He added: "Some activities, you can decide whether you want to voluntarily fund or not. But things like Darfur, like refugees — for that sort of thing, we should have a system that produces money faster."
So in other words, the UN and outsiders cannot interfer in Dafur and Sudan to prevent the underlying causes, genocide and persecution, but they are expected to fill the gap of feeding these people even though Sudan send oil to China and India?
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')Mr. Hess suggested, however, a second concern — the reluctance of some other donors to "step up to the plate," leaving most relief work to the United States and a handful of other nations, including Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, Britain and other European governments. Notably absent were the oil-rich governments of the Middle East and Angola itself, now at peace and reaping billions from oil and diamond sales.
Good point. Where is that ME oil money and help from African nations who have been on the receiving end of aid before?
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')n Nangweshi's nutrition center, a 36-year-old mother of eight sat in the dank hall with her youngest, a 2-year-old with diarrhea. In January, she said, their food ran out eight days before the February allotment.
