Category: Humanitarian Aid

Subsidized food aid on the horizon for millions of India’s poor

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Beneath outward signs of prosperity, India is still one of the most malnourished nations on the planet. According to the 2012 Global Hunger Index from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), India — despite being one of the world’s largest producers of food — ranks as low 65 on a list of 79 countries on the index. It is near the top of the list of countries for underweight children under the age of five.

A $22 billion-a-year welfare scheme passing its way through Indian Parliament aims to sell subsidized wheat and rice to 67% of its 1.2 billion people. The scheme will massively expand an existing program that provides food to 218 million people.

Under the National Food Security Bill, 75% of rural dwellers and 50% of the urban population would get five kilograms of grain per month at the subsidized prices of 3 rupees (US5 cents) for rice and 2 rupees per kilo for wheat and 1 rupee per kilo for coarse grains to be fixed for a period of three years.

Pregnant women and lactating mothers would get a maternity benefit payment of 6,000 rupees (US$99), while children aged six months to 14 years would get take-home rations or be provided with hot cooked food.

The Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices, part of the Ministry of Agriculture, said in a report that the cost of India’s food program is likely to balloon to 6.82 trillion rupees ($126 billion) in its first three years, meaning the government would have to budget almost double its projected food subsidy each year.

Indian political and economic analyst Paranjoy Guha Thakurta said he believed the positive impact of the Food Bill would likely to outweigh its problems in the long term, saying that India would be forced to address problems with its distribution system.

“Indian society has always been an unequal society historically. The food inflation that this country has witnessed in the recent past has made an already unequal society even more unequal,” he said. “Simply put, the poor spend a larger proportion of their income on food.”

“The fact is that in a country like ours with 1.2 billion people, of which anywhere between 200-400 million people are incredibly poor, to have a scheme of cheap food distribution is something that I as an Indian favor.”

[CNN] 

Defining Humanitarian Aid

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Within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is a committee of 24 members of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC), these being: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States and European institutions.

Under OECD criteria, humanitarian aid has very clear cut-off points. For example,

  • “Disaster preparedness” excludes longer-term work such as prevention of floods or conflicts.
  • Reconstruction relief and rehabilitation” includes repairing pre-existing infrastructure but excludes longer-term activities designed to improve the level of infrastructure.
  • The term “global humanitarian assistance” is used to describe humanitarian response

International humanitarian aid” (or “international humanitarian response”) is used to describe the contributions of:

  • international governments
  • individuals, private foundations, trusts, private companies and corporations.

Private contributions included those raised by humanitarian organizations, including NGOs, the UN and the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement.

Source: Global Humanitarian Assistance 

The Syrian Crisis

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With every week that goes by in the Syria crisis, hundreds more lives are lost, policy options narrow and the chances of post-conflict stability grow worse. What started as a demand for internal reform has become a regional conflagration.

Inside Syria, the International Rescue Committee has talked with refugees who reported that life-threatening shortages of medicines and food and fuel shortages are a daily reality. There are allegations of truly horrific human rights abuse.

Nearly seven million Syrians are living in desperate conditions. In addition to nearly 100,000 killed inside Syria (and countless more dying for lack of medical help), close to a third of the Syrian population has been displaced within the country or beyond.

The strain on communities hosting refugees is tangible. There are refugee camps in Jordan, Iraq and Turkey, but across the region the large majority of refugees are fending for themselves in urban areas.

This humanitarian toll is now as much a part of the geopolitics as the balance of military power. The scale of killing has created sectarian reprisals, not just in Syria but in Lebanon and Iraq. Meanwhile, the extent of refugee flows is itself a source of destabilization. And under any scenario, there are many more refugees to come — not least the 250,000 to 300,000 Syrians living up against the Jordanian border.

[Excerpt of report by David Miliband, a former foreign secretary of Britain.]

The Cluster Approach to Humanitarian Relief

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In the past decade the humanitarian relief system has responded to over a thousand natural disasters and complex emergencies in the world, affecting hundreds of millions of people.

Extreme weather and climate events have increased in both frequency and intensity, placing populations and assets at great risk. On top of the growing severity of natural disasters, there are increasing numbers of internally displaced persons, refugees, and asylum seekers due to war or internal conflicts.

In response to this growing need, the humanitarian system has evolved into an industry, with a plethora of organizations, all with different missions, mandates, and agendas.  With the increase of humanitarian actors, the relief system has met a series of challenges, including the need to both increase resources toward humanitarian ends and to improve operational effectiveness and efficiency.  Despite efforts to confront these challenges, much criticism has been leveled at the humanitarian system for failing to meet the basic requirements of affected populations in a timely manner, with the quality of response varying greatly from crisis to crisis.

The Cluster Approach was implemented by the United Nations to address some of these concerns and to improve the coordination of humanitarian relief and actors.  Coordinating relief efforts entails minimizing the duplication of humanitarian services, whether by filling gaps or preventing overlap, and ensuring various organizations are synchronized to work together to achieve a common objective, thereby enabling a more coherent, effective, and efficient response.

Although the need for coordination in relief efforts is not disputed, there are generally two schools of thought on how coordination is best executed in humanitarian relief.  The first group is driven by governmental and inter-governmental bodies, and places an emphasis on a centralized, unified, hierarchical structure, which is assumed to be more effective and efficient.  The second group, preferred by NGOs, is based on a loose centralized approach to coordination.  This group tends to regard the centralization as a means of control over actors and focuses on how a diversity of efforts and approaches can ensure success: if one fails, all do not fail.

With a hierarchical structure featuring accountable lead agencies and encouraging equal-footed partnerships and collaboration, the Cluster Approach can be understood as an attempt to find a ‘middle-ground’ between the two schools.  Read more 

Humanitarian Aid in the form of vaccines

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We now have vaccines to prevent nearly 30 diseases. The GAVI Alliance — a public-private partnership focused on increasing access to vaccines in poor countries — has contributed to the immunization of more than 370 million children since 2000.

The World Health Organization estimates immunization programs prevent 2 million to 3 million deaths every year.

WHO also estimates we have an opportunity to reach an additional 22 million infants who live in hard-to-reach or insecure communities across the developing world. Reaching these populations is the key to achieving humanitarian milestones agreed to by the global community — chiefly, Millennium Development Goal 4, which calls for a significant reduction in child mortality by 2015.

We owe it to ourselves to seize this opportunity for a healthier and disease-free world. More importantly, we owe it to our children.

[Excerpt of article by Siddharth Chatterjee, Chief Diplomat at the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies]

Global refugee numbers at 19-year high

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The number of people who have been forcibly displaced by war and other crises worldwide has risen to its highest level for almost two decades, hitting 45.2 million, according to the UN’s refugee agency.

Annual figures released by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) showed that 1.1 million fled across international borders in 2012, while a further 6.5 million were displaced within their own homelands.

“This means one in each 4.1 seconds. So each time you blink, another person is forced to flee,” Antonio Guterres, the UN high commissioner for refugees, told reporters.

The total figure of 45.2 million included 28.8 million internally displaced people, 15.4 million border-crossing refugees, and 937,000 asylum seekers.

“War is the main reason for this very high number of refugees and people internally displaced. Fifty-five percent of them correspond to the well-known situations of  Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Sudan, and Syria,” Guterres said.

Overall, the Afghan conflict continued to produce the most refugees, a position that it has held for 32 years. Worldwide, one refugee in four is Afghan.

The UNHCR has warned that Syrian refugee numbers could hit 3.5 million by the end of this year, while there are also fears that the number currently displaced within the country, 4.25 million, will also climb. Syrian refugees have flooded into neighboring Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq, stretching those nations’ ability to cope.

“Who is supporting refugees in the world? Essentially, developing countries,” he said, stressing that 87 percent of the world’s refugees were protected by developing countries, up from 70 percent a decade ago.

“So when we see discussion sometimes that exist about refugees in many developed countries, I think it’s good to remind public opinion in those countries that refugees are not people fleeing from poor countries into rich countries in search of a better life,” he added.

Pakistan remained the world’s top host nation in 2012, with 1.6 million refugees mostly from Afghanistan, followed by Iran, with 868,200, and Germany, with 589,700.

260,000 Somalians dead due to famine

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Between 2010 and 2012, more than a quarter of a million people died in the famine in Somalia — in part because the world was too slow to react, says the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Somalia, Philippe Lazzarini.

Half of the 258,000 Somalis who died in the famine were children younger than 5. In the worst-affected area, Lower Shabelle, close to one in five children younger than 5 died.

A report, jointly commissioned by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the USAID-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network, concluded that the world did not do enough after warnings in 2010 that starvation loomed following severe drought.

The year from July 2010 to June 2011 was the driest in the eastern Horn of Africa in 60 years. This resulted in the death of livestock, small harvests and a big drop in demand for labor, cutting into household incomes. Southern Somalia also received less humanitarian assistance in 2010 and much of 2011 than it had in previous years, particularly 2008 to 2009, the report said.

And with reduced supplies available, the price of food staples soared, putting more pressure on poor households.

The result was what the researchers say was one of the worst famines in the past 25 years.

Defining Humanitarian Aid

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“Humanitarian aid” is aid and action designed to save lives, alleviate suffering and maintain and protect human dignity during and in the aftermath of emergencies. The characteristics that mark it out from other forms of foreign assistance and development aid are that:

  • it is intended to be governed by the principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence
  • it is intended to be short-term in nature and provide for activities in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. In practice it is often difficult to say where ‘during and in the immediate aftermath of emergencies’ ends and other types of assistance begin, especially in situations of prolonged vulnerability.

Traditional responses to humanitarian crises, and the easiest to categorize as such, are those that fall under the aegis of ‘emergency response’:

  • material relief assistance and services (shelter, water, medicines etc.)
  • emergency food aid (short-term distribution and supplementary feeding programs)
  • relief coordination, protection and support services (coordination, logistics and communications).

Humanitarian aid can also include reconstruction and rehabilitation (repairing pre-existing infrastructure as opposed to longer-term activities designed to improve the level of infrastructure) and disaster prevention and preparedness (disaster risk reduction (DRR), early warning systems, contingency stocks and planning).

Source: Global Humanitarian Assistance

Franklin Graham claims IRS targeted his international aid ministry

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Franklin Graham, one of the U.S.’s most prominent evangelicals, says the targeting of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service included two of his ministries.The evangelical leader is the son of famed evangelist Billy Graham.

“I am bringing this to your attention because I believe that someone in the administration was targeting and attempting to intimidate us,” Graham wrote in a letter Tuesday to President Barack Obama.

In September, the IRS informed the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse, an international aid group, that it would review the groups’ records for the tax year ending in 2010, according to Graham. IRS agents conducted the review in October, Graham said.

“I do not believe the IRS audits of our two organizations last year is a coincidence –or justifiable,” Graham said in the letter to Obama.

The IRS did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment. The agency has acknowledged that it gave extra scrutiny to tea party groups applying for federal tax exemptions. The Treasury Department’s Inspector General said in a report that the IRS’ use of “inappropriate criteria”  ended in May 2012.

The politics of American humanitarian intervention

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Over the last 20 years, the U.S. government has chosen to intervene in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Haiti and Libya, while resisting calls to take action in Rwanda and Sudan.

These days the Obama administration has been hesitant to get involved in Syria. President Obama’s varying view on humanitarian intervention is in keeping with over 20 years of inconsistent American policy on the issue.

Obviously, there are many reasons why Washington selectively engages in humanitarian intervention missions. Among them, recent research on when and why the U.S. engages in humanitarian intervention emphasizes two factors that might force the U.S. government’s hand on humanitarian intervention: public opinion and Congressional partisanship.

Although public opinion appears to have an influence on legislative behavior, traditional factors such as partisanship have the strongest influence on how legislators cast their votes.

Humanitarian intervention is most likely when the U.S. president enjoys a majority in Congress. In the case of the 1990s, humanitarian interventions failed to get off the ground when President Clinton lost majorities in Congress.

Politicians however are learning the lessons of the 1990s and circumventing Congress. President Obama contributed the U.S. military to NATO operations in Libya preceded without Congressional authorization, as he was aware that such a vote would go down to defeat in a Republican-controlled House and deeply partisan Senate.

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