Mixing Foreign Aid with Defense budget commitments

British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon suggested that his government could switch millions of pounds of aid spending into the defense budget to help meet its 2 per cent NATO commitment.

Speaking to the Sunday Express, ex-defense chief Lord Robertson said: “Including the foreign aid budget in defense spending is just sleight of hand. It’s double entry bookkeeping. … This was never the traditional way of calculating our NATO contribution.

David Cameron was personally lobbied by US President Obamaduring last week’s G7 summit in Bavaria. Lord Robertson added: “You’ve seen President Obama making it very clear during the G7 that Britain wasn’t doing enough.

“My view is that they should leave financial engineering to the bankers. In defense terns what matters is protection of the allies and they’ll not be taken in by a cheap three-card trick.”

He added: “Foreign Aid is now pegged to GDP and it is going to leap up as the economy grows.

[Sunday Express]

The magnitude of Syria’s humanitarian crisis

The war in Syria, now in its fifth year, shows no signs of letting up. Well over 200,000 people are thought to have died—though counting the dead is so difficult that at one point the UN simply gave up. Perhaps a million more have been injured.

Almost 12 million Syrians have been forced from their homes, with around 4million fleeing abroad. Syria is one of the top countries of origin for Europe’s boat people. It is telling that around 250,000 of the displaced have sought sanctuary in war-torn Iraq.

Inside Syria the fighting has caused one of the worst humanitarian crises of the 21st century. The economy is a wreck: four out of five Syrians live in poverty and unemployment is over 50%. The World Health Organisation says 57% of Syria’s public hospitals have been damaged, with 37% knocked out of service. Most of the country’s doctors have fled. The life-expectancy of Syrians, on average, is now around 55, 20 years shorter than it was before the war.

Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, says the country has lost the equivalent of four decades of human development. Over 4,000 schools have been damaged or repurposed. Power output is down by 56%, according to the electricity ministry.

Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict through a network of informants on the ground, reckons ISIL now controls more than half of Syrian territory. The crisis will almost certainly grow worse.

[The Economist]

UN appeals for $500 million in humanitarian aid for Iraq

The United Nations launched an appeal on Thursday for half a billion dollars in international aid to tackle a worsening humanitarian crisis in Iraq triggered by the conflict with Islamic State militants.

Lise Grande, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, said the United Nations would be forced to slash or shut down more than half its aid operations in Iraq without an immediate injection of new funds. “In the months ahead the humanitarian situation is going to get worse … By the end of 2015, 10 million Iraqis are likely to need some form of life-saving assistance,” Grande said, launching the appeal at the European Parliament.

Violence has already forced nearly 3 million Iraqis from their homes, the U.N. says. Grande said more than 4.4 million Iraqis needed food as key agricultural areas, including large parts of Iraq’s cereal belt, had fallen under Islamic State control.

World Health Organisation Director-General Margaret Chan said public services for health, water, and sanitation, were collapsing. “Crowded, unsanitary conditions bring a high risk of infectious diseases, especially for the millions who have been internally displaced … Cases of measles are now being reported from all 18 governorates. Cholera is endemic,” she said.

In Geneva, medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres called for U.N. and other aid agencies to “get out of their comfort zone” and reach tens of thousands of Iraqis who have fled fighting and are in desperate need of aid and health care in areas including north of Mosul, south of Kirkuk and the outskirts of Baghdad.

[Reuters]

Australia’s record as humanitarian world leader ‘has deteriorated’

Australia has lost its standing as a world leader on humanitarian issues after taking a hardline approach to asylum seekers, a senior US official has said.

Anne Richard, the assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, said on Wednesday that there had always been a “strong tradition” of the US, Canada and Australia taking the lead in tackling humanitarian issues. “That sense that Australia is in the forefront has deteriorated a bit in the last few years,” she said.

Richard met Australia’s ambassador for people smuggling issues, Andrew Goledzinowski, during an emergency international summit on the plight of thousands of Burmese and Bangladeshi caught in an asylum seeker standoff in the Andaman sea. Richard was evasive on whether Australia’s policy to turn back asylum boats had, at least in part, contributed to the standoff.

“The US takes a different approach,” she said, pointing to the policy of assessing protection claims on-board the vessels in which asylum seekers flee. The US approach of ensuring that people have an opportunity to state their case for protection “is needed throughout the region”.

About 2,000 Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants are still stranded at sea somewhere between Burma and Malaysia, Thomas Vargas, from the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) in Indonesia, said.

The US has a long-standing program to resettle Burmese refugees, many of whom are Rohingya. It took about 1,000 Burmese refugees in the past three months, making Burma one of the top three countries of origin for the US refugee program. Shortly after the high seas standoff made headlines, the US stepped in with an offer to resettle some of the people fleeing their homelands.

The Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, has refused to resettle any of the stranded Rohingya, even if they are found to be refugees.

[The Guardian]

EU draws fire for failing to set date for 0.7% aid target

The EU has come under fire for failing to set a deadline for its own financial commitments to aid, a move that activists say could threaten wider talks on funding an ambitious development agenda.

A critical funding summit in Addis Ababa in July is meant to agree how to finance development priorities for the next 15 years. The sustainable development goals (SDGs), which will replace the millennium development goals when they expire this year, will be ratified in September. But campaigners say that, without concrete progress in Addis Ababa, the entire process is in jeopardy.

A meeting last week of the EU’s Foreign Affairs Council on Development  set out the EU’s vision of a new global partnership for sustainable development, including a renewal of member states’ pledges to commit 0.7% of gross national income to aid. But it gave no concrete deadline.

Concord, the European confederation for relief and development, described the pledge as “vague and non-binding” and said 2020 should be the new deadline.

Donor nations have generally failed to fulfil the promise made at the Gleneagles G8 summit of 2005 to meet the UN target. Only five countries – Sweden, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark and Britain – achieved the 0.7% level in 2014.

[The Guardian]

Yemen crisis a ‘humanitarian catastrophe’

It’s been just more than two months since a Saudi Arabia-led coalition began its airstrike campaign against Houthi rebels in Yemen, and the country has since become a “humanitarian catastrophe,” experts said this week.

“I am shocked about what I have seen,” said Medecins Sans Frontieres’ Middle East Operations Manager Pablo Marco, who spent 50 days inside the country recently. “The biggest problem is the fact both parties in the conflict are not respecting the civilians and, specifically, they are not respecting medical facilities and medical staff.”

The World Health Organization said on Wednesday that more than 2,000 people have been killed and more than 8,000 injured in the conflict since airstrikes began, and that 8.6 million people are in urgent need of medical help.

U.S. State Department press director Jeff Rathke said that the U.S. has urged “Saudi and other authorities to continue to allow commercial shipments of fuel and food to avert a humanitarian crisis for the 16 million Yemenis in need of assistance.”

Dozens of hospitals have had to shut down inside the country, and nearly all that are still operating are powered by generators. “We are witnessing how the whole health system in the country is literally coming to a halt,” Marco said. “In a matter of 15 days or two weeks there will be hundreds of people who will be dying from this.”

[ABC News]

UN races humanitarian relief to quake-affected Nepali communities as monsoon season nears

Marking one month after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Nepal killing thousands and devastating large swathes of the country’s Kathmandu valley, the United Nations relief arm is continuing to intensify its humanitarian operations as it supports national and local authorities with critical life-saving efforts.

The 25 April earthquake, and its 7.3 magnitude follow-up on 12 May, damaged 26 of Nepal’s hospitals and over 1,100 health facilities, while affecting some 5.6 million people, half of whom have been displaced. An estimated 8,500 people were killed by the two quakes. In addition, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has confirmed that 8.1 million people are in need of humanitarian support while another 1.9 million require food assistance.

Among the major obstacles facing emergency responders is Nepal’s unique and challenging mountainous topography which has rendered many affected communities difficult to reach. And now, with monsoon season no more than three weeks away, time is now of the essence as affected communities – without shelter and short on food supplies – remain more vulnerable than ever to potential landslides and torrential rains, the UN has warned.

As a result, OCHA has reported that elite climbers and porters have joined the relief efforts, setting off on foot from humanitarian staging areas where aid is dropped off in order to optimize delivery to the more hard-to-reach areas.

Against that backdrop, however, there is also growing concern that international funding for the humanitarian response is, to date, insufficient. In today’s press release, OCHA warned that only 22 per cent of what is required for the response was received against the $423 million humanitarian appeal.

[UN News Centre]

Economic damage from Nepal earthquake almost half the country’s GDP

The initial estimates of the economic damage caused by the April 25 earthquake in Nepal are in–and the numbers are staggering.

The economic damage from just the first Nepal earthquake is almost half of the country’s GDP.

The overall damage is estimated to be at about $10 billion, according to the Nepal government–nearly half of its gross domestic product (GDP) of $19.2 billion. According to IHS Global Insights, a research firm, the estimated cost for rebuilding homes, roads and bridges alone could run up to $5 billion.

For Nepal–one of the poorest countries in the world–rebuilding its ravaged economy will be particularly difficult after it suffered years of slow growth.

[Quartz]