Military involvement in conquering the Ebola outbreak?

As the body count in Africa’s deadly Ebola outbreak continues to rise, some say the time has come for the U.S. military to step in.

“The U.S. Military is uniquely poised to help with this disease,” says Timothy Flanigan, an infectious disease researcher at Brown University who’s volunteering in Liberia, the country hardest hit by Ebola. “We’ve trained for it, we’ve got the logistics, we’ve got the support and we have the matériel.”

The Department of Defense runs a sophisticated health service for its own troops. Its staff includes infectious disease experts, doctors and nurses. It can set up massive field hospitals almost anywhere. On top of that, the military can do logistics like no other: It can move fuel, food and supplies en masse.

“Our deployable medical capabilities are generally trauma medicine, treating people who suffer wounds in combat and things of that nature,” says Michael Lumpkin, the assistant secretary of defense in charge of Ebola response. “That’s not necessarily what they’re dealing with there.”

Until recently, many charities working in the region didn’t want military involvement. But as the outbreak grows worse, aid groups feel they have to take a chance. “I think what we’ve already seen is a sea change in the receptiveness of many international health workers to military engagement,” Julie Fischer, a public health expert at George Washington University says.

Doctors Without Borders, which has clinics throughout the region, is now asking for military support. In neighboring Sierra Leone, the British Military is planning to set up and run a 62-bed facility. That work is being done in coordination with the charity Save the Children.

[NPR]

Should the world continue to fund food aid to North Korea?

For nearly three decades, a chronic food emergency has gripped North Korea. In the 1990s a famine killed up to five per cent of the pre-crisis population.

Pyongyang presses on with its nuclear programme and prestige projects while millions of its citizens remain malnourished. The long-running food crisis is the outcome of decades of economic mismanagement and a political system that absolves its leadership of any real accountability.

Humanitarian activities by the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) and private relief groups constitute the longest ongoing engagement between the hermit state and the international community. But the North Korean regime’s actions create an ethical conundrum which may be reaching its breaking point.

Donor fatigue has set in. The WFP’s assistance requests are grossly undersubscribed and the organization may be forced to shut down its remaining program. And if it tries to soldier on with reduced resources, its ability to monitor its own activities will be badly affected, risking aid diversion and catastrophic scandal.

[The Guardian] 

Humanitarian aid from Iran delivered to Iraqi Kurds

Iran’s second consignment of humanitarian aid has been delivered to the people of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, an official with the Iranian Red Crescent Society said.

Humanitarian aid workers targets of attack

More and more, during the course of helping suffering populations, humanitarian aid workers have become targets of attack by extremist groups.

2013 saw the highest number of aid workers killed compared to all other years, as reported by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Of 460 incidences of violence reported against aid workers in 2013, 155 have been fatal. This was said to have triple the number over the last 10 years. The leading offenders are reportedly found in Afghanistan, Syrian Arab Republic, South Sudan, Pakistan and The Sudan.

Without sufficient numbers of workers on the ground, service delivery to displaced people is hampered. And with more needy situations, not to speak of these attacks on humanitarian aid workers, there is need for an increase in the number of aid workers who have the courage and commitment to respond to increasingly various complex situations around the world.

Oxfam nudging big food companies to do right

Oxfam America thinks that it can force the world’s biggest food companies to save the environment and make life better for millions of farm workers.

A campaign called Behind the Brands, led by Oxfam International, an advocacy organization dedicated to fighting poverty, is trying to make the inner workings of the 10 biggest food companies in the world more visible.

They include General Mills, Associated British Foods, Danone, Mars, Coca-Cola, Mondelez, Unilever, PepsiCo, Nestle and Kellogg, companies which collectively control much of what we consume.

Oxfam’s goal is to nudge them by scoring them on a scale of 1 to 10 on a whole host of fronts, from worker rights to climate change.

Chris Jochnick is one of the architects of this campaign and Oxfam America’s director of private sector development. In the following radio spot, he touches on how social media is giving activists more power, why big food companies respond to pressure, and whether corporate executives are his friends or his enemies, as well as some of the tactics he and others have used to influence corporate leaders.

Tactics include speaking up as shareholders at annual meetings or earnings calls, and staging public events, such as the one featured in this YouTube video of activists in Time Square drawing attention to the plight of female cocoa farmers in Africa. These efforts led to agreements with three large chocolate companies — Mars, Mondelez and Nestle — who have committed to doing more to help the female cocoa farmers in their supply chains escape poverty.

Listen to NPR’s Dan Charles and Allison Aubrey talk with Oxfam’s Chris Jochnick

UN: Syrian refugee crisis is ‘biggest humanitarian emergency of our era’

The Syrian civil war has sparked “the biggest humanitarian emergency of our era.”

That’s according to António Guterres, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, who added that while the world’s response to the crisis has been “generous,” it hasn’t met the needs of refugees.

The U.N. agency released new numbers on Friday and the picture they paint is exceedingly grim. A few data points from the report:

• The total number of Syrian refugees is on the verge of surpassing 3 million people since the conflict began in 2011. (By comparison, Chicago has a population of 2.7 million.)
• Nearly half of all Syrians have been forced to abandon their homes.
• One in eight Syrians has fled the country.
• 6.5 million Syrians are displaced inside the country.

The situation is also growing more acute, according to the report. More than half of the refugees coming into Lebanon, for example, told the agency that they have moved at least once before. One in 10 refugees in Lebanon say they have moved more than three times.

[NPR]

Major surge in humanitarian crises so far this year

From Syria to Iraq and natural disasters to a deadly virus, 2014 has already been marked by a major surge in humanitarian crises — and there are still four months to go.

A UN report released last week says this year has seen a large increase in the number of people needing aid, up to 102 million from 81 million in December 2013.

“2014 has seen a major surge in humanitarian crises around the world,” said the UN’s Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, adding that aid agencies need an estimated $17.3 billion US to cover the world’s needs, up from $12.9 billion in 2013.

Among the ongoing problems affecting people around the world:

• The Syrian conflict.
• Typhoon Haiyan, which hit last November but is still affecting people in the Philippines.
• ISIS extremism in Iraq.
• Violence in the Central African Republic.
• An outbreak of the Ebola virus.
• Longstanding violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Darfur and South Sudan.

“We’re having a particularly, it seems, difficult period of time right now,” Rachel Logel Carmichael, a team leader in World Vision’s humanitarian and emergency affairs branch, said in an interview with CBC News.

Fen Hampson, director of the global security and politics program at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, says natural disasters like hurricanes or typhoons are typically one-off events that are damaging, but prolonged conflicts have more lasting effects on people.

The greatest humanitarian crisis of the last century, Hampson said, was due to the First and Second World Wars, “where you had very large-scale civilian casualties going into the tens of millions, and obviously displaced populations as well.”

[CBC]