"There are 800 million people in the world who do not have enough to eat
each and every day. And nobody talks about it or writes about it"
A little food for thought for all those of us well off enough to be
sitting before a computer screen to read reggae news...
--
To see this story with its related links on the The Observer site, go to
http://www.observer.co.uk
Who cares?
The number of humanitarian crises in the world is greater than ever
before but most go unreported in Western media. Sophie Arie in Rome and
Jason Burke reveal the extent of the suffering - and the nightmare
facing aid agencies
Sophie Arie in Rome and Jason Burke
Sunday August 15 2004
The Observer
In the dusty valleys of Sumdoh, where the villages barely cling to the
steep slopes of the high peaks of the Indian Himalayas, where winter
temperatures drop to -30C, and where the frost splinters roads into
rubble in months, they are waiting. High above, behind the crags that
rim their desolate valley homes, is a lake. Old shepherds remember it as
an oversized pond, but now it is a huge reservoir, swollen with the
glacial melt caused by global warming, waiting to smash its way down the
valley and out to the plains beyond.
Last week, with the lake higher than ever, the Indian government began
the laborious process of evacuating 12,000 villagers. The operation was
carefully co-ordinated from the hill town of Simla. Chief Minister Vir
Bhadr Singh reviewed the situation and said the government must prepare
for the worst. But many thousands remain in the danger zone.
Few outside India have heard about the crisis. This is not unusual.
Across the world tens of millions of people are at risk from famine,
disease and natural disasters, without anyone taking much notice. In
Gujarat, in western India, 300,000 farmers have had their fields
flooded; droughts have hit Sri Lanka, there are floods and landslides in
Brazil and Haiti.
Nor are the villagers of Sumdoh exaggerating the problems. When a lake
flooded in the Caucasus in 2002 it destroyed a village 15 miles down
stream, killing 100 people. Researchers at the United Nations
Environment Programme have identified at least 44 potentially dangerous
glacial lakes in the tiny Himalayan kingdoms of Nepal and Bhutan alone.
Many aid workers say the current situation is the worst they have ever
faced. The number of humanitarian emergencies is already higher than
ever before. According to the Red Cross, there were around 400 reported
disasters each year between 1993 and 1997. Between 2000 and 2002 there
were more than 700. And a 'witches brew' of factors threatens to unleash
many, many more that could bring misery to tens of millions and
completely overwhelm the structures that exist to bring help to those
who most need it.
On the outskirts of Rome, in a vast business complex, a giant concrete
office block houses the World Food Programme (WFP), the world's largest
international aid agency and a key part of the UN's global assistance.
Although Romans abandon their capital city for the beach in August,
there is a tense buzz of activity inside the WFP headquarters.
The programme is more stretched than it has ever been, and was involved
in three times more emergencies in the Nineties than in the Seventies.
'We are at our limit. Nobody is quite sure how we will manage when the
next thing comes. But we all know it will come,' said Brenda Barton, its
chief spokesperson.
Senior WFP officials believe four major factors are causing the crisis.
The first is that global warming is causing problems of a severity that
has never been seen before. The rise in global temperatures - reckoned
to be more than half a degree centigrade over the past year - has melted
glaciers throughout the world, causing landslips, mudslides, flash
floods and the swollen lakes that threaten Sumdoh. Warmer temperatures
mean more evaporation which means more precipitation which means more
flooding. WFP officials point to the recent floods in Bangladesh - the
worst for six years - as an example of the sort of climate-related
crisis they increasingly face.
Another factor that senior figures at the programme say makes their job
more difficult is the focus on the war on terror. With news agendas
dominated by violence in Iraq or security scares in Europe, only the
highest profile stories ever make it on to our television screens and
newspaper front pages.
'We are facing a major problem of priorities,' said John Powell, the
WFP's deputy executive director. 'The international community has great
concern that we keep capacity in Iraq for the next couple of months. But
at the same time, there are tens of millions of people who don't know
where their next meal is coming from. We don't seem to be able to
engender the same degree of concern for many other places in the world.'
Powell said press coverage is critical. 'The media is an indispensable
ingredient in the recipe for success,' he said. 'But it's a fact that
there are disasters which are less prominent. Altogether there are 800
million people in the world who do not have enough to eat each and every
day. And nobody talks about it or writes about it.'
One example raised by WFP officials is the current devastation wrought
by massive locust swarms in sub-Saharan Africa. A plague of locusts,
generated by unusually strong and regular rain, has cut a swathe from
the western Maghreb across Mauritania, Niger and Chad and is heading for
southern Sudan, where hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the
violence of government-sponsored militia are already at grave risk.
The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), another major UN body,
launched an appeal for aid to mount operations to counteract the locust
swarm in the autumn of last year. This appeal was renewed twice during
the spring, but a bare minimum of funds was forthcoming and, though the
richer countries such as Algeria and Libya were able to mount effective
campaigns, the poorer sub-Saharan countries just had to take their
chances.
'We have had big damage in the oases already, especially to market
vegetable gardens,' said Mohamed El Haceu Ould Jaavar, chief of
intervention at Mauritania's National Locust Centre. 'The situation is
critical. We don't have the means to cope with the situation. We need
vehicles, planes and pesticides to treat the locust.'
The continuing famine in North Korea is another example of how politics
and climate can interact with devastating results. Following earlier
flood warnings, the Red Cross is now reporting that nearly 40,000
families have been displaced in North Korea as a result of heavy rains.
The rainy season has also washed away at least 100,000 hectares of paddy
and non-paddy fields and cut roads and rail links, mainly in the south
of the country. The northernmost province of Ryanggang is currently
inaccessible because bridges on the main road were destroyed by the
floods. Yet, with North Korea listed in Washington's Axis of Evil, aid
for the state has been cut by 80 per cent since 2001.
According to Powell, the WFP had to make a nightmarish decision. 'Do we
feed the pregnant women and the malnourished children or do we feed the
elderly? We could no longer do both. So we stopped giving food rations
to the elderly. We have had to cold bloodedly categorise people. It's an
excruciating decision to have to make.'
And, even as problems intensify, the ability of the WFP's staff to cope
is diminishing. High international oil prices have forced costs up. And
United Nations staff are increasingly targets, making expensive security
arrangements necessary and curtailing operations in sensitive areas. Two
major non-governmental organisations (NGOs) recently pulled out of
Afghanistan because of concerns over the safety of their staff.
Yet the WFPs dramatic stance is controversial. The exact cause of the
wave of natural disasters is unclear and some doubt a link to climate
change. Dr Mark Saunders, a scientist at University College, London,
runs a tropical storm forecasting centre. He said that though the year
had been 'active', that does not mean the long-term trend is towards
more tropical storms. 'There is not evidence of any significant trend
over the past 20-30 years. Global change is happening, the question is
what the impact might be. One can expect increased flooding but there is
no definitive study.'
Clive Elliott, the FAO's locust expert, said it was impossible to link
locust swarming to climate change. Nor is it necessarily the case that
the war on terror is a distraction - though humanitarian assistance may
suffer disproportionately when public attention is not drawn to
emergencies, argue some.
Many specialists claim that the focus on overseas events sparked by
current security concerns actually marks a huge opportunity for
development work, and point out that global aid flows are at their
highest level for years.
The Department for International Development is spending £165
million in Iraq this year and next. Around a third of this money has
been transferred from programmes in other middle income countries, the
rest has come from the department's contingency fund. This, officials
say, is easily covered by a budget that has increased by £1.2
billion over the last two years to a total of £4.5bn. This has
allowed, officials say, a rapid response to crises in Darfur and
Bangladesh.
'The money being spent in Iraq does not mean pulling back on
humanitarian funding elsewhere,' one official told The Observer. 'It is
an easy answer to say that because of a focus on security we can't fund
[action against] locusts. I don't think there is an overall shortage of
financing but there are some structural issues that need addressing.'
Some say that all those involved in 'the aid industry' need to take a
long, hard look at themselves. Dr Peter Walker, director of the
...
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