Source: http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=93279
Aid watchdog Development Initiatives has released its annual Global Humanitarian Assistance (GHA) report which shows that institutional donor aid achieved its highest-ever level of US$16.7 billion in 2010. However, the aid costs also touched the highest-ever level for 2010.
The report also states that disaster preparedness is largely neglected and the emergency aid is spent in same countries repeatedly. The major contributors for the aid included the USA, Canada and Japan. Their increased contribution has helped in offsetting the decreasing aid budgets of a number of donors, including the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Greece, Korea, Portugal and Ireland – all of which watched their aid budgets lowering for the second year in a row.
Donors which are not part of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) also contributed more. Their foreign assistance increased from $4.6 billion to $10.4 billion between 2005 and 2009, according to a second Development Initiatives report by Kerry Smith: Non-DAC Donors and Humanitarian Aid: Shifting Structures, Changing Trends.
The additional funding does not go as far as it used to: price rises in food and fuel have “put pressure on the system and reduced buying power”, said GHA programme leader Jan Kellett. Fats and cereal costs more than doubled between 2007 and 2008, and continued to rise throughout 2010, while the cost of delivering them also continued to rise, according to Development Initiatives and the UN.
The UN estimates international food prices reached an all-time high in February 2011.
This and other factors meant the unmet needs in UN emergency appeals “worryingly” grew from 30 to 37 percent, according to Kellett. UN appeals for the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), Chad, Central African Republic and Uganda all experienced a widening in their funding gaps in 2010, according to the report.
Another area of unmet need was disaster preparedness and risk reduction, which received just 75 US cents out of every $100 spent on aid, according to Development Initiatives, reaching just $835 million in 2009.
“We return to lots of these same situations every 3-5 years – everyone knows a disaster will occur in East Africa, and yet we are still not ready for it,” said Kellett. “Not what it says on the box”
A striking finding from the report is that humanitarian recipients are relatively predictable: the top five aid recipients – Sudan, oPt, Iraq, Afghanistan and Ethiopia – have remained among the top 10 aid recipients over the past decade.
Rather than aid being a short-term life-saving measure, the statistics indicate it is being used to deliver basic services year on year, according to Kellett, and in this sense, the divide between humanitarian and development aid may be far weaker than many think. “It’s not what it says on the box,” he surmised.
This is not necessarily an indictment of humanitarian aid, he added, but it begs the question: is humanitarian aid always the right solution? “I would question whether it makes sense to spend the same amount every year in Darfur… Should we try to be achieving conflict resolution, peace building, other issues? These are difficult discussions but they are worth posing,” he said.
This points to the oft-repeated false division between humanitarian and development aid, said UK Overseas Development Institute (ODI) Humanitarian Policy Group researcher Sarah Bailey. “The reality is that our efforts to make a clear division between `humanitarian’ and `development’ are not well suited to the complexity of these contexts… We know that humanitarian assistance is not the best tool to address long-term vulnerability and the absence of basic services, so why isn’t development assistance doing more to tackle these problems?” asked Bailey.
