Displaced Liberians line up to register to receive food aid. Photo by VASILY FEDOSENKO
BRUSSELS (AlertNet)- Fierce competition for humanitarian aid has created a two-tier system in which money rolls into high-profile crises while disasters deemed less politically important become second-class emergencies, aid agencies said at the launch of a U.N.-led funding drive.
In its Humanitarian Appeal 2004, the United Nations has asked governments for ${esc.dollar}3 billion to help 45 million people embroiled in 21 of the world&${esc.hash}39;s most serious conflicts and natural disasters.
But the appeal faces daunting challenges.
"Never has the competition been so intense," James Morris, executive director of the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP), said at the Brussels launch of the appeal.
"Donor countries have grown a bit weary of these appeals, especially those struggling to meet domestic demands and cut their budget deficits at the same time."
The annual appeal -- the result of the U.N.-led Consolidated Appeals Process (CAP), aimed at coordinating planning among aid organisations -- aims to train the spotlight on many of the world&${esc.hash}39;s forgotten crises, including 17 in Africa.
"This pressure on funding has led to the creation of a class system," Morris said. "The politically important crises are funded first and generously, the others are quietly relegated to the bottom and more or less forgotten?? A two-tier system is now firmly in place.
"There should be no second-class emergencies -- not in the media and not in the eyes of the donors. There should be no second-class citizens among aid recipients. Yet sadly there are."
NEEDS PRIORITISEDLast year, agencies sought ${esc.dollar}5.1 billion through the appeal and received ${esc.dollar}3.3 billion.
"We&${esc.hash}39;ve averaged over the last 10 years about 60 percent funding, which, despite donors&${esc.hash}39; generosity, is not enough for us to do all our work," said CAP chief Toby Lanzer of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
"We are only going for ${esc.dollar}3 billion for next year, but I would be looking to get as close to that as possible over the coming months."
Together, the U.N., NGOs and the Red Cross movement have come together much better this year and prioritised needs?? We have a set of projects that are very targeted and we&${esc.hash}39;ve been able to avoid needing to ask for more money."
Lanzer said this year&${esc.hash}39;s appeal was lower because it did not include funding needs for Iraq, whereas last year&${esc.hash}39;s appeal had included a request for ${esc.dollar}2 billion for Iraq.
At a conference of international donors last month, governments pledged ${esc.dollar}33 billion for the reconstruction of Iraq. Washington later came up with its own spending package worth a whopping ${esc.dollar}87.5 billion.
"With even a small percentage of the commitment the world has made to Iraq, we could feed every hungry child in the world," Morris said.
But he said there was no evidence that major donors had cut financial support to other places in need because of Iraq.
European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid Poul Nielson told a news conference that EU humanitarian support for Iraq would not drain money from other conflicts.
The European Commission&${esc.hash}39;s Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO) provides 125 million euros (${esc.dollar}105 million) each year to U.N. agencies. Total funding for humanitarian aid is 500 million euros (${esc.dollar}420 million) annually.
&${esc.hash}39;LIKE THE WEATHER&${esc.hash}39;Nielson said the biggest obstacle to the financing of humanitarian aid was the public perception that conflicts cannot be solved but are "something we have to live with, like the weather".
He said 90 percent of human suffering was in fact man-made, meaning that fundamental change was possible.
"For that reason, we should raise the level of ambition and start pushing for something more -- global governance, good systems for funding and resources for the U.N.," he said.
Statistics hint at the imbalance in humanitarian funding that aid agencies say is endemic. Last year, the two most high-profile crises - Iraq and Afghanistan - received two-thirds of total humanitarian support, according to OCHA research.
This lack of proportionality is driven by the domestic and foreign policy interests of donors, Larry Minear and Ian Smilie concluded in their study, "The Quality of Money: Donor behaviour in humanitarian financing".
"There is a very real politicisation of aid," Minear told AlertNet.
The WFP&${esc.hash}39;s Morris said that while donors might want to reward recipient governments and humanitarian agencies that deliver aid more efficiently, a growing tendency to earmark funds for specific purposes also proved that aid was becoming more politicised.
"Earmarking has sometimes made the U.N. and our NGO partners far too dependent on a single donor -- not a healthy state of affairs for the victims of crises," he said.
Morris said 80 percent of the WFP&${esc.hash}39;s recent operations in Sudan were funded by the United States. "We need to move away from that kind of excessive dependence in funding."
With 90 percent of funding coming from 10 major donors, there is a "dramatic need" to broaden the base, he said.
PICKING AND CHOOSINGThe countries that contribute the greatest percentage of their gross domestic product to the CAP are Norway, Sweden and The Netherlands.
Morris said donors should contribute to the whole range of humanitarian operations, balancing funds across different sectors, not simply "picking and choosing from a menu".
Mukesh Kapila, U.N humanitarian coordinator for Sudan, said mechanisms behind donor decisions could produce negative results.
"The way targets and decisions are made naturally drives agencies in a particular direction, or not as the case may be, and that can be perverse if it results in the type of delivery which is not necessarily the best way to do things," he said.
"Donor behaviour is irrational and often unaccountable and possibly creates many of the problems that we face."
Mikael Linvall from the Swedish mission to the United Nations told AlertNet that a growing awareness of these problems had led to the International Meeting on Good Humanitarian Donorship in Stockholm in June.
"All of the major humanitarian donors committed themselves to better behaviour," he said, adding that most countries were in favour of moving towards a needs-based approach to funding.
"It&${esc.hash}39;s not going to happen overnight, but anything we can do to improve it is going to help."
Linvall said overall funding of humanitarian aid -- of which the CAP is just one component -- was insufficient.
He said that just because appeals were 60 percent funded did not mean 60 percent of needs were being met.
"We&${esc.hash}39;re probably funding much less than that. If we doubled the amount of aid given today it would be close."
Spending on disaster relief accounts for a fraction of total government expenditure. The world currently spends ${esc.dollar}10 billion on humanitarian aid, compared with ${esc.dollar}794 billion on the military, research from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute shows.
LACK OF TRUSTMinear said that more important than the appeal&${esc.hash}39;s asking figure was how much governments would actually offer, and how quickly. The timing of pledges could influence the way agencies plan for the year ahead.
William Paton, U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Tajikistan, said it was impossible to plan activities "based on the fictitious belief that we were going to get 100 percent of a purely needs-based appeal".
"We have to adapt our description of the amount needed based on how much we think the market will bear," he said.
"More and more donors are admitting that this is a problem and that we need to treat all people in need equally. But we have to plan in the real world with the available money."
The appeal noted that most humanitarian workers know first-hand what happens when funds come up short. In the Ivory Coast last year, agencies were forced to re-allocate resources from one vulnerable group to another, leaving internally displaced people and refugees with reduced rations.
Linvall said that while funding appeals had become more accurate and efficient, there was a residual lack of confidence in the financing system.
"We still have a problem that certain donors feel they can&${esc.hash}39;t 100 percent trust the assessments made by agencies," he said. "There is mistrust, but a certain extent of it is unavoidable because of the competition over scarce resources."
Minear said his study had revealed suspicion not only between major groups making up the system -- the U.N., NGOs and donors -- but also within those groups.
"We found an alarming amount of distrust within the system," he said. "It&${esc.hash}39;s a multi-faceted, multi-sided distrust that plays out in a variety of ways."
Kapila said he thought it was not simply a question of donors being "ungenerous or unresponsive".
"The donors are saying that the way the current humanitarian system works is inefficient and relatively ineffective," he said.
Kapila called for fundamental reforms of the humanitarian system to make the financing of humanitarian action more predictable and sustainable.
"Without that reform I see little prospect for getting more resources, other than in highly politicised circumstances," he said.
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