VIEWPOINT: Katrina turns tables on U.S. aid

This NOAA satellite image shows Hurricane Katrina hours after making landfall on the Louisiana coast.

Larry Minear, director of the Humanitarian and War Project at Tufts University's Feinstein International Famine Centre, says Americans have a lot to learn from the global reaction to Hurricane Katrina.

Hurricane Katrina has turned the world's preeminent aid donor into an aid recipient. Normally on the dispensing end of financial and technical assistance, the United States has now received offers of aid in cash and kind valued at $1 billion from some 100 countries and international organisations.

The offers range from $500 million in crude oil and cash from Kuwait to $25,000 from Sri Lanka, itself still recovering from December's tsunami. Bangladesh, itself no stranger to hurricanes, has offered technical assistance and $1 million in cash. Cuba has pledged 1,100 doctors, Venezuela food, potable water and eye care, Canada 1,000 relief personnel and four naval and Coast Guard vessels.

This stunning role reversal of more than a half-century of aid relationships offers Americans, who pride themselves on their generosity, an opportunity to reflect upon their own vulnerability and on changes needed in U.S. foreign aid policies.

For starters, post-Katrina aid from abroad, like the outpouring following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, conveys welcome international solidarity. Cataclysms can strike any nation, even the sole remaining superpower.

Contributions from poor countries will be accepted, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said, because 'it is very valuable to give to each other and to be able to do so without a sense of means'.

President George W. Bush initially expressed his view that the United States could take care of itself. But his administration had soon requested 500,000 meals-ready-to-eat (MREs) from the European Union and air transport support from NATO.

Being on the receiving end of aid flows is awkward. A dozen relief flights a day from abroad are now touching down across the South. The world's number one food producer and exporter suddenly finds itself requesting MREs. Mexican troops are providing assistance, their first time on U.S. soil since the Mexican-American war of 1848.

Not all the gifts are unsolicited or without strings. Iran's offer of 10 million barrels of crude oil is conditional on a waiver of U.S. trade sanctions, for example. The State Department is turning down all offers with strings.

POLITICAL POINTS

As a foreign aid donor, the United States knows well the temptation to try to score political points with assistance.

To its credit, the Ronald Reagan administration insisted that emergency assistance be provided to famine-ridden Ethiopia under military strongmen Mengitsu Haile Mariam in the mid-1980s because 'a hungry child knows no politics'. Yet Reagan and other U.S. presidents have often tied the granting or withholding of emergency assistance to short-term foreign policy objectives.

U.S. aid now flows more generously to Afghanistan than to more desperate African countries, and Iraq now upstages Niger in per capita U.S. assistance. Despite the humanitarian principle that emergency aid should be granted solely according to need, aid is often used to applaud or embarrass, to reward or sanction.

In fairness, certain political factors cannot be entirely divorced from the aid process. 'Katrina was more than a natural disaster,' commentator James Carroll has written, adding that it was also a 'political epiphany', laying bare the structures of vulnerability caused by poverty, race and class.

These underlying factors cry out for attention, although the political pressure for change can be diffused by the outpouring of sympathy for the survivors.

International experience confirms that when humanitarian aid substitutes for political solutions, it becomes overextended and leaves the structural underpinnings of need unaddressed.

Former President Bill Clinton may be right in saying that now is not the time for national soul-searching on what went wrong that set the stage for the tragedy. But the necessary post-mortem should not be delayed too long.

HARDSHIP AND HAVOC

Katrina should also lead to a review of U.S. policies that create hardship and havoc in other countries.

'Out in the world, where Americans go to war and perform humanitarian missions, chaos is taken to be a part of indigenous conditions,' says analyst Peter Canellos. Yet American military and economic power has implicated this country deeply in some of that chaos.

Moreover, the signature element in American aid over the years has been food assistance, which often helps U.S. farmers while discouraging their counterparts in the developing world.

U.S. policymakers now make sport of the United Nations, which itself offered assistance post-Katrina and which, for all of its weaknesses, anchors the current system of global humanitarian aid. Reflecting upon the Katrina experience, perhaps the United States will take international law and institutions more seriously.

Finally, the killer hurricane underscores the need for accountability in aid efforts. Although the administration was quick to claim that the federal government was meeting the needs of the inundated, the judgment of the beneficiaries rather than the appraisals of policymakers deserves to be the ultimate arbiter.

This is difficult enough to accomplish when the recipients are citizens of a democracy such as the United States. As international aid groups are realising, it is even more difficult, but equally necessary, when from Darfur or Mogadishu the dispossessed have little say in donor capitals such as Washington or aid agency headquarters in New York or Geneva.

Katrina has lots to teach the American people and their policymakers regarding the importance of human solidarity and of a more mutual U.S. role in global humanitarian action.

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