Tsunami makes the case for more disaster relief money

By David Cronin

Date: 13/01/05

Officials at the European Commission's Humanitarian Office (ECHO) are to lobby for increased resources following the tsunami which devastated large tracts of Asia.

Sources in ECHO say its director António Cavaco will probably make the case for bolstering its wherewithal in the coming weeks, as part of an assessment of how it can improve its readiness for dealing with disasters.

At present ECHO has a team of 25 stationed in the areas affected by the disaster. Officials in ECHO's Brussels headquarters acknowledge that they are under considerable pressure, especially as the organization is assessing both the immediate and longer-term needs of survivors.

Most of the 25-strong team had already been stationed in ECHO's offices in Bangkok, New Delhi and Jakarta. Among the reinforcements brought in were Peter Holdsworth, a veteran aid worker based in Nairobi, who has been coordinating much of ECHO's activities in Sudan's war-torn region of Darfur. He travelled to the remote Indonesian province of Aceh, where more than 100,000 perished.

Fellow ECHO worker Heinke Veit witnessed massive destruction in Sri Lanka. "I saw villages swept away, railtracks thrown apart and overturned buses and cars in the middles of roads," she said.

Some relief agencies believe, too, that the EU's existing humanitarian resources need to be enhanced. "ECHO has worked quite smoothly in south-east Asia," said Kathrin Schick from Voluntary Organizations in Cooperation in Emergencies (VOICE), an umbrella group including Save the Children, Oxfam, Care and World Vision. "The problem with ECHO is that it doesn't have the system to deploy more staff when something like this happens."

So far the Commission has pledged up to €450 million in humanitarian and reconstruction aid for areas hit by the tsunami. President José Manuel Barroso has undertaken that every euro of this will be used for its intended purpose.

Yet the EU's track record on aid delivery leaves much to be desired. In the late 1990s, the Union was severely criticised when media reports stated that none of the €200 million it had earmarked to help Central America recover from Hurricane Mitch was spent two years after the disaster.

A reform process aimed at boosting the efficiency of aid delivery - as well as subjecting it to more rigorous financial controls - was introduced in 2000, partly in response to the Mitch controversy. But some aid analysts say that the spending of aid is still slow. For example, of €35m allocated to Afghanistan in humanitarian aid last year, just 52% has actually been paid out.

But an ECHO official argued that such a rate of spending is normal as most of the projects being financed are ongoing and have thus only received an advance payment so far. More than 99% of the €35m has been contracted to its 'partners' (charities through which it channels money), the source added.

Another ECHO official said: "I'm a bit perplexed by some of the accusations levelled at us. The BBC claimed recently that of the $1 billion [753m euro] promised [by the international community] after the Bam earthquake in Iran, only $17.5m [13m euro] has been sent. If that's true that would be scandalous. But we gave €8.5m in humanitarian assistance, which has all been contracted to our partners. Surely we didn't supply more than half of all the aid."

The Asian tsunami is likely to be an important test case for the Commission's newly devised strategy of ensuring a smooth transition from the emergency phase of a crisis to the longer term. Such issues as providing housing for those uprooted and education for what UNICEF calls the "tsunami generation" will have to be addressed as part of the latter stage. An estimated 1.5m children are believed to have been directly affected by the tsunami, many of whom have been orphaned.

"One of the biggest failures of the EU's track record is that it fails to link humanitarian aid with rehabilitation and development," said Olivia Lind of Save the Children. "But it is extremely important that the children who are deeply traumatised come back to some sense of normality, that they can go to school, have a place to live and - where they have lost parents - be reunited with other family members."

Article reports on the work of ECHO, the European Union's Humanitarian Aid Department, in the wake of the tsunami disaster in Asia and the need to enhance the EU's existing humanitarian resources.