UN emergency chief calls for EUR400m disaster fund

By David Cronin

Date: 08/09/05

The head of the UN's humanitarian aid division has urged EU governments to support a new EUR 400 million fund for coping with crises such as droughts, conflicts or earthquakes.

Emergency Relief Co-ordinator Jan Egeland wants such a fund to be operational by January 2006, after it receives backing from world leaders at next week's UN summit in New York (14-16 September).

Egeland said that funding of such magnitude was needed to provide a predictable source of money for responding to disasters in their early stages. Belgium, the Scandinavian countries, the UK, Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands have pledged to back the fund, he said.

"It makes so much more sense not to wait until a crisis becomes a catastrophe. Let's not wait until children are dying on our TV screens in Niger to react. That is not only immoral, it is also bad economics. If we act early, we can feed people on $1 a day, we can bring in food on ships and lorries. But when feeding the dying, we have to fly in food or we have to have intravenous feeding of children. That is many times more expensive."

The EUR 400m available to the fund would be ten times the amount currently available. Egeland voiced frustration at how the UN had to raise money from scratch when warnings of major humanitarian problems were issued. Appeals have led to high donations for victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami and of violence in Iraq and Kosovo but "far too little" for Africa, he added.

He cited Sudan as an example of where humanitarian assistance had been demonstrably effective, reducing the mortality rate in the Darfur region by two-thirds since summer 2004.

Following the tsunami in south-east Asia last December, Egeland said that rich countries had never been as "stingy" towards the poor. He said that many EU governments should also be doing more to eradicate poverty.

"On average, rich countries give 0.25% of national wealth to international development; that means we keep 99.75% to ourselves. I don't think that is any sign of any excessive generosity."

Of the 15 countries that formed the EU prior to last year's enlargement, Italy, Greece and Italy allocate less than 0.25% of their gross domestic product (GDP) to development aid.

Egeland described as "very positive" a recent commitment by the 'old' EU-15 to ensure that their aid budgets reach at least 0.7% of GDP by 2015. "Europe is now taking a dramatic lead but Europe has a lot of nations that are still lagging behind," he said.

Egeland held talks last week with Louis Michel, the European commissioner for development and humanitarian aid, but did not make any requests for EU support for those left homeless by hurricane Katrina.

Pointing out that the US "is the country on earth with the greatest assets", he nonetheless said that the UN was assessing the situation to decide if it should launch an international appeal for assisting the aid efforts in New Orleans.

Article reports that the head of the UN's humanitarian aid division urged EU governments to support a new €400 million fund for coping with crises such as droughts, conflicts or earthquakes. Emergency Relief Co-ordinator Jan Egeland said that he wanted such a fund to be operational by January 2006, provided it received backing from world leaders at the upcoming UN summit in New York, 14-16 September.