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The news is full of the China earthquake in Sichuan and of the
irresponsibility of the junta in Myanmar in refusing to allow
international aid to the country following the cyclone earlier this
month. In 1976, there was a major earthquake in Tangshan, China in
which anywhere between 250,000 and 500,000 people lost their lives.
1976 was at the end of the Cultural Revolution and at that time
China refused any international aid, as, according to Chairman Mao,
“zi li gen sheng”—depend on ourselves. His wife and gang of
four member, Jiang Qing, was quoted as saying, “There were merely
several hundred thousand deaths. So what?”
In Myanmar, the junta has been refusing visas to
international aid workers and haggling over tax and customs duties
for international relief donations in kind. This has become, and
rightly a matter of considerable international concern, more so
I’m sure that was the case at the time of the Tangshan
earthquake—fashions change. China has indeed opened up, they have
allowed foreign reporters to cover the Sichuan earthquake and they
have accepted international aid. It is expected that there will be
serious food shortages in North Korea in the near future—wonder
what will happen with that?
I have written before about international aid
donations to the Philippines and the difficulties of getting these
items through Customs speedily to the people who are in need of
them. There have been unhappy experiences here, too; however I do
know now that there is a speedy and official route for getting
disaster relief supplies through Customs—do the international
donors know this?
There will always be natural disasters and lives
and homes and livelihoods will be lost because of them. The
underdeveloped world is generally sited in more disaster prone areas
and is less able to deal with the catastrophic consequences of
natural disasters—shortage of money, shortage of infrastructure,
bureaucracy and a possibly greater acceptance of loss of life—not
that most people would be as harsh as Jiang Qing. The capacity of
international disaster aid is enormous, and sometimes it works very
efficiently. I have no doubt that some informal international
disaster relief effort is in fact already working in Myanmar
now—these are people who know that help is needed and who will
break un-humanitarian rules and practices in order to ensure that
help is delivered where and when it is needed, at significant
personal risk to themselves. They are small, fast on their feet and
effective, but sadly limited by the resources at their disposal. The
resources are with the major multilaterals and international aid
agencies that have developed their own elephantine bureaucracies,
and because of their nature always have to approach via the front
door—which sometimes is not opened.
There is no question that the responsibility for
disaster relief lies with the state in which the disaster occurs,
but often these states do not have the resources to deal with the
problem, cannot properly distribute the aid or even police its
distribution—bandits stealing emergency food supplies in the Horn
of Africa and selling them for their own personal gain whilst the
intended recipients starve.
So we have massive resources at the disposition
of the United Nations and multilaterals the use of which is
constrained by their own internal bureaucracies and political
procedures, limited resources in the hands of disaster-prone third
world states, (which are smaller than they need be as they will have
been eroded through corruption) and an inability to readily get the
aid through to the intended recipients other than by informal means.
It does not work well, other than in small pockets.
Rather than dealing inefficiently with disasters
once they happen, how would it be to spend say 10 percent of the
disaster relief funds on prediction methods to warn people in
advance when to get out of the way because there is a problem
looming?
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Mike can be contacted at mawootton@gmail.com
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