By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 24 2005 (IPS)

The United Nations, under relentless pressure to provide humanitarian assistance to hundreds of thousands of people hit by a rash of recent natural disasters worldwide, is hoping its proposed new Central Emergency Respond Fund (CERF) will be up and running by early 2006.

“The old (existing) Central Emergency Revolving Fund could deliver aid in three to four weeks and sometimes months. With the new Fund, you can start work in three to four days,” boasts Jan Egeland, U.N. under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs.

He said pledges have already been made in excess of 160 million dollars by several member states.

The proposal to revitalise the existing fund, already approved by world leaders at the U.N. summit in mid-September, will go before the 191-member General Assembly in early November for final ratification. The new fund is expected to be operational by early 2006, Egeland said.

But Greg Puley, policy adviser for Oxfam, is not very optimistic about existing aid pledges and deliveries.

As a first step, says Puley, governments must commit an additional one billion dollars into the U.N. emergency fund on top of their existing humanitarian aid levels to ensure an immediate response to crises.

But rich donor governments, including the United States, Belgium, Italy, France, Canada and Australia, have so far failed to pledge a cent to the fund, according to Oxfam. Only seven governments – Britain, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland and Luxembourg – have pledged money to date.

Egeland admits that too often, “we are too late because we have to wait for funding”. Still, he is confident that the new fund will rise to the occasion.

At a press conference last month, Hillary Benn, the British secretary of state for the department of international development, told reporters the primary purpose of the new Fund is to generate a fast emergency response to humanitarian disasters worldwide..

“When a humanitarian crisis occurs,” he pointed out, “the United Nations presses the fire alarm.” But in order to get the fire engines moving, one had to pass the hat around to collect money to buy the gasoline for the tank and water for the hoses, he said.

“A more effective system was needed, as funds were not getting to people as quickly as they should,” Benn added.

At the same press conference, Luxembourg’s Minister of Cooperation and Humanitarian Action Jean-Louis Schiltz said: “It is clear for us that countries can no longer be kept waiting when there are children dying in desperate need of food and clean water.”

In a report released last week, Oxfam said that governments have failed to effectively respond to a year of disasters.

“The South Asian earthquake is the latest in a year of some of the worst disasters ever seen, yet governments have failed to respond adequately and lives have been lost as a result,” said the international agency.

The study, titled “2005: Year of Disasters”, found that the number of people affected by natural disasters has climbed dramatically over the last decade, with tens of millions of people affected in the past year alone.

Last December, the Asian tsunami killed a staggering 224,495 people. Hurricanes Stan (in Central America) and Katrina (in the United States) killed much fewer people but their floods and mudslides affected around two million and 500,000 people respectively.

The average annual number of disasters reported during 2000-04 was 55 percent higher than during 1995-99. With 719 reported disasters, 2004 was the third worst year of the decade (1994-2004), according to Oxfam.

During 2000-2004, disasters affected one-third more people than during 1995-1999. Over the same period, the numbers of people affected by disasters in countries of low human development doubled, with Africa showing the greatest increase.

The Oxfam study also says that the response to these emergencies has been “characterised by an uneven, often late and sometimes inefficient international humanitarian performance that has been undermined by inadequate funding for the U.N.’s vital appeals”..

The study found that, humanitarian assistance still does not cover all needs, often arrives too late, and is too often determined more by media profile or political criteria than humanitarian need. It concludes that “these failings are condemning thousands of people to unnecessary suffering and death”.

Surveying some of the major crises in 2005, Oxfam found that the international response to U.N. appeals for many humanitarian emergencies, including Niger, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Darfur and Southern Africa, has been “vastly inadequate”.

According to Oxfam, there was massive under-funding for some of the world’s worst crises: In the DRC, 2.3 million people have been displaced by the conflict and 3.8 million have lost their lives since 1997.

Yet just over half (53 percent) of the 194.2 million dollars requested by the United Nations had been received as of mid-October.

Similarly in Darfur, where an estimated 200,000 people have been killed and 1.8 million displaced by the conflict, less than half (just 46 percent) of 1.9 million dollars requested had been received as of mid-October.

Puley of Oxfam said that 2005 will be remembered as the year of disasters “and we must learn lessons from it”. While governments responded generously to the tsunami last December – and look set to do so again following the Asian earthquake early this month – they virtually ignored less visible crises in places like DRC, Malawi and Niger, said Puley.

Lack of quick and adequate funding translates into tens of millions of women, men and children around the world suffering needlessly, and in some cases it is a death sentence for thousands.

The United Nations estimates that 16 million people are currently at immediate risk in 10 neglected emergencies in Africa alone.

In 2004, the world body faced an annual shortfall of over 1.3 billion dollars for its appeals, “effectively abandoning people to destitution, starvation or death once their own coping strategies and national resources have been exhausted”.

Oxfam’s briefing paper concludes that the life-threatening shortcomings in the current system require urgent reform of the humanitarian system.

Reforming the existing U.N. Central Emergency Revolving Fund is a vital first step that governments must agree on when they meet to review humanitarian action at the U.N. General Assembly in November, the study said.

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