Capitalism cannot afford humanitarian aid

The World Food Programme’s (WFP) is currently trying to support more than 80 million people in 75 countries worldwide, and its financial problems serve to underscore the precarious nature of humanitarian funding at a time when there are four concurrent Level Three Emergencies (the most serious kind according to the UN) in South Sudan, Central African Republic, Syria and Iraq, as well as the Ebola crisis in West Africa. It has hit the headlines several times in recent months due to funding shortages threatening food distributions not just for Syrian refugees: WFP staff told IRIN there had been ration cuts in Kenya and Ethiopia, and in the  Afghanistan school feeding where a shortfall of $26.9million has led to the suspension of school feeding and a reduced allocation of rations to many communities  and other programming has been stopped. These cuts reveal not just the size and number of the emergencies that WFP is tackling, but according to experts show that the current funding system is not adequate.

 On 8 December the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) released the Global Humanitarian Overview 2015, seeking record funding of $16.4billion to help close to 57.5million people across 22 countries. Valerie Amos, UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, noted “the rising scale of need is outpacing our capacity to respond.” OCHA’s Financial Tracking Service reveals that as of 14 December, fewer than half of the 31 humanitarian appeals launched during 2014 had attracted more than 50 percent of what they asked for.

 “Unfortunately this is the reality of a system that is broken. When you have this many crises going on at once around the world, it brings to light a lot of problems in the humanitarian response architecture,” said Mark Yarnell, a senior advocate at Washington-based NGO Refugees International. “With all the attention the Syria situation received, maybe it can force a deeper look at why the system keeps breaking down.”

Christina Bennett, an international aid policy analyst and research fellow at the Humanitarian Policy Group at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) in London, told IRIN that while there would always be room for end-of-calendar-year appeals to attract donors with unspent money, there was a need to get away from short-term funding cycles that both hinder planning and create procurement delays. “The system is an appeals-based one, where donors have pots of money that they are able to allocate on a short-term basis, so there is this kind of cycle of appealing and funding, appealing and funding,” she explained. “It is largely a reactionary system,” she added. “If there was an ability to have more flexible and longer-term funding, you may perhaps see fewer of these last-minute urgent appeals and more of an effort to plan ahead of time… what we are seeing is that there is a finite amount of money in the system for humanitarian response.”