MANAGING CHAOS: THE DISASTER AFTER THE DISASTER

Event: University of Hong Kong Law School
Conference on Disaster Management - February, 2005

The nongovernmental sector has grown massively over the past 25 years. Country after country is producing non-state organizations whose global impact is now being felt.

In the United States there are over 600,000 nonprofit corporations, of which perhaps 3,000 are exclusively international in focus. Only a few hundred of these comfortably fit into the category of "international relief and development NGO".

The "dirty little secret" of foreign aid is that governments do not employ relief workers and rarely deliver aid directly; nor, for the most part, do United Nations agencies. Increasingly, foreign aid provided by governments is contracted out to both nonprofit and for-profit corporations. UN agencies are increasingly using NGOs rather than member states' governmental organizations which heretofore had first claim to UN funds.

The NGO sector as a result is "morphing" into something resembling (in the US, at least) the defense industry. Organizations founded as eleemosynary or charitable institutions whose mission statements and corporate by-laws outlined their philanthropic purpose are opening offices in Washington, New York, Brussels and Tokyo. Those offices are tasked with gleaning new and/or unallocated funds for their parent NGOs. This vastly increases comptetiion among NGOs without increasing the quality of their assistance.

The recent pan-Asian tsunami, while unprecedented in size and scope, also produced a governmental and private sector response of unprecedented size. Just 52 NGO members of InterAction, a US umbrella organization of 160 major relief agencies, collected $550 million for the tsunami while the US Government has pledged an additional $1 billion, most of which will be in the form of either government contracts with the NGOs and UN agencies or in reimbursement to the US Department of Defense for ships and helicopters. [The US Government's Agency for International Development - USAID - has for over 25 years lived in fear of paying the bills for the US Defense Department's increasing involvement in aid missions. Typical billings for transport tend to run to two and three times what USAID would pay to charter private aircraft and ships.]

There is also a probelm with newly emerging centers of aid giving conflicting with each other-the world now counts as major aid providers the US, the UN, the European Union/European Commission, Japan, Canada, the UK, the Scandinavian countries and - with the Asian tsunami - India and China. This is in addition to private NGOs and Red Cross agencies. All have discrete policies and varying priorities.

While this may ultimately benefit victims of the recent tsunami and other major disasters, the growth has not been so much in per capita receipt of aid by victims as it has been regarding which NGOs and Red Cross agencies receive the most money for their own purposes. [The American Red Cross reports over $600 million already in hand for the tsunami; but it's annual budget for 2003/2004 included fund raising expenses of $140 million and administrative costs of $190 million, so it is not clear how much of these new funds will actually benefit victims.]

Another aspect of the coordinatoin problem has bee the failure of already enfeebled governments of countries affected by a disaster to be prescriptive in outlining what will and will not be acceptable aid. Certainly no one wants aid deliveries either pilfered or taxed, but too often governments fail to publicly state what their policies will be vis-a-vis the international aid efforts which are mobilezed to help their citizens. In Sri Lanka, for example, the government has complained loudly about Christian missionaries and even Scientologists evangelizing among HIndu, Buddhist and Muslim disaster victims; but it has yet eject any of these groups from the country. Sri Lanka was also late in outlining what it and is not acceptable material and, as a result, received such items as winter clothing, outdated pharmaceuticals and even Viagra.

There needs to be vastly improved coordination after a disaster on many fronts. An "SOP" or Standard Operating Procedure would include the following:

* For affected areas, those governments should hold off accepting any and all aid deliveries not related to the immediate rescue of persons in distress until they and/or an international assessment mission has been completed (this can be done within 72 hours). The results of the initial assessment should inform what will and will not be acceptable aid and this should be disseminated worldwide.

* For bi-lateral and multi-lateral governmental donors, they should speak to each other first before making their own arrangements with affected-area governments so as to avoid duplication of effort and being manipulated by desperate affected-area governments. The competition in tsunami aid giving by various governments was unseemly. Most of those pledges are unlikely ever to be fulfilled.

* For NGOs and other non-state actors, there should be renewed efforts at cooperation before sending material aid and personnel to the affected area. Once there, local or indigenous NGOs should be acknowledged as the major actors and be given the majority of the resources raised so aggressively by the foreign NGOs descending upon them.