Update: The comments after this BBC article on the floods made me very angry. Many of them amount to “I’m not helping because they aren’t” (“they” being Islamic nations such as Saudi Arabia). Refusing to help because no one else is is an attitude I find even more despicable than the excuses I listed below, and in this instance it also betrays very thinly disguised racism. I am disgusted.
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Because this has been a slowly developing situation and because of the recent revelation that the Pakistani government have been funnelling money to the Taliban, some people apparently feel that this is a humanitarian disaster they do not need to donate to.
The thought that anyone might think that a sufficient excuse not to help makes me sick.
Here is some more in-depth coverage from Al Jazeera (as usual, the coverage from our own news agencies seems more concerned with the performance of their cricket team than with the deaths of thousands of Pakistani citizens).
Here are links to Oxfam and MSF for you to make your donation.
With more rain on the way, this situation could be about to get a lot worse. Don’t put it off: next week might be too late.
okay i donated some money (locally – rather than in interwebs) but I am always wondering if it really makes things better or worse. If you support people whose government is failing them who live somewhere that apparently cant sustain that much human life, dont you just store up suffering for the future? I dig that disasters turn up and for a big enough one a government must rely on the UN etc. But if the UN pulls out the cash for corrupt governments then why not be corrupt? If the UN doesnt pull it out but then the general population make it up why does the UN bother to prepare properly next time? If we bail out the banks……
Wow. You touched on a lot of complex socio-economic issues in that short paragraph…
First off, I deliberately gave links to Oxfam and MSF on the basis that, if you donate directly to the aid agency, the money should go on helicopters, tents and the occasional necessary bribe and not too much into the pockets of a corrupt government.
Secondly, you have cause and effect around the wrong way. Sure, it makes sense on the surface that supporting a corrupt government will keep people in poverty but the evidence shows that governments are corrupt because people are poor, not the other way around. Tackling corruption simply doesn’t work, but, if you help a country out of poverty then the corruption goes away on its own (or at least dresses up in a suit and calls itself “lobbying”).
The over population question is similar. You can’t stop poor people having babies (china tried to and we all now how well that turned out) but if you help their babies survive into adulthood, people choose to stop having anymore of their own accord. For an example of that in action check out the birth rate for Bangladesh; 40 years ago people were saying Bangladeshis would never stop having so many children because of their faith – they were wrong.
Anyway, I don’t know how much of this disaster is due to overpopulation – much of the cause seems to be ilegal logging, so if we can stop that (again, by tackling poverty so that it stops being an attractive career option) then perhaps it won’t happen again.
Poverty really is the route of most of the world’s problems – if we can fix that, much of the rest will solve itself.
Bailing out banks is a completely different problem :/ I suppose you could call it corruption but it seems to me to be more a failure of our government to negotiate sufficiently favourable terms for their loan.
Our system isn’t perfect, but that doesn’t mean we should just leave thousands of suffering people without help if we can do something.
twas oxfam in person that I selected…so hopefully a similar outcome.
so I am convinced by poverty causes corruption, but you also need to demonstrate that donating aid during emergencies decreases poverty, in order to complete the argument. I think Im more inclined to believe that donating money not during emergencies has more effect and Im far from convinced that foreign aid tackles poverty rather than tackling the effects of poverty.
Its interesting that Bangladesh had a drop in birth rate but Im not sure it was the result of foreign aid unless it was in the form of debt relief.
Hmmm. I think I was trying to make several separate arguments really.
I wasn’t saying disaster relief stops corruption, I was saying not giving aid doesn’t stop it, so why not give the aid? The same goes for over population – not giving aid won’t bring the birth rate down, so let’s give the aid anyway and save the lives of the people who need our help now.
If I believed leaving them to suffer would help future generations, I’d hate it but I’d lump it for the greater good. There is no evidence to show that is true, so we should help them; not for the future but because it is the right thing to do.
Then I was saying separately that, disasters notwithstanding, if you want to combat corruption and bring birth rates down, the way to do it is by helping a country out of poverty.
I don’t know how much of Bangladesh’s economic improvements are down to foreign aid. Probably not much, I expect most of it is down to the general improvement in the economy of the whole sub continent. All I was really using that example to show was that birth rates come down on their own when babies stop dying.
Oh, and I am far from convinced that throwing money at the problem is the best way to help a country out of poverty. I just see that as a completely different issue to a disaster relief fund, which has no effect on poverty, and is definitely best served by a rapid cash injection to get shelter, food and medicines to the affected area asap.
Woah woah woah stop there one minute.
While your comment may be relevant to the particular argument you’re having, as someone reading it from the outside, I would ask you to step back for a minute.
No.
Donating aid during emergencies (in particular, to direct-action charities like Oxfam) saves lives.
Donating aid outside of emergencies reduces poverty (ok, ok, the means and methods matter, but hey, if you’re not going to go there and sort it out, find someone you trust to do it for you, and pay them).
That, at the end of the day, is what matters.
So give £100 now, to save lives, and give £100 in 2 months, to reduce poverty. Not happy with the ratios? Well, you work out how much the balance means to you. But unless you can point at what’s actively killing people, or increasing poverty, as a direct result of your donation, I find it very hard to justify either being *bad*.
As a quick follow up, Linda Polman was on The Daily Show [1] on Wednesday talking about her book “Crisis Caravan – What’s Wrong With Humanitarian Aid?” [2] which seems to be basically about this issue. Doesn’t quite sound interesting enough to me to read it, but you may disagree!
1: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-september-29-2010/linda-polman
2: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crisis-Caravan-Whats-Wrong-Humanitarian/dp/0805092900/