Feral Jundi

   Boy, this is a big slam on aid organizations.  Bravo to the Lancet for having the courage to point this out, and especially during this time with the Haiti earthquake.  I am sure they will get all sorts of hate mail.  The truth hurts though, and these aid groups do the same things in places like Africa or war zones.

   So why is this on Feral Jundi?  Part of the reason is that there is no regulatory apparatus in place to keep these aid organizations in check. Where is the scrutiny, and why do we give them a free pass?  My industry is constantly getting the label as disaster capitalists, yet you never hear that kind of language used to describe aid organizations.

   And when it comes to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, security is pretty damn important. You can’t be happy or live in peace, when rebels or criminals are actively trying to kill you and your family for whatever reason.  You can’t eat, if rebels and criminals are stealing your food or destroying your farm lands.  It takes security forces to step up and be that sheep dog, in order for others to be able to eat and live in peace.  Yet my industry continues to get this treatment as if we are less than, or not needed. Pffffft. We put our life on the line to protect others, and that is our value in the world of disasters and wars. And to me, we are worth every penny spent.

   Finally, what really kills me about these aid organizations, is that they will scream until they are blue in the face on how immoral or unethical security contractors are, and yet they will contract the services of our industry so they can do their thing in countries like Africa, or in wars like Iraq and Afghanistan. Pure hypocrisy, and when you couple that, with this article written below, you start to realize that this is an industry that needs some attention. –Matt

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Haiti aid agency accused of rivalry tactics

By Andrew Jack in New York and David Blair and Benedict Mander in Port-au-Prince

The Financial Times

January 22 2010

A prominent British medical journal, The Lancet, has accused aid agencies operating in earthquake-ravaged Haiti of using “unsavoury” corporate tactics as they compete with each other to attract funding during a chaotic relief effort.

More than 500 relief agencies are operating in Haiti and the skies are filled with aircraft ferrying supplies to Port-au-Prince.

With 150 arrivals at the airport every day, immense quantities of material are piling up in hangars or on the taxi-ways.

But while flying supplies in to the stricken city has become relatively easy, getting them out to people is more challenging, a week and a half after the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that killed an estimated 75,000 people.

In an editorial published on its website on Friday, The Lancet said the situation in Haiti remained “chaotic, devastating and anything but co-ordinated”. It accused agencies of “jostling for position” and needless competition for funds.

“Polluted by the internal power politics and the unsavoury characteristics seen in many big corporations, large aid agencies can be obsessed with raising money through their own appeal efforts,” The Lancet wrote.

One logistics specialist handling airport arrivals for Haiti said: “You should see the circus that has come to town.”

Aid workers in Haiti deny any suggestion of rivalry. “To say that there is something of a bad feeling among us is totally false – period,” said Louis Belanger, a spokesman for Oxfam. “This is a massive disaster and it takes time.”

Meanwhile, an 84-year-old woman was pulled alive by rescuers from under a wrecked building in Port-au-Prince yesterday, 10 days after the earthquake struck.

Story here.

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Growth of aid and the decline of humanitarianism

The Lancet

Picture the situation in Haiti: families living on top of sewage-contaminated rubbish dumps, with no reliable sources of food and water and virtually no access to health care. This scenario depicts the situation in Haiti before the earthquake that catapulted this impoverished and conflict-ridden country into the international headlines. Now the latest target of humanitarian relief, international organisations, national governments, and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are rightly mobilising, but also jostling for position, each claiming that they are doing the most for earthquake survivors. Some agencies even claim that they are “spearheading” the relief effort. In fact, as we only too clearly see, the situation in Haiti is chaotic, devastating, and anything but coordinated.

Much is being said elsewhere about the performance and progress of relief efforts in Haiti. It is crucial that the immediate needs of the Haitian people are urgently met. But it is scandalous that it took a seismic shift in tectonic plates for Haiti to earn its place in the international spotlight. Political rhetoric is familiar: domestic and international point-scoring during times of crisis and disaster is a common game played by many governments and politicians. But this dangerous and immoral play has many losers, especially since the rules include judging the needs of desperate people according to subjective perceptions of worth.

For example, just think back 5 years to the dismal international response to the catastrophic earthquake in Pakistan. Additionally, over the past 2 weeks alone, flooding has displaced 30 000 people in Kenya and 4000 people in Albania, and in Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Somalia hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by further fighting. All international agencies, including the World Food Programme, have recently withdrawn from Somalia—one of the most violent countries in the world with a population size similar to Haiti. It is unimaginable that international agencies and national governments might one day compete for attention in leading a Somali humanitarian relief effort. The reasons for their current inaction are most un-humanitarian.

We have repeatedly drawn attention to the fact that when viewed through the distorted lens of politics, economics, religion, and history, some lives are judged more important than others—a situation not helped by the influence of news media, including ourselves. This regrettable situation has resulted in an implicit hierarchy of crisis situations further influenced by artificial criteria, such as whether disasters are natural or man-made. As this week’s special issue on violent conflict and health shows,* the health needs of people affected by conflict are repeatedly neglected.

Politicians and the media make easy targets for criticism. But there is another group involved in disaster relief, which has largely escaped public scrutiny—the aid sector, now undoubtedly an industry in its own right. Aid agencies and humanitarian organisations do exceptional work in difficult circumstances. But some large charities could make their good work even better. The Lancet has been observing aid agencies and NGOs for several years and has also spoken with staff members working for major charities. Several themes have emerged from these conversations. Large aid agencies and humanitarian organisations are often highly competitive with each other. Polluted by the internal power politics and the unsavoury characteristics seen in many big corporations, large aid agencies can be obsessed with raising money through their own appeal efforts. Media coverage as an end in itself is too often an aim of their activities. Marketing and branding have too high a profile. Perhaps worst of all, relief efforts in the field are sometimes competitive with little collaboration between agencies, including smaller, grass-roots charities that may have have better networks in affected counties and so are well placed to immediately implement emergency relief.

Given the ongoing crisis in Haiti, it may seem unpalatable to scrutinise and criticise the motives and activities of humanitarian organisations. But just like any other industry, the aid industry must be examined, not just financially as is current practice, but also in how it operates from headquarter level to field level. It seems increasingly obvious that many aid agencies sometimes act according to their own best interests rather than in the interests of individuals whom they claim to help. Although many aid agencies do important work, humanitarianism is no longer the ethos for many organisations within the aid industry. For the people of Haiti and those living in parallel situations of destruction, humanitarianism remains the most crucial motivation and means for intervention.

Story here.

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Safety Needs According to Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs

With their physical needs relatively satisfied, the individual’s safety needs take precedence and dominate behavior. These needs have to do with people’s yearning for a predictable, orderly world in which injustice and inconsistency are under control, the familiar frequent and the unfamiliar rare. In the world of work, these safety needs manifest themselves in such things as a preference for job security, grievance procedures for protecting the individual from unilateral authority, savings accounts, insurance policies, and the like.

For most of human history many individuals have found their safety needs unmet, but As of 2009 “First World” societies provide most with their satisfaction, although the poor – both those who are poor as a class and those who are temporarily poor (university students would be an example) – must often still address these needs.

Safety and Security needs include:

• Personal security

• Financial security

• Health and well-being

• Safety net against accidents/illness and their adverse impacts.