Comments on: Starving People Need Food, not Money

By: John Woodall, MD

John Woodall, MD — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 18:37:20 +0000

The sentiment of yur comment is right on. The realities of mounting a disaster response are daunting. During the war in Croatia and then Bosnia, I ran many efforts to provide aid to refugees. Our first response was to send several containers of material: shoes, toys, foodstuffs to the region. Here are the realities on the ground:
- Someone has to receive the matieral.
-Someone has to process/categorize the material.
- Someone has to distribute the material.

These three processes are profoundly labor intensive. The reality is, if you send material to a country in response to a disaster, it just sits at a dock. Someone has to pay for unloading it, catagorizing it, storing it, finding a way to ship it to where it is needed, having local resources to receive it.

That is why sending food id not practical. In fact, sending anything other then money presents huge logistical problems. That is why aid agencies in the past 15 years or so have asked that donations be of money. Ideally, the recipient of the money has their own channels to acquire, categorize, store and distribute needed material. In fact, this should be what one looks for when planning a donation of money.

The other way to go is to fund organizations that build the local capacity to receive aid. This s a vanshingly rare service aid agencies do. But, it is in fact, vital to sustainable reconstruction. The Unity Project is one such organization http://www.unityproject.org.

I hope this is helpful.

John

By: Jim Holmlund

Jim Holmlund — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:10:10 +0000

David, Perfectly understand your frustration. One observation: first line needs seem to be rations packaged for individuals, or families etc. Readiness for distribution seems to be a serious challenge. It may not be for this disaster, but would your client consider linking up with other staple food producers and investigate the possibilities of producing small basic staple food ration packages which can be bought by aid organisations at a fair price [with all the money donated] to be distributed in such situations? Idea needs development; moreover would it be bad PR for any enterprises to be able to tell the thousands of stories of such a joint endeavour? This surely will not be the last natural or manmade disaster to strike large portions of our troubled humanity. Corporate preparation may be the word.

By: uberVU - social comments

uberVU - social comments — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 14:08:12 +0000

Social comments and analytics for this post…

This post was mentioned on Twitter by davidhenderson: @ej_butler Starving people in Haiti need FOOD, not money. Feds are turning Haiti into another New Orleans. http://bit.ly/6B3tPb...

By: Tweets that mention Starving People Need Food, not Money | David Henderson - consultant, author, journalist -- Topsy.com

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 13:42:10 +0000

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by David Henderson, thoughtLEADERS. thoughtLEADERS said: RT @DavidHenderson: Starving People Need Food, not Money http://bit.ly/7cr9Ht [...]