The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #76827 Message #1373724
Posted By: McGrath of Harlow
07-Jan-05 - 12:36 PM
Thread Name: BS: earthquake, related tsunami bring death
Subject: RE: BS: earthquake, related tsunami bring death
From today's Independent:£2.2bn pledged: but will the world deliver this time?
Recent Disasters
HURRICANE, Central America 1998
Pledged: £4.8bn
Delivered: £1.6bn
FLOODS, Mozambique 2000
Pledged: £214m
Delivered: £107m
EARTHQUAKE, Bam, Iran 2003
Pledged: £17.1m
Delivered: £9.5m
And that is leaving aside the other ways governements cheat. For example, they use the aid money to pay their own people for goods and services, instead of local people, and they rack up the notional cost of surpluses they had stacked up as a way of subsidising sections of their own economy; and they make up for the cost of helping one lot of people by reducing the help they were giving to some other people who probably need it just as badly, but aren't in the headlines.