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.