Humanitarian Assistance: Who supplies the relief?

This is a summary on how the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (USAID/OFDA) provides humanitarian assistance and a critique on the structure and methodology of this assistance considering political, economic, and planning aspects. USAID/OFDA provided a financial assistance of almost 400 million dollars to other nations -- mainly developing -- in forms of material, human and monetary contribution in 2003. In 2010, this figure tripled and reached the amount of 1.3 billion dollars. The mandate of this federal agency is mainly to help nations in crisis to immediately respond to disasters and recover. This consensual assistance takes place under three different departments: response and mitigation, logistics, and program support. Politics is inextricably linked to crisis response. Public authorities make decisions based on internal and external calculations whether to provide assistance or not to a disaster inflicted region. If the assessment is positive, assistance is approved and allocated. However, if it presents high strategic risks, a well-knitted speech justifies the political decision or the topic is deliberately ignored by the mainstream local media to avoid unnecessary damages from political and economic spill-over effects. USAID/OFDA, for instance, did not provide any help to Cubans, Somalians, North Koreans, or South Ossetians in 2003 and 2010 fiscal years because of underlying geopolitical interests -- or simply indifference. Economics also play a role in humanitarian assistance. Before a decision is made on the provision of humanitarian assistance, opportunity costs and cost-benefit analysis are considered by decision-makers. Even though humanitarian assistance might help a donor nation achieve its geopolitical objectives, donor nations also assess what are at stake by diverting taxpayers’ money to other regions of the globe. Also, in this -- self-interest, calculated benefit, cost-risk -- equation, donor nations take into account the actual return-on-investment and -- or should also consider -- the capacity of local governments to avoid predicted human and natural disasters for rapid and slow onset events. Planning is pivotal in humanitarian assistance. Decision and policy makers must acknowledge that by offering assistance during the preparedness phase of the disaster cycle, political risks and economic costs are largely reduced. Humanitarian assistance, therefore, should shift from response to preparedness since a donor country has more to gain politically and economically by partnering with local governments during the planning phase. In this scenario, local governments are in charge of providing assistance and coordinating first responders. By acknowledging that humanitarian assistance is not a perfect system, let alone an impartial and neutral activity, professionals acting in this area should grasp the political and economic contexts in which they are inserted in so that they also advocate a shift in the direction of humanitarian efforts from relief to preparedness. This shift would also greatly contribute to the subtle messages donor nations like the U.S. send across the globe when engaging in aid relief. The suspicion over humanitarian assistance as deriving from tacit interests would diminish by adopting transparent and pragmatic approaches to humanitarian assistance -- an activity not guided by the idealism of human rights but by the realpolitik of governments’ mutual cooperation. References OFDA Annual Report, 2003. http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/humanitarian_assistance/disaster_assistance/publications/annual_reports/pdf/AR2003.pdf USAID Disaster Assistance, 2010. http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/humanitarian_assistance/disaster_assistance/publications/annual_reports/index.html