Yemen faces malnutrition crisis

The conflict in Yemen along with other factors has created chronic malnutrition. Only Afghanistan another country wracked by conflict has a higher level. The United Nation's Children's fund claims that hundreds of thousands of Yemeni children face starvation. A total of one million suffer from severe malnutrition.
   UNICEF representative Gert Kapelari said:"About 250,000 children today in Yemen are at risk of dying or having lifelong consequences if we don't act immediately," he said. Aid agencies claim that Yemen is facing a humanitarian disaster with chronic levels of poverty. An Oxfam representative said that 44 per cent of the people, a total of about ten million, do not have enough to eat.
      Although food is available prices have risen while incomes are low. High unemployment makes the situation worse. Up to 90 per cent of food in Yemen is imported. The conflict between rebels and the government has displaced many people making them dependent upon food aid. The World Food Program(WFP) estimates that 670,000 internally displaced person depend upon food aid. For more see this article.

EU parliament soundly defeats anti-piracy bill that could threaten internet freedom

   The European Union parliament soundly defeated the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The margin of the defeat was quite large. 478 voted against the bill and 165 abstained while only 39 voted in favor of the bill.
  A conservative party in the parliament tried to postpone the vote until after the European Court of Justice had ruled whether the act poses a threat to civil liberties. The agreement has already been signed by Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea,. New Zealand and the United States as well as the EU and member states.  Some of these signatories may now decide to jettison the deal or try to renegotiate it.
   Oxfam claimed that ACTA could very well make life saving drugs very costly for those in poor countries:. "ACTA could have made life-saving drugs much costlier for the world's poorest, resulting in devastating consequences for their health. With Europe's rejection, we're now hugely relieved that ACTA is going nowhere,"  What is represented as necessary for free trade is of course usually the opposite. Key to free trade and ensuring that markets do not interfere with monopoly rights are intellectual property rights such as patents.

. EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht, who represented the bloc in ACTA negotiations said: "With the rejection of ACTA, the need to protect the backbone of Europe's economy across the globe, our innovation, our creativity, our ideas - our intellectual property - does not disappear," While some claim that ACTA is dead it will no doubt arise again from its ashes. Monopoly rights not free markets are crucial to modern capitalism's profitability. Free markets are defended for ideological purposes and to argue against economic policies that the most powerful capitalist bodies do not like. For more see this article.

Oxfam: Too much aid to Afghanistan wasted.

This is from common dreams. From the point of view of corporations that get paid for projects and locals who benefit from a corrupt system the waste is quite profitable. A consultant can make up to 500,000 a year. I was not aware as this article claims that there has been a change in the process of authorising air strikes so that the numbers have gone down. I thought the opposite was the case.


Too Much Aid to Afghanistan Wasted, Oxfam Says
by Jon Hemming
KABUL - Too much aid to Afghanistan is wasted — soaked up in contractors’ profits, spent on expensive expatriate consultants or squandered on small-scale, quick-fix projects, a leading British charity said on Tuesday.

Despite more than $15 billion of aid pumped into Afghanistan since U.S.-led and Afghan forces toppled the Taliban in 2001, many Afghans still suffer levels of poverty rarely seen outside sub-Saharan Africa.

“The development process has to date been too centralised, top-heavy and insufficient,” said a report by Oxfam.

By far the biggest donor, the United States approved a further $6.4 billion in Afghan aid this year, but the funds are spent in ways that are “ineffective or inefficient”, Oxfam said.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) allocates close to half its funds to the five largest U.S. contractors in Afghanistan.

“Too much aid is absorbed by profits of companies and sub-contractors, on non-Afghan resources and on high expatriate salaries and living costs,” the report said.

A full-time expatriate consultant can cost up to $500,000 a year, Oxfam said.

More money needed to be channelled through the Afghan government, strengthening its influence and institutions.

Aid also needed to be better coordinated to avoid duplication, it said.

Only 10 percent of technical assistance to Afghanistan is coordinated either with the government or among donors.

SECURITY DETERIORATES

Spending on development is dwarfed by that spent on fighting the Taliban. The U.S. military is spending $65,000 a minute in Afghanistan, Oxfam said.

The report called for the 25 provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) run by the armies of 13 different nations across the country to withdraw where the security situation is stable enough and carry out relief work only where there is a critical need.

The PRTs, Oxfam said, “being nation-led are often driven more by available funding or the political interests of the nation involved rather than development considerations”. The result was “a large number of small-scale, short-term projects”.

“Given the historic suspicion of foreign intervention, such efforts to win ‘hearts and minds’ are naive. It is unsurprising that the huge expansion of PRT activities has not prevented the deterioration of security.”

Violent incidents are up at least 20 percent since last year, according to U.N. estimates, and have spread northwards to many areas previously considered safe.

More than 200 civilians have been killed in at least 130 Taliban suicide bombs and at least 1,200 civilians have been killed overall this year — about half of them in operations by Afghan and international troops.

Oxfam called on the 50,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan to take greater care not to hurt civilians, particularly in air strikes. The lower number of troops in Afghanistan than in Iraq — less than a third as many in a much bigger country with a larger population — leads to a greater reliance on air power.

There are four times as many air strikes in Afghanistan as in Iraq, Oxfam said.

The NATO-led force in Afghanistan says it takes every effort to avoid civilian casualties and has already modified procedures for launching air strikes resulting in fewer civilian deaths.

(Editing by Richard Meares)

© 2007 Reuters

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.