It’s strange that at this week’s World Economic Forum the designated voice of the world’s poor has been Bill Gates, who has pledged £478m to the Global Fund to fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, telling Davos that the world economic crisis was no excuse for cutting aid.

It reminds me of that dark hour when Al Gore, despite being a shareholder in Occidental Petroleum, was the voice of climate change action – because Gates does not speak with the voice of the world’s poor, of course, but with the voice of its rich. It’s a loud voice, but the model of development it proclaims is the wrong one because philanthropy is the enemy of justice.

Am I saying that philanthropy has never done good? No, it has achieved many wonderful things. Would I rather people didn’t have polio vaccines than get them from a plutocrat? No, give them the vaccines. But beware the havoc that power without oversight and democratic control can wreak.

The biotech agriculture that Lord Sainsbury was unable to push through democratically he can now implement unilaterally, through his Gatsby Foundation. We are told that Gatsby’s biotech project aims to provide food security for the global south. But if you listen to southern groups such as the Karnataka State Farmers of India, food security is precisely the reason they campaign against GM, because biotech crops are monocrops which are more vulnerable to disease and so need lashings of petrochemical pesticides, insecticides and fungicides – none of them cheap – and whose ruinous costs will rise with the price of oil, bankrupting small family farms first. Crop diseases mutate, meanwhile, and all the chemical inputs in the world can’t stop disease wiping out whole harvests of genetically engineered single strands.

Both the Gatsby and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundations are keen to get deeper into agriculture, especially in Africa. But top-down nostrums for the rural poor don’t end well. The list of autocratic hubris in pseudo-scientific farming is long and spectacularly calamitous. It runs from Tsar Alexander I’s model village colonies in 1820s Novgorod to 1920s Hollywood film producer Hickman Price, who, as Simon Schama brilliantly describes in The American Future, “bought 54 square miles of land to show the little people how it was really done, [and] used 25 combines all painted glittery silver”. His fleet of tractors were kept working day and night, and the upshot of such sod-busting was the great plains dustbowl. But there’s no stopping a plutocratic philanthropist in a hurry.

And then there is the vexed question of whether these billions are really the billionaires’ to give away in the first place. When Microsoft was on its board, the American Electronics Association, the AeA, challenged European Union proposals for a ban on toxic components and for the use of a minimum 5% recycled plastic in the manufacture of electronic goods.

AeA took the EU to the World Trade Organisation on a charge of erecting artificial trade barriers. (And according to the American NGO Public Citizen, “made the astounding claim that there is no evidence that heavy metals, like lead, pose a threat to human health or the environment”.)

Now, the EU is big enough and ugly enough to have fought and won the case. But many an African country lacks the war chest for such a fight, and so will end up paying for the healthcare of those exposed to leaky old PCs’ cadmium, chromium or mercury, instead of embarking on, let’s say, a nationwide anti-malaria strategy. Bill Gates himself may not indeed have known about what the AeA was doing on Microsoft’s behalf, but the fact remains that if a philanthropist’s money comes from externalising corporate costs to taxpayers, and that if Microsoft is listed for its own tax purposes as a partly Puerto Rican and Singaporean company, then the real philanthropists behind these glittering foundations might be a sight more ragged-trousered than Bill and Melinda.

Free marketeers will spring to the defence of billionaire philanthropists with a remark like: “Oh, so you’d rather they spent all their money selfishly on golf courses and mansions, would you?” To which I reply: “Oh, you mean that trickle-down doesn’t work, after all?” But the point is that the poor are not begging us for charity, they are demanding justice. And when, on the occasion of his birthday, a sultan or emperor reprieved one thousand prisoners sentenced to death, no one ever called those pardons justice. Nor is it justice when a plutocrat decides to reprieve untold thousands from malaria. Human beings should not have to depend upon a rich man’s whim for the right to life.

Last week, Oxfam and Save the Children released a report saying that emergency relief in the Horn of Africa came months late, costing thousands of lives and millions of dollars. Oxfam and Save the Children conclude that humanitarian assistance should be done differently. The anti-foreign aid establishment is using the report to argue that aid doesn’t work and should be cut across the board.

The very fact that $2.1 billion has been donated to help the victims of the famine is a testament to human beings’ generosity. But that fact of our generosity also explains why I am so frustrated by the increasing opposition in many rich countries to foreign aid.

We know people care about the suffering of others. Not only that. They are willing to express their caring by making significant donations, even in very hard times. So what keeps them from supporting government investments to alleviate extreme suffering?

According to public opinion research, many people believe aid is either stolen by corrupt leaders or wasted on ineffective programs. Naturally, no one is eager to make investments they’re convinced won’t pay off.

There is also the argument that aid doesn’t work even when it gets to its intended recipients. This claim is not convincing either. In the past 50 years, the number of children who die every year has gone down from 20 million to fewer than 8 million. Meanwhile, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has declined by more than half. These massive improvements are due in large part to aid-funded programs to buy vaccines and boost farmers’ productivity.

I am confident that we can get the price of AIDS drugs down to $300 per person per year in the very near future. That will mean that every $300 a country gives to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and malaria represents a person who will stay alive for another year. Every $300 that’s not forthcoming represents a human being who will almost certainly die. That is a stark but realistic way to think about the choices we’re making when we debate aid budgets.

My hope is that we can convert some of the generosity that goes into humanitarian relief into stronger support for foreign aid programs.

Many of those suffering in the Horn of Africa were going hungry before there was a recognized emergency in the region. In fact, more than 1 billion people in the world don’t have enough food to eat.

One of the most powerful solutions to this problem is to help poor farmers get more out of their tiny plots of land. In parts of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa especially, farmers plant low-yielding seeds, climate change is starting to shrink their harvests, and plant diseases are invading their fields.

New seeds and other tools can help farmers cope with these challenges. For example, my foundation helped fund the development of a variety of rice that can survive flooding and will feed an extra 30 million people every year in Bangladesh and India. That additional rice will not only prevent starvation but also help farmers earn more so they can take sick children to the doctor and pay school fees.

The question is, how do we continue to do the research needed to develop these new tools? Poor countries are investing more in their own agricultural sectors, but they don’t have the resources to lead on R&D. Aid is a key piece of the puzzle, and right now the entire research budget of the group responsible for agricultural science for the poorest is just $300 million per year. It’s a shame to see such a high-leverage opportunity generate such ambivalence.

I am proud to live in a world where a stranger’s suffering matters. Yet foreign aid, the best way to address that suffering, has a growing legion of critics. That is a contradiction we must remedy, and the best way to do it is to tell the truth about aid.

The women usually stay on the fringes. Whether in Somalia or in Niger, they are hesitant, and blend into the background while the men talk. With their babies strapped to their backs and the elder children held by the hand, the women watch and listen, curious faces peering through the crowd. But more often than not, they don’t contribute.

Public space is men’s space, and I have learned that if I want to hear the full story about the challenges the women face in feeding their families, I need to ask for space to be made for them. As a woman working on the front lines of hunger, I have experienced this all across Africa.

Most recently, in the small commune of Hamdara in Myrriah, Niger, I met a group of men who had come out to talk about a project supported by the World Food Program. With an NGO partner, we are working with the community there to rehabilitate water sources so that crops can be irrigated and livestock watered — small steps intended to protect communities from the impact of drought and to build resilience and bolster food security.

“Something is missing,” I said when I arrived in the village.

“No, we are all here,” replied the men who had gathered around me.

“Ah, so you are the only village in Niger where there are only men?” I asked.

That prompted much laughter, and then slowly the women, who had been invisible until now, started to come forward, first one and then another until the men were hard to spot among all the mothers and children.

The discussion with the women almost always starts with laughter. A Western woman in their midst, asking lots of questions, makes for an interesting afternoon. And then there is the universal camaraderie among women. Somehow we find a way to understand one another through shared experiences: the emotional tug of a crying child; always having too much to do; the relentless demands of husbands. Whether one comes from Canada, Niger or Somalia, motherhood, at its core, is the same everywhere.

The women told me how they were going to make the most of the improvements to water sources — how they were planning to dig irrigation channels and then grow lettuce, tomatoes and carrots to add variety to their diet. We made a date in December for me to return and share a plate of their newly grown vegetables.

Before I left, the laughter was replaced by seriousness as the women explained the harshness of their lives in a country where the cycles of drought are accelerating. What more, they wanted to know, could I do to help them and give their children hope of a better future?

It’s a simple question. And it is one that I have faced many times in other countries across Africa where mothers worry about feeding their children, and anxiety grows amid fluctuating weather patterns and erratic rainfall.

Then there is conflict. Three years ago when I was working in Somalia, I came face to face with a mother who had fled the fighting in Mogadishu with her seven children. The surge in conflict had almost emptied the capital, and she was among thousands who travelled overland for days, walking or climbing onto the backs of trucks when the opportunity arose.

For her and others who are compelled to flee conflict, the relief we provide is vital for survival and has to be immediate. In Somalia, drought and conflict are the bullies on the block, joining forces to cause loss of life.

Women and children in Somalia. Women and children in Niger. Year after year, conflict after conflict, drought after drought, one problem after another.

Somehow I always feel ashamed. As an educated, Western woman, I often wonder if I could manage the way these women manage. I know the answer, as I don’t have their strength or their resiliency. But what I do possess is the desire and drive to work with them to build the foundations of a better life for their children.

In the seemingly endless public debate about the effectiveness of humanitarian aid, people often ask why we bother. “It’s too costly,” they say. “The world’s economy is not in great shape,” or “Charity should begin at home.”

Then there is the perennially alarming debate about whether we should just sit back and let nature take its course, a kind of inbuilt mechanism to manage population growth.

It is difficult working in an environment where you are trying to help, but where every action you take is questioned like this.

I am an aid worker. I don’t have a crystal ball to predict the future of these countries and the fate of the people who live in them. What I do know is that the international community does care, can contribute and does make a difference. The child we save today has a future. The water pan fixed today can make life that little bit better by providing families with fresh vegetables to improve their diets tomorrow.

Droughts in Niger and Somalia used to be relatively rare. Crops withered, goats and cattle perished and families suffered, but there was time to recover before the next drought descended.

In the past decade the cycle has accelerated. The people of Niger are now facing the consequences of the third drought since 2005.

As the women in a small village in Niger called Louga Kalley in Tillaberi told me last month, life is tough, and it isn’t getting any better.

The small ray of hope this time around is that the alarm has been rung early enough so that we can work together, with the government and the international community, to contain the threat to the nation’s food security and take early measures to cushion the impact of the drought on vulnerable communities while actions designed to cope with chronic food insecurity are introduced.

This is a sign of hope for the women hovering on the fringes of those meetings I attend. These are people whose future still depends on the vagaries of the ever-changing patterns of rainfall.

Any one of those women could be me, or she could be you. The child strapped to the mother’s back, with the hacking cough and the tired eyes, could be my child, or yours.

We all share the same hopes, but without our help, many of those women and their children face a different, darker, and all too harrowing destiny.

Fifty years ago, almost 20 million children under the age of 5 died every year. In 2010, the figure was down to 7.6 million . This 60 percent decline in childhood deaths — reflecting advances in agriculture, education, health and sanitation — is compelling evidence of the increasing justice in our world.

But the global economic crisis is putting the long-term trend of progress at risk, as Congress’s debates about the foreign aid budget underscore.

I am giving a report Thursday to the heads of the Group of 20 governments, including President Obama, suggesting creative ways for the world to continue investing in development despite fiscal constraints. I hope three key ideas become part of congressional deliberations over the coming weeks.

First, programs funded by U.S. generosity have been a core component of this 50-year project of raising living standards around the world.

Aid is targeted to fill specific gaps in development. The most important of these gaps is innovation. When the private sector doesn’t have incentive, and poor governments don’t have the money, smart aid pays for breakthrough solutions. The green revolution that fed a billion people in the 1950s and ’60s never would have happened without advanced agricultural science funded by U.S. aid. In just the past 10 years, millions of children have been saved from diseases such as measles and whooping cough by vaccines that Americans paid for through their contribution to an organization called the GAVI Alliance. Immunization is a great example of how aid can be effective. Thirty-six cents worth of measles vaccine protects a child for a lifetime.

Second, development isn’t just good for people in poor countries; it’s good for all of us. It used to be that the world was, roughly speaking, one-third rich and two-thirds poor. Now, the number of dynamic, healthy, highly educated countries is much higher, which is a recipe for prosperity. Imagine the world economy without Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Mexico or Turkey.

If countries that are currently poor can feed, educate and employ their people, then over time they will contribute to the world economy. On the supply side, they’ll increase the production of key commodities such as food, keeping prices lower. On the demand side, as their citizens are more productive, they’ll become important markets for trade.

But if people don’t get access to basic necessities, continued suffering will lead to economic stagnation and instability. It is, for example, not only unconscionable but also a strategic mistake to allow famine to devastate the livelihoods of millions of people in the Horn of Africa.

Third, the United States is not doing development alone. We spend about 1 percent of our total budget on aid, as do dozens of donor countries.

And with only a few exceptions, the amount poor countries spend on their own development is much greater than the amount donors invest. Ethiopia, for example, has in the past five years built 15,000 rural health posts to provide improved services for its citizens.

There is also a group of rapidly growing countries — including Brazil, China and India — that combine recent experience with development and significant technical capacity, giving them the insight and the skill to have special impact. For instance, China is sequencing 10,000 varieties of rice to help small farmers cope with climate change. These efforts can make a big difference. For example, a new submergence-tolerant rice variety being used in flood-prone areas of Bangladesh and India can more than double farmers’ yields. We predict that 20 million farmers will be planting this variety in the next six years.

The private sector hasn’t always invested as much in development as it should because the market incentives haven’t always been clear, but there are ways to encourage involvement. In my report to the G-20, I’ll make half a dozen recommendations for mobilizing tens of billions of dollars annually from private sources. The African diaspora is sitting on $50 billion in savings that could fund development in their home countries if it were captured through diaspora bonds.

If the transaction costs on remittances worldwide were cut from an average of 10 percent to an average of 5 percent, it would unlock $15 billion a year in poor countries. In addition, there are trillions of dollars in sovereign wealth funds, and a portion could be reserved for key infrastructure projects in poor countries.

Sometimes Americans get the impression that we’re shouldering the whole burden of development and that, ultimately, our aid doesn’t make a big difference. I see it very differently. We’re providing strategic investments that link up with many other investments to systematically make a better, more prosperous and safer world. If we do it right, we can keep shrinking the number of countries where aid is needed to zero.

Before I joined the Peace Corps, I had heard all the stereotypes. Volunteers were a bunch of privileged white kids, I was told. Guitar-strumming, wide-eyed do-gooders who didn’t understand cultural differences and spent their time building latrines they could never persuade anyone to use.

The image of an unprepared, inexperienced volunteer armed with nothing but good intentions is no longer accurate, if it ever was — at least not here in Senegal, West Africa, where I am serving in the Peace Corps as a preventative health educator.

Sure, I was a philosophy major in college. And yes, I was assigned to a village called Ndiago, home to 300 subsistence-level farmers and their wives and children in the middle of nowhere. I’ll admit life here isn’t much like life in Los Angeles. But volunteers receive excellent language, cultural and technical training, so when that big white Land Cruiser drives away and leaves us in our villages, alone with our piles of baggage, our water filters and our new “families,” most of us do not dissolve into tears.

Still, I was nervous when, seven months into my service, the leaders of my community approached me to ask if we could start a latrine project. Wasn’t this exactly what I had been teased about? More important, was I ready for such an ambitious project?

But the arguments for the project were convincing. Of the 26 family compounds in my village, each of which can house up to 20 or 30 people, only 11 had latrines. The unlucky families without them went into the bush when nature called. In a country like Senegal, where water-borne illnesses are a major threat and children can die of simple dehydration, defecating outdoors contributes to an erosion in the quality of life and can even lead to painful, preventable deaths. Here was my community coming to me and asking for a way to change that. Even with my dread of failure, my lingering fear that I would be implementing a program no one would make use of after I had left the village, how could I say no?

During the hottest part of the day, when by all rights we should have been napping under the sparse shade trees, the village gathered. I had invited the patriarchs of every compound, the village health workers and the most important women in the community. My host-sister, Fama, who at the time was 3, came too — though when she wanted to sit in her customary spot on my lap and listen to the talk, she was shooed away by her elders.

Nervously, with help from the village health workers, I explained my proposition: The people of Ndiago would bring latrines to themselves. Two men from the village would be in charge of hiring masons and bringing the cement and other materials to the village. Two women would be selected to educate everyone on how to use and maintain their latrines and on the importance of washing their hands with soap and water. I would be involved, but only to deal with the grant money and keep track of the receipts.

The proposal was immediately accepted, and the villagers selected the two men and women who were to hold positions of responsibility. From there, the project went so smoothly that even to this day, a year later, I have trouble believing it.

All 15 compounds without latrines were able to finish the work before the rainy season. That’s lucky for us, because everyone is busy in the fields during the rains, and anyway, it’s when diseases like giardiasis, amoebiasis, dysentery and sometimes even cholera become major threats. The women who were elected to serve as health educators turned out to be helpful in teaching about oral rehydration therapy as well. The project saved lives, and the people of Ndiago did it for themselves and by themselves.

I was proud of how things had gone. Then I started thinking about it more. If there were ever an outbreak of amoebiasis in my hometown of Los Angeles, outraged parents would write letters to members of Congress, even as their children made quick recoveries. But in this century when cutting-edge medical technology is being used to develop remedies for hair loss, my community here in Senegal — people I think of as family — ask for nothing more than simple latrines for themselves and their children. Not a source of safe, clean drinking water. Not a real waste management system. Not more consistent access to oral rehydration therapy and the cheap medications that treat diarrheal diseases. Just holes in the ground.

My host-sister Fama is 4 now, almost 5. She never walks anywhere — she skips and hops and leaps and runs and dances wherever she wants to go. She’s talkative and friendly and happy. I love her, yet there is nothing I can do to ensure that she will receive good-quality healthcare and a good education. I can’t prevent her from being forced into an early marriage. She will probably have her first child at the age of 17 or 18. She will probably lose some of her children to preventable, treatable diseases.

Maybe this latrine project in my village will prove to have been a small step in the right direction. And maybe I should be happy with that. But I want the people of this village to want more. If in 10 or 20 years the people of Ndiago and Senegal and the rest of the developing world are still asking for latrines instead of demanding access to health and sanitation facilities, to better schooling for their children and more accountability from their leaders, then my project and thousands of others all across the world were failures. Fama is not one special, entitled child in a million, she’s one of millions. Each one of them is worth more than what a latrine project can give them. So what do we do now?

North Korea has recently made a desperate international appeal for food aid. Reports from aid workers and international nongovernmental organizations warn of a major food shortage. As the United States deliberates whether to restart a food aid program in North Korea, it must consider the following questions: Is there a true humanitarian need, can we address the potential risk of food diversion and can a properly monitored program allow us to engage with the vulnerable citizens of one of the most isolated countries in the world?

The concern about potential food aid diversion arises out of the political class system in North Korea. The government considers its most loyal citizens to be the elite, who mostly live in the capital of Pyongyang, and the military. However, everyone else — whose loyalty is seen as questionable and/or who has not had the good fortune of being born into the right family — lives outside Pyongyang in areas that are an afterthought for the North Korean government. And it is this vulnerable part of the population that would be the intended beneficiaries of any food aid program.

According to a monthlong assessment conducted by the United Nations World Food Program and the Food and Agriculture Organization released in March, there is a true humanitarian need among these vulnerable people. The U.N.’s report also concludes that 6 million people (one-fourth of the population) are in dire need of food.

But with the importance that the North Korean government has given to the elite and the military, the major concern is will those who need this aid be the actual recipients of it? The 2008-09 food aid program agreed to by the U.S. and North Korea offers the best model for addressing this concern. The agreement set up unprecedented standards in access and monitoring, allowing the U.S. to really get to the people who needed food the most.

I traveled eight times to North Korea as a U.S. government official to oversee implementation of that program. I participated in some of the more than 3,000 monitoring visits conducted during the 10-month-long program to oversee the journey of U.S. food from its arrival in North Korea to the institutions where we distributed food to our beneficiaries. This type of thorough monitoring made it difficult for any significant amount of food aid to be diverted to the military or elite. In addition, in a country where rice is viewed as such an important part of a meal, the wheat, corn and corn-soy blend that we strategically provided is not palatable to the elite, further minimizing diversion concerns.

The food aid program also offered an incredible opportunity to engage with regular North Korean citizens. People who spoke Korean were permitted in North Korea to monitor and administer the program, something not allowed under any previous food aid program. As a Korean speaker myself, I experienced how knowing the language brought extra depth and cultural insight to the encounters with nonelite North Koreans outside Pyongyang. When I drove through those closed societies far from the capital, the visits to homes, schools, orphanages and public distribution centers gave these North Koreans an unforgettable experience: contact with foreigners and Americans. It gave them a window on the outside world and perhaps a different perspective of the U.S. Through my interaction with them, I was able to confirm how much they appreciated our help and that they clearly knew the food aid was coming from the U.S.

Granted, the North Korean government made attempts to deviate from the terms of the agreement, and it prematurely ended it. But overall, for the 10 months we lived and worked in North Korea, much was accomplished in terms of our humanitarian and diplomatic objectives.

In the event that negotiations for another food aid program with North Korea resume, the Obama administration is justified in requiring that North Korea adhere to strong monitoring standards. And although there is always room for improvement in monitoring and access, the 2008 agreement offers a proven model and foundation for any future food aid effort.

Through a properly monitored program, we have the power to preserve the lives of and engage diplomatically with an otherwise unreachable population in North Korea. As human beings and as Americans, we should not miss this opportunity.

Representatives of more than 3,000 governments and donor organizations are meeting in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on Wednesday. If past experience is indicative, they will pledge to provide hundreds of millions in aid.

Most of these donors should simply stay home.

Year after year, smiling Cambodian government leaders attend these pledge conferences, holding out their hands. But first they have to listen as ambassadors and aid officers stand at the podium, look them in the eye, and lambast them for corruption and jaw-dropping human rights abuses.

Each year Prime Minister Hun Sen promises to reform. The donors nod and make their pledges — $1.1 billion last year. Then everyone goes home and nothing changes. In the following months, officials dip into the foreign aid accounts and build themselves mansions the size of small hotels, while 40 percent of Cambodia’s children grow up stunted for lack of nutrition during infancy.

This year should be different. Over the past two decades, the Cambodian government has grown ever more repressive. Now it is actually planning to bite the hand that feeds it: The legislature is enacting a law that would require nongovernmental organizations to register with the government, giving venal bureaucrats the ability to shut them down unless they become toadies of the state.

Eight major international human rights organizations are calling on Cambodia to back down, saying the bill is “the most significant threat to the country’s civil society in many years.” Donors, they say, should hold back their pledges. But they say that every year, and each year the donors ignore them. Meanwhile, the status of the Cambodian people the aid is supposed to help improves little if at all. Nearly 80 percent of Cambodians live in the countryside with no electricity, clean water, toilets, telephone service or other evidence of the modern world.

All of this might surprise most Americans. It has been decades since many people here have given Cambodia even a thought. Forty years ago, Cambodia was on the front pages almost every day as the United States bombed and briefly invaded the state during the Vietnam War. Then came the genocidal Khmer Rouge era, when 2 million people died.

How many know what has happened there since? Last month, the Nexis news-research service carried 6,335 stories with Thailand in the headline. Vietnam had 5,196. For Cambodia, 578.

Most people don’t know that Cambodians are ruled by a government that sells off the nation’s rice harvest each year and pockets the money, leaving its people without enough to eat. That it evicts thousands of people from their homes, burns down the houses, then dumps the victims into empty fields and sells their property to developers.

That it amasses vast personal fortunes while the nation’s average annual per capita income stands at $650. Or that it allows school teachers to demand daily bribes from 6-year-olds and doctors to extort money from dirt-poor patients, letting them die if they do not pay.

This is a government that stands by and watches as 75 percent of its citizens contract dysentery each year, and 10,000 die — largely because only 16 percent of Cambodians have access to a toilet. As Beat Richner, who runs children’s hospitals there, puts it, “the passive genocide continues.”

You wouldn’t know any of that from the donors’ behavior. You see, for foreigners Phnom Penh is a relatively pleasant place to live. Rents are cheap and household help is even cheaper. Espresso bars and stylish restaurants dot the river front — primarily for diplomats and aid workers.

Donors have largely been able to pursue whatever project they wanted without interference. They knew that the government would steal some of their money. But so what?

“Some money goes this way or that way,” said In Samrithy, an officer with a donor umbrella group. “But it’s useful if some of it reaches the poor. Not all of it does but some does. That’s better than nothing.”

Even with that, many donors feel the way Teruo Jinnai does. He’s the longtime head of the UNESCO office in Phnom Penh. “Here I have found my own passion,” he told me. “Here, I can set my own target. So that gives you more power, more energy, more passion.”

Well, Mr. Jinnai, the noose is tightening. If, as expected, the NGO bill becomes law, government repression will reach out for you, too. Isn’t it time, then, for all those donors to make a statement? On Wednesday stand up and tell the government: I am withholding my aid.

De todas las catástrofes que azotaron el mundo en 2010, el terremoto de Haití produjo la herida que más cuesta curar. Hoy, un año después del segundo seísmo conocido más destructor de la Historia, la herida sigue abierta y en parte agravada por nuevos problemas como el huracán Tomás, la epidemia de cólera y la volatilidad política que ha seguido a las elecciones. La Unión Europea, que ya venía ayudando a los haitianos desde mucho antes del terremoto del 12 de enero, reaccionó prestando ayuda humanitaria inmediata, pero pensando también en un plan de recuperación a largo plazo.

Haití ya era uno de los más pobres del hemisferio occidental antes del temblor de tierra: la mayoría de sus habitantes dependía de la ayuda exterior para su sustento diario, el sistema sanitario estaba subdesarrollado, la red de carreteras era insuficiente y el país estaba gobernado por una administración debilitada. Si la situación humanitaria ya era difícil antes del terremoto, tras el seísmo se complicó mucho más: la capital estaba en ruinas, muchas infraestructuras fuera de servicio y tanto los organismos gubernamentales como las agencias humanitarias perdieron una gran cantidad de personal, recursos e instalaciones.

En la fase de emergencia, la UE reaccionó de forma coordinada, tanto los países europeos como con los socios internacionales, para rescatar supervivientes y proporcionar servicios médicos, agua, alimentos y cobijo a las víctimas. También trabajó de forma constructiva con todos los actores implicados, desde la población y las autoridades locales, hasta los militares, los organismos internacionales y las ONG desplegadas sobre el terreno. Asimismo, la UE se ha esforzado por combinar desde el principio las medidas de auxilio con las de recuperación. Por ejemplo, hemos animado a la población local a participar activamente en la retirada de escombros y la reconstrucción con programas de dinero por trabajo que permiten recuperar medios de subsistencia a más largo plazo. De este modo, la acción de la UE ha limitado en gran medida los habituales efectos secundarios en una crisis de esta naturaleza: las epidemias y la desnutrición.

Cuando a finales de año se propagó el cólera, la Comisión Europea también reaccionó rápidamente y destinó 22 millones de euros a combatir la epidemia. Con este dinero nuestros socios sobre el terreno suministraron agua limpia a más de 650.000 haitianos, trataron a más de 158.000, mejoraron las condiciones sanitarias de casi 900.000 y dieron consejos de higiene y prevención a millones más. Como resultado, el número de nuevos casos de cólera y de muertes empezó a disminuir dos meses después del inicio de la epidemia, hasta que se produjeron los disturbios de mediados de diciembre.

A más largo plazo, Europa también ha cumplido su promesa original. Durante la conferencia internacional de donantes del pasado marzo en Nueva York, la UE (Comisión y Estados miembros) comprometió un total de 1.200 millones de euros para los próximos tres años, con objeto de apoyar la asistencia humanitaria inmediata y la recuperación a más largo plazo. De esa cantidad, unos 780 millones de euros ya se han plasmado en acciones concretas sobre el terreno y en mejoras reales para la vida diaria de los haitianos, como el suministro de alimentos y agua potable; tiendas y viviendas provisionales; atención médica; reconstrucción de carreteras; reapertura de escuelas; recuperación de la producción agrícola y la actividad económica, y el mantenimiento de la capacidad del Estado de Haití para prestar servicios sociales básicos. Es cierto, muchos haitianos siguen viviendo en campamentos o en condiciones precarias, pero esto no significa que nuestros esfuerzos hayan sido insuficientes o que el dinero de nuestros contribuyentes y el trabajo de nuestros expertos hayan caído en saco roto. Muy al contrario, con nuestra asistencia hemos contribuido a evitar el desmoronamiento completo del Estado.

No existe una solución rápida. Sin embargo, sobrevivir al terremoto y al cólera sólo es el principio. La tarea del año pasado ha sido tan enorme como la que tenemos por delante: capacitar a Haití para que emprenda el largo camino hacia un desarrollo sostenible. Nuestra visión ha sido la de ayudar a las autoridades de Haití a que reconstruyan su país casi de cero. Actualmente, nos preocupa la agitación política y civil que ha seguido a las elecciones y que podría empeorar la situación, impidiendo que la ayuda humanitaria llegue a las personas que más la necesitan y retrasando el complejo proceso de reconstrucción. Por ello hemos instado a las autoridades de Haití a restablecer la calma necesaria para el rápido establecimiento de un gobierno legítimo y eficaz. Debe ser este nuevo Ejecutivo el que lidere la reconstrucción del país y proponga soluciones a los problemas que han hecho de los haitianos un pueblo tan vulnerable.

La comunidad internacional se ha mantenido firme en su labor solidaria con los haitianos y nosotros, en la Unión Europea, estamos convencidos de que quienes ayudaron el año pasado volverán a hacerlo en el futuro. La alternativa -que Haití vuelva a caer en un largo ciclo de desesperación, miseria e inestabilidad- es, simplemente, inaceptable.

Un an après le séisme qui a fait près de 250 000 morts, ravagé des villes entières et transformé la capitale Port-au-Prince en champ de ruines, Haïti continue de s’enfoncer dans le chaos. La situation est indigne. Plus de 1 million de personnes vivent toujours dans des camps d’urgence, dans des conditions d’hygiène et de promiscuité désastreuses. Le choléra en a déjà tué plus de 2 500. En douze mois, la crise humanitaire est devenue une crise morale et le déshonneur de la communauté internationale. Les engagements solennels n’ont pas été tenus : seule une part infime des sommes promises a été versée. Surtout, les retards accumulés laissent la population haïtienne avec de lourds sentiments d’abandon et de frustration.

Il ne s’agit pas seulement, en Haïti, de reconstruire des routes et de soigner des malades. Ce sont nos valeurs qui sont en jeu, le respect de la parole donnée, notre capacité à faire valoir un minimum de justice. Comment croire que sur un territoire aussi modeste, avec une culture aussi dynamique, une jeunesse prête à s’investir, nous serions impuissants à aider les Haïtiens à se relever et obtenir des résultats probants ?

Haïti ne demande ni la charité ni l’assistanat. Haïti a besoin d’investissements durables dans les domaines qui sont l’épine dorsale de toute société : la jeunesse, l’éducation, la culture. Les Haïtiennes et les Haïtiens doivent surtout être mis en première ligne de la reconstruction. Elle ne se fera pas sans eux.

La majorité de la population haïtienne a moins de 25 ans. Les jeunes d’Haïti, filles et garçons, aspirent à un système d’éducation et de formation professionnelle de qualité, veulent acquérir des connaissances et des compétences. Ils veulent travailler, faire partie des solutions et être reconnus pour ce qu’ils ont à offrir. Cette jeunesse est une chance, il faut soutenir ses projets. Il serait criminel et dangereux de la laisser grandir dans le découragement et la colère.

L’éducation est la condition de toute reconstruction durable. Sans elle, pas de fonctionnement efficace de l’Etat, pas de formation des élites. En Haïti, au moins 40 % de la population n’a aucun bagage scolaire, seulement 1 % atteint le niveau universitaire. Pour changer cela, il ne suffira pas de reconstruire les bâtiments. Il faut former les professeurs, dont le tiers n’a pas été au-delà du collège. Il faut assurer la continuité entre le primaire et le secondaire, que fréquentent à peine 20 % des élèves. Il faut aussi revoir la carte scolaire : la concentration des écoles autour de Port-au-Prince a causé la perte du système éducatif dans son ensemble. Il faut mieux les répartir, avec une politique éducative digne de ce nom.

Les Haïtiennes et les Haïtiens ont montré leur immense pouvoir de résilience, qui tient notamment à la force de leur culture. L’éducation, la culture, c’est effectivement ce qui reste quand tout a été détruit, et ce qui détermine la capacité d’un peuple à faire face. La culture haïtienne est un trésor : la région de Jacmel, par exemple, a tout le potentiel d’un grand pôle de développement culturel et touristique. Ses artistes, ses artisans, son carnaval, son quartier historique sont des leviers puissants sur lesquels s’appuyer. La municipalité et la société civile ont pris des initiatives en créant notamment l’école de musique Desaix-Baptiste et une école de cinéma : aidons-les à valoriser leurs talents, par l’éducation artistique, le soutien à l’artisanat, la diversification de l’économie !

HAÏTI A BESOIN D’ENGAGEMENT SUR LE (TRÈS) LONG TERME

L’Organisation des Nations unies pour l’éducation, la science et la culture (Unesco) a redoublé d’efforts pour la formation des enseignants et la mise en place de statistiques scolaires qui font cruellement défaut. L’Unesco a formé des maçons aux techniques antisismiques, aménagé des centres de formation professionnelle. L’urgence est maintenant à la reconstruction du système éducatif, comme nous l’avons dit dès le mois de mars 2010 lors de notre visite sur place. Il est évident que la réalisation des objectifs sera longue – vingt ans minimum – coûteuse – peut-être 5 milliards de dollars pour offrir une éducation primaire de qualité pour tous – et difficile dans sa mise en oeuvre. Raison de plus pour commencer tôt, et pour être exigeant.

Haïti a trop souffert de la succession des programmes d’aide accumulés sans cohérence, sans stratégie à long terme. Les populations, les gouvernements n’ont pas été suffisamment associés alors que tous les experts savent la nécessité de les impliquer fortement pour gagner en efficacité et en autonomie.

Tout cela est vrai. Comme il vrai qu’il y a d’autres malheurs, qu’il y a la crise, qu’il y a toujours un prétexte pour ne rien faire. Nous épargnerons au lecteur le rappel du montant croissant des dépenses militaires mondiales, et la vitesse à laquelle on sait bâtir des routes et des ponts dans le Golfe ou en Chine. Personne n’est en position de donner des leçons, et les recettes miracles n’existent pas. Chacun doit se remettre en question et s’améliorer. Ce qui est certain, c’est qu’Haïti a besoin d’engagement sur le (très) long terme, en étroite coopération avec les Haïtiens. Sur ces bases, Haïti peut être un symbole de renouveau de la coopération internationale.

Nous appelons les gouvernements, les acteurs de la société civile, en Haïti et ailleurs, à tenir leurs promesses et à prendre leurs responsabilités pour une reconstruction efficace et rapide. Nous devons à ce peuple, porte-drapeau de la lutte des esclaves pour la liberté, certaines valeurs fondatrices des communautés politiques modernes. Ce legs immense nous oblige à faire plus et mieux, pour ne pas ajouter la faute morale à la tragédie humaine.

The international response to the earthquake that struck Haiti nearly a year ago was immediate and massive. The devastation was massive as well: The quake killed more than 200,000 people, injured more than 300,000, destroyed more than 250,000 homes and displaced more than 1.5 million people, 1 million of whom are still living in makeshift shelters in hundreds of camps.

The cost of the damage has been estimated at up to $14 billion. Thirty-nine governments and people from around the world have sent money and emergency aid of one sort or another, including doctors, food, medicine, water, temporary shelters and heavy equipment to remove rubble. The Haitian population welcomed the humanitarian response and the gestures of international solidarity.

Today, by contrast, Haitians are increasingly impatient with the United Nations, the international community and their own government because of the lack of progress in rebuilding their country. This discontent was exacerbated by the cholera outbreak in October, which has caused more than 3,000 deaths so far and is believed to have been introduced by a contingent of Nepalese U.N. soldiers.

To understand the frustration, which can occasionally turn into violence, it is necessary to make some key distinctions. The laudable immediate humanitarian response to post-earthquake Haiti is one thing. The objectives of the international community – the United States, Canada, and France; the United Nations; and financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund – are quite another, and they’re significantly more problematic. Their objectives and their policies first and foremost aim to benefit their own investors, farmers, manufacturers and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

There is a dramatic power imbalance between the international community – under U.S. leadership – and Haiti. The former monopolizes economic and political power and calls all the shots. The Haitian state and the tiny but wealthy elite that rules the country also bear great responsibility for the abysmal conditions of the country before the earthquake, but they did not create those conditions alone. They did so in close partnership with foreign governments and international institutions long involved in Haitian affairs, the same ones that are now in charge of post-earthquake reconstruction. It is not surprising, then, that this unequal relationship is reflected in the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), with members drawn equally from the foreign community and Haiti, and co-chaired by Bill Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive.

The IHRC, originally conceived by the State Department, has effectively displaced the Haitian government and is in charge of setting priorities for reconstruction. When members of the Haitian Senate pointed out to Bellerive that Haiti had surrendered its sovereignty to the IHRC, he conceded the point but hoped that the government could become “autonomous in its decisions” at some point. In a recent interview, Bellerive criticized the international community for not allowing his country to play a bigger role in its own reconstruction.

So far, the IHRC has not done much. Less than 10 percent of the $9 billion pledged by foreign donors has been delivered, and not all of that money has been spent. Other than rebuilding the international airport and clearing the principal urban arteries of rubble, no major infrastructure rebuilding – roads, ports, housing, communications – has begun. According to news reports, of the more than 1,500 U.S. contracts doled out worth $267 million, only 20, worth $4.3 million, have gone to Haitian firms. The rest have gone to U.S. firms, which almost exclusively use U.S. suppliers. Although these foreign contractors employ Haitians, mostly on a cash-for-work basis, the bulk of the money and profits are reinvested in the United States.

That same logic applies to the 1,000 or so foreign NGOs that are operating in Haiti. These groups, which work independently of the Haitian government, reinforce the country’s dependence on foreign aid and further sap the capacity and responsibility of the government to meet the basic needs of its citizens.

The stage for this increased dependence on foreign aid, investment and NGOs was set in the 1970s, when the international community, in particular the United States and the World Bank, devised development strategies that turned Haiti into the supplier of the region’s cheapest labor for the garment industry. Haiti also went from producing 80 percent of its food in the 1980s to being one of the largest importers of U.S. food in the hemisphere today. This shift took place through “structural adjustment” policies that kept wages low and removed tariffs and some restrictions on imports. This was highly profitable for the foreign investors and their Haitian contractors, but the garment industry did little to reduce unemployment or lift its workers out of poverty.

One primary architect of the policy knows it wasn’t a success. In testimony last March, former president Clinton said that compelling Haiti to cut tariffs on imported rice from the United States “may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked [to help Haiti]. It was a mistake.” Later he acknowledged that the policies have “failed everywhere [they've] been tried.”

Yet, these are essentially the same policies that his IHRC is recommending. This obvious contradiction would boggle the mind only if one believed that members of the international community had the best interests of Haiti in mind rather than those of their own farmers, firms, NGOs and economies. For their part, the elites in Haiti who benefit from the status quo have no alternative to propose and are all too willing to point their finger at someone else. Whatever new government emerges from the recent, though flawed, elections will not change that basic reality.

When I arrived in Haiti as ambassador, unemployment was rampant, the government could not provide basic services such as education and health care, and only 12 percent of the population had access to electricity. And that was in August 2009 – months before the devastating earthquake that struck the country almost one year ago.

The 35 seconds of terror that Haiti suffered on Tuesday, Jan. 12, resulted in 230,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of injuries, left almost 2 million people homeless, decimated the economy and exacerbated many of the problems the nation already faced. Haiti also lost up to 30 percent of its civil service and all but one of its main government buildings.

As President Obama put it, it was as if the United States, “in a terrible instant, lost nearly 8 million people; or it’s as if one-third of our country – 100 million Americans – suddenly had no home, no food or water.”

Today, the United States remains committed to helping build a more prosperous and stable Haiti. Like many of Haiti’s international partners, we are providing more than $400 million in humanitarian relief funding to lay the foundation for long-term development, along with $1.15 billion, pledged at the March 2010 donors conference, to help rebuild. Our efforts are part of an internationally coordinated reconstruction program that embraces innovation to restore Haiti’s economy, which before the earthquake had experienced several consecutive years of growth.

The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, co-chaired by Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive and Bill Clinton, ensures that relief and development projects are coordinated and sequenced, so we don’t build any “bridges to nowhere.” Member countries from Canada and Brazil to France and Venezuela, as well as member institutions such as the United Nations and the Inter-American Development Bank, are all committed to helping Haiti realize a better tomorrow. Unlike previous efforts to rebuild the country, the IHRC also includes representatives from Haiti’s government, private sector and civil society.

The U.S. government is also bringing to bear the expertise of multiple agencies as we make targeted investments in agriculture and food security, infrastructure and energy projects, health care, and governance and security programs.

We have also embraced innovation. Mobile phones allowed Americans to donate to Haitian relief and recovery efforts – more than $35 million, given in $10 increments – and they will empower Haitians. Working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we are offering cash incentives to encourage competition in Haiti’s private sector to bring banking services to residents through their mobile phones. This week we will award a $2.5 million prize to the first company to launch a mobile banking service.

Haitians are very entrepreneurial. Just days after the earthquake, I saw lottery booths, beauty shops and even movie theaters in the camps. And in the months since, businesses have been reopening and new ones taking shape. But most of these entrepreneurs have no means to track their money or put it somewhere safe. Mobile banking is just the beginning of innovations that could improve the lives of millions in Haiti.

We know progress is not always visible, and we understand people’s frustration with the pace of reconstruction. But progress – though not as much as we need or as fast as we want – is here. The Haitian government undertook a proactive communication and flood-mitigation effort before the rainy season last year, and it led the international response to Hurricane Tomas in November. Haitian scientists in the Ministry of Public Health and Population identified cholera as soon as it appeared, and the ministry has coordinated the international response to the outbreak. An important component of this response is public health and hygiene information, and the ministry’s public service announcements – often directed at children who recite them verbatim with pride whenever someone passes by – are ubiquitous on the radio.

For our part, the United States has employed 350,000 people in cash-for-work programs, which have boosted the economy. We have also invested in agricultural initiatives, helping increase crop yields by about 75 percent over the previous year’s harvest in some areas. And we have been a critical player in the effort to remove rubble. The progress is incremental, but like many at the U.S. Embassy, I have seen progress each day on my way to work – ruined buildings demolished, then the areas cleared of rubble and converted into construction sites. The work continues.

Governments, multilateral organizations and the private sector are collaborating to marry development dollars and private investment to create permanent jobs. The State Department has signed two agreements with the government of Haiti, the Inter-American Development Bank and two of the world’s largest garment manufacturers, from Korea, to explore the possibility of building an industrial park that would produce tens of thousands of permanent jobs and permanent housing for thousands of Haitians. During my three diplomatic assignments here, I have seen the importance of job creation for Haiti, and these kinds of agreements make me optimistic.

We face a long and difficult journey, and now we pause to mourn the dead. But we renew our commitment to the living by helping build a more prosperous and stable Haiti, and a future that its people want.

Haiti should be an unlikely backdrop for the latest failure of the humanitarian relief system. The country is small and accessible and, following last January’s earthquake, it hosts one of the largest and best-funded international aid deployments in the world. An estimated 12,000 non-governmental organisations are there. Why then, have at least 2,500 people died of cholera, a disease that’s easily treated and controlled?

I recently went to Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, and found my Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) colleagues overwhelmed, having already treated more than 75,000 cholera cases. We and a brigade of Cuban doctors were doing our best to treat hundreds of patients every day, but few other agencies seemed to be implementing critical cholera control measures, such as chlorinated water distribution and waste management. In the 11 months since the quake, little has been done to improve sanitation across the country, allowing cholera to spread at a dizzying pace.

Ten days after the outbreak hit Port-au-Prince, our teams realised the inhabitants of Cité Soleil still had no access to chlorinated drinking water, even though aid agencies under the UN water-and-sanitation cluster had accepted funds to ensure such access. We began chlorinating the water ourselves. There is still just one operational waste management site in Port-au-Prince, a city of three million people.

On the one hand, Haitians were deluged with text messages imploring them to wash before eating, while on the other they had to bathe their children in largely untreated sewer water. Before the quake, only 12% of Haiti’s 9.8m people received treated tap water, according to the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC).

The road to controlling a cholera epidemic has been paved by hundreds of previous outbreaks worldwide. Yet, in Haiti, there are vast gaps in the deployment of well-established control measures. Now the epidemic is nationwide, making more than 120,000 people sick and killing at least 2,500.

In the face of this ferocious outbreak, investigations into its origin have not been released publicly, even though this information is fundamental to understanding the epidemic’s behaviour.

Hypotheses of cholera’s origin range from the contamination of the river Artibonite by UN peacekeepers, through climate change to voodoo. In the absence of transparency, fear and suspicion have provoked violence. The population’s anxiety is only amplified by catastrophic epidemic projections by the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO), a sister of the World Health Organisation.

PAHO’s epidemic modelling has not led to effective aid deployment. Huge amounts of aid are concentrated in Port-au-Prince, while scant support has been provided to inexperienced health workers in rural areas, where cholera is flourishing. MSF teams have found health centres with shortages of life-saving oral rehydration solution, and clinics that were simply shut.

It is against this backdrop that many non-governmental agencies have launched fundraising appeals, even while their post-earthquake coffers remain filled. The UN’s Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has repeatedly claimed that underfunding of its $174m cholera appeal, launched primarily to benefit private groups, is hampering the response – despite the fact that Haiti is the top-funded UN appeal for 2010. As nearly a million Haitians remain homeless in the face of a full-blown public health emergency, arguments that existing funds are tied up in longer-term programmes ring hollow.

The inadequate cholera response in Haiti – coming on the heels of the slow and highly politicised flood relief effort in Pakistan – makes for a damning indictment of an international aid system whose architecture has been carefully shaped over the past 15 years.

Throughout the 1990s, the UN developed a significant institutional apparatus to provide humanitarian aid through the creation of the Department for Humanitarian Affairs in 1992, later renamed OCHA, all the while creating an illusion of a centralised, efficient aid system. In 2005, after the Asian tsunami, the system received another facelift with the creation of a rapid emergency funding mechanism (CERF), and the “cluster” system was developed to improve aid efforts.

The aid landscape today is filled with cluster systems for areas such as health, shelter, and water and sanitation, which unrealistically try to bring aid organisations – large and small, and with varying capacities – under a single banner. Since the earthquake, the UN health cluster alone has had 420 participating organisations in Haiti.

Instead of providing the technical support that many NGOs could benefit from, these clusters, at best, seem capable of only passing basic information and delivering few concrete results during a fast-moving emergency. Underscoring the current system’s dysfunction, I witnessed the Haitian president, René Préval, personally chairing a health cluster meeting in a last-ditch effort to jump-start the cholera response.

Co-ordination of aid organisations may sound good to government donors seeking political influence. In Haiti, though, the system is legitimising NGOs that claim responsibility for health, sanitation or other areas in a specific zone, but then do not have the capacity or know-how to carry out the necessary work. As a result, people’s needs go unmet.

While co-ordination is important, it should not be an end in itself. It must be based on reality and oriented towards action to ensure that needs are covered.

In Haiti, the cholera outbreak will continue to claim lives for the foreseeable future. What is clear, though, is that the aid community at large has failed to prevent unnecessary deaths, in a population already so tragically affected by one catastrophe after another.

Piracy is not the only robbery on the high seas. A 56-year-old policy known as cargo preference is costing U.S. taxpayers an estimated $140 million each year for humanitarian food shipments and is affecting millions of aid recipients worldwide. It is time to update this well-intentioned but ineffective policy.

Cargo preference was launched in 1954 alongside modern American food aid programs. By requiring the U.S. government to ship three-quarters of its international food aid on U.S. flag vessels, the policy was intended to maintain essential sealift capacity in wartime, safeguard maritime jobs for American sailors and avoid foreign domination of U.S. ocean commerce. But in a comprehensive – and, to date, the only peer-reviewed – analysis of available shipping data and shipping vessel ownership records, we found that cargo preference falls well short of these objectives. Our study of the shipping data and the fiscal 2006 food-aid shipment records – the only full year records were available – from the U.S. Agency for International Development found that by restricting competition, the policy costs U.S. taxpayers a 46 percent markup on the market cost of ocean freight.

A few factors contribute to the expense of the cargo preference policy: Fully 70 percent of the vessels approved for cargo preference fail to meet the U.S. Maritime Administration’s age-based criterion for being militarily useful. And the system that awards food-aid shipping contracts allows price competition only within each priority category. That effectively means that the shippers using only U.S. vessels for the entire voyage automatically win bids against shippers that, in an effort to minimize costs, move containerized cargo between foreign and U.S. flag vessels en route.

Seven major U.S. military operations – in Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, the Persian Gulf, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq – have been carried out since the cargo-preference policy was implemented. But in that time there has been no documented call-up of citizen mariners for national service from these vessels. Meanwhile, the ships’ crews supported by cargo preference number only about 1,400 mariners. So the extra $140 million cost to U.S. taxpayers breaks down to about $100,000 per sailor.

And much of the windfall gains of this supposedly “buy American” program accrue to foreign shipping lines, thanks to a complex set of nested holding companies incorporated in the United States. A large share of the vessels eligible for preferred treatment are ultimately owned by foreign lines that include Hapag-Lloyd, Maersk and Wallenius.

The extra costs of this program – $140 million is roughly equal to the fiscal 2006 value of non-emergency food aid to Africa – are largely shouldered by programs such as USAID. This reduces resources to minimize hunger and human suffering abroad. With the federal government struggling not only to cut spending but also to meet President George W. Bush’s 2005 pledge to double U.S. aid to Africa and to fund President Obama’s Feed the Future initiative, ending wasteful cargo preference spending is an obvious source of revenue.

More efficient ways can be found to fulfill cargo preference’s policy objectives. The 1996 Maritime Security Program meets the same demands by subsidizing only militarily useful U.S. flag ships. By ending cargo preference on food aid, we could augment the Maritime Security Program, reduce costs to taxpayers and more directly support additional militarily useful vessels. The Pentagon would have more vessel options to quickly mobilize for national security missions, while the United States would be able to increase humanitarian response worldwide. Eliminating a parallel, obscure provision that requires 25 percent of bagged food aid to be handled in the U.S. Great Lakes port range would similarly encourage greater price-based competition among ocean carriers. Tightening guidelines regarding corporate parentage of eligible carriers could increase the benefits afforded to American carriers, merchant mariners and other ocean freight industry employees.

Rather than promote ineffective shipping subsidies under the guise of humanitarian assistance, national security and “buy American” objectives, Congress should revisit the role of cargo preference as it applies to international food aid. Updating this legislation could enhance welfare and security in America and abroad while costing U.S. taxpayers less. There is no reason for high-seas piracy to be legislated from Washington.

An army of health activists and world leaders will gather at the United Nations this week to review the eight Millennium Development Goals agreed to at the start of the century and to recalibrate and recommit to more effectively achieve them by 2015. The overarching and noble goal is reducing global poverty. But the most compelling and achievable objectives — huge reductions in maternal and child mortality worldwide — will be severely undermined if the Obama administration either directly or covertly integrates abortion into the final outcome document.

If the summit is sidetracked by abortion activists, the robust resolve required at national levels to deploy the funds needed to achieve the internationally agreed targets will be compromised. The risk is real. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said publicly that she believes access to abortion is part of maternal and reproductive health, thinking that runs contrary to the understanding of the more than 125 U.N. member states that prohibit or otherwise restrict abortion in their sovereign laws and constitutions. Moreover, speaking before the House International Relations Committee in 2005, Mark Malloch Brown, chief of staff for then-Secretary General Kofi Annan, said concerning reproductive health, “we do not interpret it as including abortion.” Clinton also calls pro-abortion nongovernmental organizations “partners.”

At the Group of Eight meetings in Canada this year, Prime Minister Stephen Harper rebuffed Clinton’s attempt to integrate abortion with initiatives to reduce maternal mortality. He stated his opposition to funding abortions by saying: “We want to make sure our funds are used to save the lives of women and children and are used on the many things that are available to us, and, frankly, do not divide the Canadian population.”

Millennium Development Goal No. 4 is reducing child mortality rates two-thirds from 1990 levels. It is clear that myriad cost-effective interventions need to be expanded to save children’s lives. These include treatment and prevention of disease, as well as greater access to adequate food and nutrition, clean water, childhood vaccinations, oral rehydration packets, antibiotics, and drugs to inhibit mother-to-child HIV transmission.

Similarly, unborn children desperately need care to optimize their health before and after birth. Healthy children start in the womb.

Abortion is, by definition, infant mortality, and it undermines the achievement of the fourth Millennium Development Goal. There is nothing benign or compassionate about procedures that dismember, poison, induce premature labor or starve a child to death. Indeed, the misleading term “safe abortion” misses the point that no abortion — legal or illegal — is safe for the child and that all are fraught with negative health consequences, including emotional and psychological damage, for the mother.

Talk of “unwanted children” reduces children to mere objects, without inherent human dignity and whose worth depends on their perceived utility or how much they’re wanted. One merely has to look at the scourge of human trafficking and the exploitation of children for forced labor or child soldiering to see where such disregard for the value of life leads.

The long-neglected health of mothers is prioritized by Millennium Development Goal No. 5, which rallies the world to cut maternal mortality rates 75 percent from 1990 levels.

We have known for more than 60 years what actually saves women’s lives: skilled attendance at birth, treatment to stop hemorrhages, access to safe blood, emergency obstetric care, antibiotics, repair of fistulas, adequate nutrition, and pre- and post-natal care. The goal of the upcoming summit should be a world free of abortion, not free abortion to the world.

A recent landmark study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and published in the British journal the Lancet in April is a great encouragement to governments that have been seriously addressing maternal mortality in their countries. The study, confirmed by similar numbers in a World Health Organization report released just this month, shows progress in the fight against maternal mortality; the number of maternal deaths per year as of 2008 has been reduced to 342,900 — or 281,500 in the absence of HIV deaths — some 40 percent lower than in 1980. And contrary to prevailing myths, the study underscored that many nations that have laws prohibiting abortion also have some of the lowest maternal mortality rates in the world — Ireland, Chile and Poland among them.

Implementation of the Millennium Development Goals will cost tens of billions of dollars. Credible polls from CNN and Gallup show that huge majorities of Americans don’t want their tax dollars used to pay for abortions.

Including abortion in the U.N. Outcome Document or in its implementation will undermine the Millennium Development Goals. Actions and programs to achieve the latter must embrace all of the world’s citizens, especially the weakest and most vulnerable. We must affirm, respect and tangibly assist the precious lives of women and all children, including the unborn.

Una organización humanitaria, que ocupó la atención mediática, insiste en enviar una nueva «caravana solidaria» en «homenaje» a los tres secuestrados por Al Qaeda en Mauritania. Movilizó durante meses a organismos del Estado financiados por todos los españoles. Muchos nos preguntamos si es de recibo que el Estado tenga que asumir el rescate de personas que se ponen en grandes peligros, que acometen empresas deportivas de máximo riesgo, que se aventuran en expediciones de ayuda a los «pobres» del Tercer mundo sin la debida preparación profesional, sin conocer la auténtica realidad social y cultural de esas comunidades y actuando a veces con un amateurismo obsoleto y peligroso.
Ponen en peligro las relaciones entre los Estados, dificultan la acción ejemplar de verdaderas organizaciones de cooperación internacional, contrastadas por su eficacia y por su respeto a las reglas del juego establecidas. Después de que Bernard Kouchner lanzara, como presidente de Médicos sin Fronteras, el concepto del «derecho de ingerencia humanitaria» muchas personas, movidas por buena voluntad, se han lanzado como si dispusieran de patentes de corso pero en sentido inverso: Ir en persona a llevar alimentos, ropa, medicamentos, material escolar, sin mantener las necesarias cautelas y las recomendaciones de Coordinadoras de ONG para el Desarrollo (Congde), Instituto de Estudios sobre Conflictos y Acción Humanitaria, Secretaría de Estado para la Cooperación, Cruz Roja y otros muchos organismos de reconocida solvencia. Muchas veces sin ponerse en contacto con nuestras Embajadas, hasta que ocurre un accidente.

Hace medio siglo se podía entender ese intento de reparación y ayuda. Pero ahora se trata de combatir las injusticias sociales y de contribuir a su crecimiento y autonomía. Se trata de no imponer monocultivos, de no obstaculizar su comercio a nuestros países, ni subvencionar nuestra propia agricultura.

Sin olvidar la humillación que puede suponer para los países receptores de esos alimentos y bienes que hubieran podido adquirirse allí sin distorsionar su mercado. Además, no contribuyen a un desarrollo endógeno, sostenible, equilibrado y global. Si lo que se trata es de exportar nuestro modelo económico de desarrollo, nuestras necesidades, nuestras formas de vida y hasta nuestros errores, para esto no se necesitaban estas alforjas. Han tomado un tren sin raíles en una aventura que es más exhibicionista que eficaz.

Muchos autodenominados «cooperantes», que no actúan movidos por la pasión por la justicia, pretenden llevar comida a una ínfima parte de la humanidad doliente, excluida y desterrada sin preguntarse por qué padecen hambre, enfermedades controlables, analfabetismo, daños al medio ambiente, marginación de la mujer, explotación de sus riquezas naturales y de su mano de obra. La compasión es un primer movimiento, el compromiso social es lo que caracteriza a la acción solidaria.

La generosidad, más que en dar, consiste en compartir, y en hacer juntos parte del camino. Es saberse responsable del mundo. El médico no necesita compartir la cama ni los medicamentos del enfermo para saber consolar, aliviar y no interferir en la sabiduría de la naturaleza, para que ésta pueda restablecer el equilibrio.

Algunos de estos voluntariosos cooperantes, que actúan por libre y sin tener en cuenta el valor de la sinergia, corren peligro de no respetar las creencias, formas de vida, culturas, sentido del tiempo y del espacio, tradiciones y valores muy valiosos y de los que todavía tendríamos mucho que aprender.

Lo peor es la consideración de las poblaciones de esos países empobrecidos como «subdesarrollados» o en «vías de desarrollo». Como si el subdesarrollo fuera un estadio en el camino hacia el desarrollo y no un subproducto del mismo. ¿Qué estaba enrollado y había que desarrollar, desde nuestro etnocentrismo?

Una caravana de esa índole, por similicadencia, recuerda a otras que se dirigían al Oeste en busca de tierras y del oro; aquí hacia el Sur, pero en forma de safaris solidarios. A las partidas cinegéticas, le siguieron las fotográficas. Todo bien organizado para cubrir las necesidades de los expedicionarios, lo que supone un costo tremendo e innecesario si se canalizaran esos esfuerzos de forma adecuada. Con dolor lo escribo y con todo el respeto a la buena voluntad, a veces siento lo mismo que ante el París-Dakar, de funesta memoria.

Los pobres no pueden ser objeto de nuestros cuidados, de nuestra generosidad y hasta de nuestro heroísmo. Porque el pobre, el excluido, el paciente, le damné de la tèrre, nunca podrá ser objeto para alcanzar fin alguno, ya que siempre es sujeto que sale al camino y nos interpela.

Esa es la voz que debemos prestarles, después de haberles escuchado con toda atención y descalzos. Me contaba Mayor Zaragoza que, hablando en un país de África, vio a una mujer que observaba pero con la que no se producía feedbackalguno. Federico, con ese saber suyo tan admirable, «Perdón señora, quizás hablo demasiado deprisa o mi inglés no es bueno». «No se preocupe, su inglés es bueno y su buena intención también, pero ¿por qué cuando los blancos vienen a hablarnos siempre nos dicen lo que tenemos que hacer y nunca nos preguntan lo que pensamos?». El Director General de la Unesco jamás lo olvidó.

Las ONG corren peligro, porque se han puesto de moda. Sin embargo, necesitamos muchas más asociaciones humanitarias: en los barrios, en las comunidades, en las universidades, en el campo y en la ciudad, en el norte y en el sur.

El tejido social precisa nuevos aportes imaginativos y audaces. Pero que no pierdan sus señas de identidad, porque padecerán los más débiles. Estoy convencido de que el boom de las ONG toca techo y presenta una cierta fatiga en relación al impulso de su primer fervor. Las ONG tienen que dar paso a los organismos que puedan prestar ayuda eficaz. Los voluntarios seguiremos militando en la lucha por la justicia y por los derechos sociales para todos, comenzando por los de las personas más próximas.

No se puede ir a hacer allá lo que no se hace aquí. Hay muchas personas que, al aproximarse el verano, acuden a las ONG en busca de proyectos en países del Sur, durante sus vacaciones. Se les pregunta por la actividad de voluntariado social que realizan durante todo el año, dos horas a la semana, por lo menos, y con la debida formación pues el voluntariado sin formación tiene más de aventura y de diletantismo que de auténtico servicio a las personas y comunidades que lo necesitan. La mayoría suele responder que «durante el curso tengo que estudiar», o que trabajar. Personas inadecuadas para una responsabilidad semejante y cuando les sugieres servicios de atención y ayuda a inmigrantes en España, que se pueden realizar durante todo el año, tuercen el gesto.

No hay que confundir los deseos con la realidad. El voluntariado social sabe asumir sus límites. En la organización del trabajo voluntario y de cooperación, hay que diseñar programas realistas, factibles y con continuidad. De otra forma se fomentan la desilusión y la desesperanza, cuando no la pérdida de la confianza en las capacidades de desarrollo humano, económico y social de las personas.

El voluntariado siempre será necesario porque aporta un plus de humanidad. Nos movemos acuciados por la pasión por la justicia y, en nuestra tarea aportamos la delicadeza en el modo y la firmeza en los fines.

The humanitarian aid industry is big business. According to the Overseas Development Institute it was worth about $18bn (£12bn) in 2008 and employed over 300,000 people – a huge increase in recent years. Aid agencies also have growing political clout, playing a leading role in shaping foreign policies of western governments towards humanitarian crises – sometimes even helping to trigger foreign military interventions.

Yet the industry is subject to very little external scrutiny, lacks accountability and is widely believed to often do more harm than good.

There is a real need for serious discussion of the politics and ethics of humanitarian aid, but unfortunately you won’t find it in Linda Polman’s new book, War Games. I debated with Polman at the Frontline club last week and have no doubt that she is sincere and committed. Her previous book, We Did Nothing, is a well-written critique of various UN interventions that took place in the 90s and combines a mix of good personal anecdotes and being-in-the-right-place-at-the-right-time luck.

War Games covers some similar ground – in fact, there is quite a bit of repetition from the previous book – but Polman’s grasp of her material seems far less sure this time.

It starts in Goma, just across the border from Rwanda, in April 1995, a year after the genocide. This relief operation is one of the ones most frequently cited in the book, spanning over 20 pages and coming up 13 times in the footnotes, although according to Polman’s own account, she only spent a single day there before walking back to the border the following morning.

The operation has been one of the most extensively documented and critiqued, as it was a turning point for the humanitarian movement, and Polman draws on many of these secondary sources when discussing what went wrong and why so much international aid ended up being expropriated by the genocidaires. A large number of agencies had pulled out of the camps long before Polman arrived and her failure to acknowledge this weakens what is otherwise a fairly standard treatment of the issues.

But this is a recurring weakness of the book. Polman chucks the metaphorical kitchen sink at humanitarian aid and its workers. Each chapter has a string of anecdotes illustrating their venality, incompetence, naivety or cynicism. There does not seem to have been an expat war-zone bar or luxury hotel in which Polman has not stopped to gather evidence, eavesdropped a conversation or noted a double-standard. Yet, with the exception of Liberia and Sierra Leone, where she used to live and work, she rarely seems to have ventured into the field herself, nor does she seem particularly tuned into the debates that have taken place within and about the profession in recent years. This gives what could and should have been a really interesting book a rather insubstantial feeling.

Anyone who has ever visited the site of a major, well-publicised and well-funded humanitarian operation will know that they are characterised by waste and duplication. Anyone who has spent time in a war zone knows that aid gets diverted. This is not news.

Polman says that we should demand that aid organisations explain exactly what they are going to achieve and how. Yet rather than attempt to analyse the explanations and strategies that they have put forward over the last 15 years – many of them based directly on the experiences of the Goma operation – she seems content to remain on the abstract moral high-ground. Because life-saving aid sometimes goes to the wrong people, it would be better to give it to no one in certain situations, she opines – without seeming to have followed through the obvious ethical and moral implications. Aid prolongs wars, we are continually told, yet at no point is this assertion backed by any empirical evidence.

The research is also often just bad. In her chapter on Afghanistan, for example, she refers to civilian aircraft “climbing steeply to get beyond the range of Taliban rockets”. Yet, as anyone who has ever been on such a plane would surely know, they do the exact opposite, flying terrifyingly low until they have built up sufficient speed to reduce their vulnerability.

At our debate, Polman admitted that she has never even visited a restaurant in Kabul in which she claims waitresses were “dressed in miniskirts, split to the top of their thighs, with toy guns tucked into their garters” – an allegation which could easily lead to it being targeted for a terrorist attack. She concludes this chapter by saying “just as [aid workers] do little, if anything to keep their local employees safe [they] do little to reduce the risks for aid recipients” – a remark as untrue as it is insulting.

War Games has rightly been compared to Dead Aid – although Dambisa Moyo specifically exempts humanitarian aid from her “shock therapy” proposal – and it will appeal to a similar readership. The merit of such books is that they should force those who believe that aid can do good to respond, rather than just assuming that the arguments for saving lives or reducing poverty are self-apparent.

The case for international aid has been won at the macro-political level – as shown by the cross-party consensus about Britain’s aid budget – but Polman’s book will tap an underlying sentiment, which should not be underestimated. The road to hell, it seems, is paved with stereotypical cliches, as well as good intentions. It would be wrong to let such arguments go by default.

Aid workers have already baptised the earthquake in Haiti a “historical disaster”. It will rate high in the annals of the humanitarian aid world because of the number of victims and scale of the destruction. But the rescue operation is also becoming notorious for the slowness with which aid is reaching the victims. Five days after the quake hit, many places are still largely bereft of international aid.

Not through lack of funds, supplies or emergency experts. Those are all pouring in from dozens of countries. But most of the aid — and aid workers — seems stuck at the airport.

Rescue teams have pulled survivors from five-star hotels, university buildings, a supermarket and the UN headquarters, all in Port-au-Prince’s better neighbourhoods. In poor areas, where the damage appears much greater, apparently forgotten victims report on Twitter that they have yet to encounter the first foreign rescuer.

Many aid workers are reported to have orders not to venture out without armed guards — which are not there at all, or only after long debates with the UN military command. The UN has lost a number of staff in the quake, and is not keen to risk more lives.

But the Haitian people seem to scare aid workers more than Somali warlords, Darfuri Janjawid or Afghan Taleban. Frightened Dutch aid workers abandoned a mission without reaching the collapsed building where people were trapped, and frightened doctors have left their patients unattended.

The experience of CNN’s medical reporter, Dr Sanjay Gupta, is telling. In a makeshift clinic he encountered a Belgian medical team being evacuated in a UN bus. UN “rules of engagement” apparently stopped them providing security for the doctors. The Belgians took most of their medical supplies with them, to keep them out of the claws of robbers.

Dr Gupta and his camera team stayed the night, monitored the abandoned patients’ vital signs and continued intravenous drips — and they were not robbed. Some rescuers are leaning so much toward security that they will allow people to die.

The media are not helping. CNN rules in the rubble. “Outside of a military conflict, this is our biggest international deployment since the tsunami in 2004,” according to Tony Maddox, the managing director of CNN International. So the image of the aid operation being beamed back is primarily American — and one of the big problems is the American view of Haiti.

CNN won’t stop telling aid workers and the outside world about pillaging (the incidence of which — for the first four frustrating days at least — did not compare with what happened after Hurricane Katrina) and about how dangerous it is to distribute food, because of the likelihood of “stampedes”.

Nor is the US Government, the biggest player in the aid operation, doing anything to help to relax the atmosphere. On the contrary. When President Obama said that the US aid effort would be “aggressive” he meant it. The humanitarian operation is not led by civilian agencies, but by the Pentagon.

Mr Obama ordered 9,000 troops and a fleet of nuclear-powered ships to move in. Victims of the war in Congo (which has cost five million lives in the past years) and of the genocide in Darfur would love so much American attention — but it is Haiti’s fate to lay in America’s backyard and to have been a sore to American eyes for decades already.

One, perhaps even two million Haitians already live in the United States, but more try to come. Every day dead Haitian refugees wash up on Miami’s sunny beaches. Haiti is a constant pain for US taxpayers who feel that the billions of dollars that have been poured in should have at least lifted the country out of its position as one of the poorest places on Earth. Even when the earthquake struck, investigations were taking place into the fate of several million dollars of aid funds, sent to victims of a hurricane that hit Haiti in 2008, that have disappeared.

Furthermore, to the horror of many godfearing Americans, voodoo is an officially recognised religion in Haiti. And, perhaps above all, Haitians are poor and black. In the view of some Americans those two add up to … murderous gangs.

The invasion of soldiers and humanitarian workers at the airport of Port-au-Prince reminds me of the American military invasion of Haiti authorised by President Clinton in 1994. I’d lived and worked there for almost two years as a correspondent for Dutch radio. There were 20,000 soldiers but they were surprisingly nervous about what reception the unarmed Haitians might have in store for them.

It turned out to be a wave of slum dwellers streaming to the air and sea port to greet the American guests. In abundant conga lines they snaked through the city, tea cosies on their heads to express just how happy they were. “Liberté! Merci Beel Cling Dong!” they shouted. A terrified American GI, still a teenager, saw the mass of pitiful creatures approaching him, and asked me if the tea cosies were “some kinda voodoo?”. He calmed down only when a line of BMWs and Mitsubishis appeared and filed past to watch the invasion.

Where the soldier came from, the owners of vehicles like these are respectable citizens. In Haiti, they are likely to be the ones smuggling drugs and making US aid dollars disappear. The good guys in Haiti are the defenceless people in the slums. For Western city dwellers, this is the world turned upside down. “Back! Back!” the soldier shouted, aiming his weapons at the good guys.

The rescue teams that stay put at the airport are one reason why we still don’t really know what is going on. Seventy survivors had been pulled from the rubble so far, the International Red Cross said on Sunday. That’s 14 rescues per day as a joint result of the 1,739 international specialised rescue workers that are there. That number would surely jump if some of the professional equipment that they brought was made available to the countless groups of local people desperately digging for victims with their bare hands, day and night.

Let’s hope that the food distributors worrying about their safety know that yesterday hundreds of people in Port-au-Prince dropped to their knees praying outside a warehouse where workers for the agency Food for the Poor had announced that they would be distributing rice and beans. The crowd allowed children and the elderly to go first in line without having guns aimed at them first

The Horn of Africa is in the grip of the worst drought for 47 years! Some 23 million people are threatened with starvation! When you see children on TV with distended bellies keening over their dying parents, it would be inhuman not to be moved to tears. But do them a favour. Sit on your hands.

The situation is ghastly to be sure. But, as Christmas approaches, the most intelligent response to this latest disaster is to quote Ebenezer Scrooge and cry “bah, humbug”.

African aid organisations have been in the grip of an hysterical number inflation game since the hideous images of the Ethiopian famine were brought to our screens 25 years ago today by the BBC’s Michael Buerk. For every year that has passed the scale of Africa’s problems seem to have grown.

Aid organisations and the media have inflated the scale of subsequent horror, regardless of the truth. This year the International Rescue Committee released data from its Democratic Republic of the Congo mortality survey. “Congo’s war and aftermath have killed 5.4 million,” The Washington Post yelled, quoting the IRC. Humbug.

The IRC isn’t deliberately lying, neither was the Post. But the idea that 5.4 million people have died as a result of war in Congo is nonsense. It needs to be peddled to help to generate funds to relieve the real and hideous suffering of Congo’s population, but nonsense it remains. As the IRC admits: “Less than 10 per cent of all deaths were due to violence, with most attributed to easily preventable and treatable conditions such as malaria, diarrhoea, pneumonia and malnutrition.”

The IRC is saying, really, that the Congolese are dying because they are poor. Recent work by André Lambert and Louis Lohlé-Tart shows that the rising mortality rate predates the wars there. But combine “war’’ with “millions dead’’ and you have a donation-winning headline We all do it. We use statistics to highlight the horrors in Africa to drive home the unbelievable scale of the continent’s problems. But that’s the problem: the scale has become unbelievable. Twenty-three million? From my experience of two decades’ reporting from Africa, I can say with absolute confidence that this is humbug. Did anyone count them? No.

Oxfam says that 3.8 million Kenyans, more than 3.8 million Somalis, and 13.7 million Ethiopians “need aid”. Implicit in this is that they could perish through lack of food. In Kenya it might be possible to make this guess. But in Somalia, which has been in a post-apocalyptic state of anarchy since 1991?

There is a drought. Just as there is every ten years. This is the worst in a generation. But even if 23 million people do face starvation, please don’t reach for your cheque book. Foreign aid is the principal reason for Africa’s accumulated agony.

According to Oxfam: “Food aid saves lives, but it crowds out other … initiatives that support communities’ strategies to prevent the next drought from becoming a disaster.” Exactly. If we send help now, we’ll be killing more people later because more people will be bred and no one will think to save any crops to feed them.

Kenya is having a terrible time. But it would not be doing so if the breadbasket in the west of the country had not been torn apart by ethnic violence. If the agricultural outreach programmes, which helped farmers to improve productivity through the 1960s and 1970s, had not collapsed, if the Government’s milk and beef marketing system was not ruined by corruption, and if people had not been settled on marginal land that can never sustain them, then Kenya would be able to feed itself even in times of drought.

When the rains do come to Kenya there are not enough seed stocks. Kenya’s politicians have stolen much of the aid that we have sent them, and now we are expected to feed their constituents. Every time Kenya, or for that matter Ethiopia, has faced a food shortage the wealthy nations have come to the rescue.

Oxfam reveals in its latest paper, Band Aids and Beyond, that between 70 and 92 per cent of US aid to Ethiopia has been food aid — and almost all of that was the surplus product of American farms. So Ethiopia has had no need to feed itself. Worse still, Ethiopia and Eritrea spent billions that should have been used to develop self-sufficiency between 1998 and 2000 on a border war over a mess of barren rocks. They could do this because we in the wealthy North fed the populations of both countries.

So, what to do? For an answer I turn to Birham Woldu, who survived the (man-made) 1984 famine in Ethiopia.

“Constantly shipping food from places like the US is costly, uneconomic, and can encourage dependency,” she writes in the Oxfam report. “We are a big country and when there is famine in one part of the country, there is plenty in another. So we need better infrastructure and communications to move food around to where it is needed. Above all we need education.”

If they want to badly enough, the Ethiopians can sort out their own roads. So that leaves education. We can help Africans to help themselves by donating to charities that ring-fence funding for education. If they don’t do it, don’t give. Mark all cheques “not for food” if you have to.

With education Africans can and will rid themselves of the incompetent and corrupt leaders that we have kept in power through foreign aid for decades. Educated Africans will bring an end to a dangerous cycle of humbug.

Six years ago today, my father, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was killed in a tragic attack in Baghdad that changed the face of the humanitarian world. A truck filled with bombs exploded in the United Nations compound, killing 22 humanitarian workers and wounding many more. Some who were not physically hurt were psychologically wounded. Even years later, many remain vulnerable.

My father headed the U.N. team in Baghdad. A few days before he was killed, he wrote: “The situation is indeed difficult. But we will succeed, because we will do it with the Iraqi people.”

His dedication to serving people in need is shared by thousands of humanitarian workers around the world who sacrifice their time, their energy and, too often, their lives to help those in need in places where wars kill and maim and throw innocent victims into refugee camps or exile. Darfur, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda are just a few of these areas.

In recognition of their commitment, my family sought to have Aug. 19 — the date my father and his fellow workers died while helping destitute people — designated as World Humanitarian Day. After discussions with our foundation, Brazil, France, Japan, Sweden and Switzerland sponsored a U.N. resolution that was adopted by the General Assembly on Dec. 11, 2008. So for the first time, today is officially an occasion to reflect on the situation for humanitarians deployed in the field.

Sadly, already poor conditions for humanitarian workers in many places are deteriorating. Since 2006, attacks on aid workers have increased sharply, the Overseas Development Institute reports. The Darfur region in Sudan, Afghanistan and Somalia are the most dangerous places, accounting for more than 60 percent of violence against aid workers.

Last year was the worst in 12 years, with 260 humanitarian aid workers killed, kidnapped or seriously injured in violent attacks, according to the institute. This toll exceeds the number of victims among U.N. peacekeeping troops.

The Baghdad bomb attack that killed my father dramatically underscored a fact that humanitarian workers had dealt with since the early 1990s: The U.N. flag had ceased to be bulletproof. It no longer protected U.N. humanitarian workers as well as the staffs of nongovernmental organizations.

Before the 1990s, most wars in the developed world were proxy wars. There was a kind of tacit gentleman’s agreement whereby superpowers respected as much as possible the rights and the work of humanitarian personnel.

Now, this did not prevent the deaths of many humanitarians. But most casualties were those who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, caught in the crossfire. Rarely were aid workers targeted.

The situation, though, has changed dramatically. With the rise of nationalism since the fall of communism and the end of the proxy wars, humanitarian workers no longer benefit from protection, flimsy as it may have been before. Victims nowadays are often targeted.

We’re talking about the people who are serving on the front line for those of us who weep when we see children on TV crying beside mothers who have been killed by mortar fire — and believe that something must be done to help these victims and others like them.

Humanitarian workers are the unsung heroes of our time. They are not recognized as such. Yet consider their efforts, seeking to persuade warlords to let them help innocent civilians who are facing heat, cold, disease and other threats.

They never have the money and staff to fully respond to demands. They get up every morning knowing the enormousness of the task ahead of them, carrying on despite the gnawing feeling that whatever they attempt will always be a drop in the ocean. They can help, their efforts can and do save lives, but these workers are aware that their actions amount to little more than a Band-Aid on some of the world’s worst problems.

The reality of their tasks would make any of us despair. Not them.

As a humanitarian worker once told me: “We have no right to despair when we see that people who have lost everything, even their family, still have hope.”

It is high time for the international community to face its responsibilities and stop hiding behind humanitarian action. The world must stop using humanitarian efforts as a fig leaf. It can no longer avoid action while putting its conscience at rest by sending humanitarian actors into the killing fields. There are lives at risk.

And on this day, because of their courage, dedication, generosity and humility, humanitarian workers deserve our respect. We should not only praise their work but also remind the world that we must protect them, that we must impress on warlords that if they have any humanity left, they should protect and assist these workers. We must remind the world that humanitarian workers are neutral and help those in need, whatever their color, race, religion or political beliefs. They deserve our efforts and our thanks.

Last month, while I was visiting my family in southeastern Afghanistan, my mobile rang. I didn’t dare answer it.

I recognised the number — it was a colleague I work with at the World Food Programme (WFP) office in Kabul — but I couldn’t risk being overheard speaking to her in English.

Most of my relatives in Paktia province don’t know that I work for the United Nations. I tell them I run a private business — the same story I give to my neighbours in Kabul. The truth could put us all in danger.

I’ve never programmed the numbers of my international colleagues into my mobile phone because I don’t want someone to find them there if I’m searched at a roadblock. I leave my work phone behind when I travel to the south to visit relatives and friends.

None of this is unusual. Many of my Afghan colleagues at WFP do the same things, and some take even more precautions against the risks we face just coming to work every day.

There are people here who believe that working with non-Muslims is forbidden. Some are willing to use violence to enforce this belief, and may not differentiate between someone working for a foreign military force and someone working for a humanitarian agency.

The gap between rich and poor is also an issue. Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries on Earth, and some people assume that those of us working for international agencies are wealthy — which could make us and our relatives targets for kidnappers seeking ransom.

There was a time, not so long ago, when a UN job was something people would be eager to show off. A position like mine would bring prestige and social status.

But for me and for so many of my colleagues, our motivation is something much deeper, and it inspires us to face the risks that now accompany the work we do.

I look around and see a country that desperately needs development, stability and growth. In 30 years of war, we were kept separate from the world. Afghanistan now needs continuous engagement with the international community to repair the damage done. It also needs people with skills and education to build Afghanistan a better future.

I feel a sense of responsibility to help my country grow. My work at WFP is one way of facing up to that responsibility and the challenges that go along with it. Not only are we feeding more than eight million people, we are also rehabilitating irrigation canals and feeding children through our school meals programme; laying the groundwork for sustained recovery and development.

Today is the first annual World Humanitarian Day, which honours the dedication of the many thousands of aid workers around the world who have devoted themselves to humanitarian service. We remember especially our colleagues who have lost their lives while bringing assistance to others.

Here in Afghanistan I am reminded every day that the places where humanitarian needs are greatest are often the places where we face the greatest dangers in meeting those needs. I, for one, am determined to continue the fight against hunger in Afghanistan.

The announcement that the United Nations has a record $4.8bn funding gap for its 2009 aid programmes may not strike some observers as news. For the last two decades, in particular, the UN has lurched from one financial crisis to another. Although the size of the latest shortfall is unprecedented, the basic problem is that the world’s politicians have consistently failed to stump up the resources that the UN needs to fulfil the tasks that they demand of it or to set up a system of effective managerial oversight and planning in the organisation.

The current global recession has clearly put pressure on the aid budgets of all donor countries and the UN’s humanitarian assistance budget has faced two recent unexpected calls on its resources. Last December the UN’s world food programme announced that the spike in food prices meant that it was struggling to meet its commitments to feed 49 million people in 12 of the world’s most hunger-stricken countries. Warehouses for some of its most critical operations were running out of food and it was planning to cut rations, including to Zimbabwe and Ethiopia. More recently, the Pakistani army’s offensive against Taliban militants has caused more than two million people to flee their homes, causing a ten-fold increase in needs in the country.

The UN’s emergency relief co-ordinator John Holmes said that he had received less than half the $9.5bn sought for humanitarian work this year. “It is clear that the global recession puts pressure on the aid budgets of all donor governments, but of course it puts immeasurably more pressure on crises-stricken people in poor countries,” he added.

The problem is one of political will rather than lack of money. The UN funds its operations through a mixture of assessed and voluntary contributions by member states. Its specialised agencies depend on a combination of these sources to fund their operations. The regular budget now only accounts for around 10% of total expenditure, with agencies relying on voluntary contributions for the rest, which makes the process of budgeting extremely difficult.

In 1994 the entire UN emergency peacekeeping and humanitarian aid budget was around $4bn – about the size of the New York fire brigade’s. However, even then the United States government was complaining about the UN’s “astronomical costs” and withholding funds in protest. The following year, it unilaterally cut its contributions and forced the rest of the world to agree a cap on its contributions. Since then, peacekeeping costs have more than tripled, but the UN’s regular budget has completely failed to keep up, which has led to a constant round of alarmist-sounding financial appeals ever since.

The UN has faced similar problems throughout its history, although on a lesser scale. There were disputes over how to pay for its first big peacekeeping operation – in Congo – in 1970, and the UN had to issue bonds to tide it through. In those days, it was the Soviet Union who headed the list of defaulters, withholding money in protest at its policy difference with the rest of the UN general assembly.

By the 1980s the pattern had been reversed and it was the Reagan administration in the US that had adopted a policy of “withholding” its contributions as a form of exerting political leverage. The US deliberately underpaid its dues, withdrew its support entirely from one UN aid agency and delayed other payments as a means of creating financial crises within the organisation. Although most of Reagan’s successors adopted a more constructive approach, hostility to the UN had by then become an article of faith in the US Republican party, which have continued their campaign of financial disruption in Congress and the Senate.

By choking off funds at critical junctures these greatly exacerbated the problems faced by UN peace-keeping missions in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina and so turned many of their criticisms of the UN into self-fulfilling prophecies. Even today the big operations in Darfur and the Democratic Republic of Congo remain grossly under-resourced. The hollowness of Republican attacks on the UN’s supposed “waste and inefficiency” have also been highlighted by the mind-boggling costs of US operations in Iraq and now Afghanistan.

While President Obama has reversed the entirely counter-productive approach of his immediate predecessor, any serious attempt at UN reform needs to address the issue of financing in a more systematic way. The current set-up probably ends up generating far more waste and inefficiency since it forces each agency to compete for short-term funding, which encourages inter-agency turf-wars and militates against long-term planning in the UN system as a whole. It would cost around 1% of the money thrown at western banks in the last six months to bridge the current humanitarian deficit. Yet politicians will continue to play a game of cynical brinkmanship over where the money should come from, confident that it will be the UN itself that gets blamed for the resulting deaths and human misery.

The new commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, announced: “The Afghan people are at the center of our mission. In reality, they are the mission.” The four-star general was wearing military fatigues, but his wording sounded civilian. Indeed, when President Obama explained in March how the United States plans “to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” he ordered a “civilian surge” in Afghanistan. But make no mistake: The civilian part of the coalition operations here is subservient to the military arm, and the two are known together as an “integrated approach.”

The problem with this approach is that when military structures perform or oversee civilian tasks, the nonmilitary humanitarian work often gets politicized and militarized, and the difference between the two is blurred. If executed as planned, the “civilian surge” may worsen the situation here.

Integrating more civilians into military structures means further militarizing what has traditionally been humanitarian work. This is not in the interest of the Afghan people, who expect security from coalition forces and assistance from civilian aid agencies.

The main destination of this “surge” will be the U.S.-led provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs), whose performance in Afghanistan has been criticized by humanitarian groups on the ground: One aid worker from a European nongovernmental organization said they behave like “Humvees in a china shop.”

While working in the eastern city of Jalalabad last year, I heard many tales that amounted to such porcelain-breaking. The main victims were the communities the PRTs were seeking to help. An Afghan working for an Asian NGO recounted how 15 Humvees entered their compound unannounced and the uniformed “farenjee” (Afghan for “foreigners”) began conducting quick medical examinations — 45 seconds per patient — while photographing the process to document their outreach. (After complaints from the NGO, the Americans said they spent 105 seconds per patient, not 45.) There was the time that armed, uniformed Americans arrived at an orphanage, I was told, to distribute pencils and notebooks. In the process, the Americans terrified the female employees of the orphanage and the young children. An Afghan doctor from an American NGO told me his concerns about the welfare of communities where the PRTs distribute medicines from their Humvees: The labels are in English or Urdu, he noted, not Pashto, the language spoken in the region.

I visited Jalalabad again in May. The aid agency I work for, the International Rescue Committee, continues to implement programs there, but even now the ever-deteriorating security environment means we mostly have to rely on our trusted staff of Afghans. I did get to visit the American PRT in Jalalabad, where I was received by a senior civil affairs officer. He told me and an Afghan colleague of mine that Americans were no longer going out to villages uninvited. I suggested that the danger still existed for locals contacted by the PRTs — these Afghans could be branded collaborators. But the officer saw no problem. “Our presence forces them to make a choice: Either they support the government or they support the Taliban,” he said. And he added, “It takes a little bit of courage if you want to be free; freedom does not come free.”

My Afghan colleague later told me of recent incidents in which a mullah was killed in Chaparhar, apparently for working with government and coalition forces, and another mullah was decapitated in Khogyani for allowing his two sons to serve in the Afghan National Army, which was trained by the U.S.-led coalition.

Contact with the foreign troops, it seems, does not come free, either.

The PRT in Jalalabad has not had significant run-ins with nongovernmental organizations over the past year, but problems persist. Staff changes are frequent, and the handovers are poor, so Afghans watch the civilians who are arriving continually try to reinvent the wheel. I am confident that the civil affairs officer I spoke with and his colleagues from the National Guard have the best of intentions, but theirs is a mission impossible. The PRTs’ directive to “win the hearts and minds” — known as WHAM — and to implement “quick-impact projects” is better suited for charity handouts than a strategy for reconstruction and development.

Simply put, PRTs are a military tool attempting to perform civilian tasks. Inherently, they undermine the necessary distinction between the development objectives of humanitarian aid workers and the political-military objectives of coalition forces.

Relief and development work is more effectively done by experienced and independent aid agencies, working in partnership with the communities they serve. Staff members at the main NGOs in Afghanistan are mostly national (99 percent of IRC staff is Afghan) and know the local languages and culture. As such, they do not require expensive protection. They are also experienced in aid delivery. Most NGOs have been working with Afghans for many years and are committed to long-term stabilization and recovery.

Civilians in Afghanistan are caught between the Taliban and coalition forces. Humanitarian groups cannot be “force multipliers” or “post-battle cleanup” teams; they are the only ones with enough impartiality to provide assistance to the Afghan people. And for the aid community there is no question: The Afghan people are definitely “our mission.”

Even before the explosion Tuesday at the Pearl Continental Hotel killed at least 16 people in Peshawar, Pakistan was at the center of global attention. Yet for all the concern about terrorism, the world has been stunningly indifferent to the plight of the more than 2.4 million people who have fled the Swat Valley, where the Pakistani army is for the first time seriously attacking the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

If the internally displaced Pakistanis are not properly cared for, public opinion, which has shifted dramatically in recent weeks to support the offensive against the Taliban, could once again turn in support of compromise. Last week, the Taliban launched a series of devastating suicide attacks to both divert security forces and cower public opinion. The truck bomb Tuesday night in Peshawar, northwestern Pakistan’s provincial capital, reportedly injured 70.

The mass exodus from the battle zone to the southern plains has been the largest and fastest displacement of people since the genocide in Rwanda 15 years ago, U.N. officials say. Most of the displaced fled the Swat Valley in just two to three weeks last month.

While the government response has been mixed, ordinary Pakistanis have reacted en masse, loading up trucks in Karachi and Lahore with wheat, sugar, electric fans and bedding and sending them north to towns such as Mardan in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), the center of the crisis. Yet their efforts seem meager next to the enormity of the humanitarian disaster.

President Obama seems to be the only world leader concerned about the displaced civilians. The United States allocated $110 million and then an additional $200 million after Obama’s special envoy Richard Holbrooke assessed the situation last week.

Holbrooke castigated Europe for its lack of support and then sought to raise funds in the Arab world, which has not responded to the Pakistanis’ plight. Islamabad says that no European or Muslim Arab country has sent any major aid.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has warned that the United Nations may be forced to cut all its services, including food supplies, by July if its appeal for $543 million in emergency aid goes unmet. After nearly a month, donor countries have pledged only 20 percent of that. The International Committee of the Red Cross — the only aid agency working with civilians wounded from the fighting and with those civilians who have remained in the destroyed towns of Swat — seeks $38 million, which would double its Pakistan budget for this year.

Strategically, much is at stake. The fighting in Swat is not just against extremism but for the hearts and minds of future generations. “Pakistani public support for the campaign against the Taliban and help to the [internally displaced] could dissipate fast if international aid is not forthcoming,” a senior U.N. official told me. “Moreover, dissatisfied [displaced civilians] could become targets for recruitment by the Taliban and al-Qaeda.”

Already, police here have caught more than 50 Taliban adherents among the displaced, either hiding or trying to coerce youngsters into becoming suicide bombers. Worryingly, among the many secular Pakistani charities working here are extremist organizations such as Falah-i-Insaniat, as the Lashkar-i-Taiba militant group that carried out the massacre in Mumbai last year is now known. Falah-i-Insaniat also supports the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Such groups — which are heavily funded by extremist sympathizers abroad — are not likely to run out of money soon.

The humanitarian situation is bleak: Only about a tenth of the displaced are living in proper refugee camps. The rest have been taken in by relatives or locals and are living in private back yards, homes, fields, mosques and school buildings. This amazing public generosity and concern are part of traditional Pashtun culture, but they cannot last indefinitely. While Pashtuns are the major ethnic group in the region, the Taliban — whose followers are largely Pashtun themselves — has sought to denigrate and destroy traditional Pashtun culture.

The U.N. World Food Program has devised an innovative system to feed those displaced who are living outside the camps. It has set up 25 “humanitarian hubs” within walking distance of most of the people, and families who have registered with the government can pick up supplies.

“We bring food to where the people are, instead of people coming to where the food is,” says Wolfgang Herbinger, head of the World Food Program in Pakistan. “But we will run out of food in a few weeks if pledges are not made now.” The program is feeding 2.1 million people and is 60 percent short of its estimated costs to buy more food.

The fresh thinking in placing such hubs where other aid agencies provide electric fans, cooking utensils and other supplies could also prove useful in war zones in Afghanistan, where direct civilian aid is lacking.

The real battles this summer against the Taliban and al-Qaeda will be fought in Pakistan as much as in Afghanistan. By refusing to see this humanitarian crisis as an exercise in winning hearts and minds, however, the world seems to be sleepwalking its way to defeat.

Almost every day the news out of Pakistan offers evidence of growing support for military action against the Taliban in Swat, and growing antipathy ­towards the Taliban itself. The rightwing media, which had urged the government to make peace deals, is falling over itself in praise of military advances.

But straightforward approval for military action is not the whole story. An article in one of Pakistan’s papers a few days ago reported that tribesmen in Upper Dir had besieged 200 Taliban and killed a number in response to the Taliban’s bombing of a mosque. The newspaper cited this as further evidence of growing anti-Taliban sentiment. There is no reason to doubt the tribesmen’s genuine anger – yet near the end of the article there was a telling admission that cannot be left out of the picture: a tribal elder said that allowing the Taliban to stay was asking for trouble as it would invite a military offensive that they ­certainly didn’t want.

This is where the story of wholehearted support for the military ­offensive breaks down. The army’s ­success has come at a horrific cost: there are estimated to be 2.5 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Pakistan. Who can blame the tribesmen of Upper Dir for taking up arms to prevent the army from adding their families to the swelling numbers of IDPs? The ­editorials of relief and approval about the army’s decision to “finally” do what is ­necessary contain the implicit message that the suffering of the 2.5 million is the price that must be paid. Around the world, leaders and opinion-makers have reached the same conclusion.

But what of the 2.5 million? When their numbers were less than half that amount – just a few weeks ago – the IDP camps could house less than 15% of them. The rest had to rely on the kindness of relatives and the even more extraordinary kindness of strangers. Families with roofs over their heads have been taking in large numbers and sharing what little they have. Their ­generosity is shaming, particularly when placed against the horrifying indifference of the rest of the world – a world that for months urged the Pakistan ­government to send its army into Swat and surrounding areas.

Yesterday nine major aid agencies – ActionAid, Cafod/Caritas, Care, Concern Worldwide, Islamic Relief, Merlin, Oxfam, Save the Children, World Vision – issued a press release to say their aid projects face ­closure due to a shortage of funds. Oxfam will have to shut down its programme to assist 360,000 people if more funding doesn’t arrive by next month. The United Nations is faring no better – its $543m appeal has only received $138m so far. The United ­Kingdom has given only 1.6% of the amount the UN requires.

A change in attitude is needed urgently; if humanitarian grounds aren’t reason enough, consider the fact that refugee camps are prime targets for those trying to radicalise the disaffected. When the Pakistani film-maker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy was in the IDP camps earlier this year she found the young boys who make up such a large population of the camps equally split between those who support the army and those who support the Taliban. A vital “hearts and minds” battle is being waged in the camps, where groups such as the extremist Jamaat-ud-Dawa (linked to the Mumbai attacks) have been very visible in giving aid.

Many in Pakistan who still oppose military action are likely to claim that “the west” is pressurising the army to kill and displace its own people, uncaring of the suffering it causes. Time now for “the west” to show a different face to those who are desperate for assistance, and will not forget where it comes from.

In the Gaza Strip, over one month on from the end of the conflict, tens of thousands of people are still struggling to rebuild their lives. We in the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, supported by large donations from the British public, mounted a massive response during the conflict with thousands of staff and volunteers delivering medical care, clean water and food. These unsung humanitarian heroes got to work as soon as fighting began, often risking their own lives, and haven’t stopped since.

Throughout my time in the region I have asked myself how our organisation can get the people of Gaza back on their feet and to live a life free of fear? The simple answer is that we cannot. This is not a job for aid agencies alone. Humanitarian action is vital, but insufficient to resolve the crisis. Ordinary Gazans have struggled under 18 months of restrictions, making daily life almost impossible – access to healthcare, petrol, electricity, secure food supplies – things we take for granted.

Next week in Sharm el-Sheikh politicians and leaders from around the world will come together to discuss the reconstruction of Gaza: but how do you rebuild Gaza? No building materials are allowed in, so no work has started on the 10,000 new houses that will be needed, nor on repairs to vital facilities such as the hospital. As one father said: “Cement alone is not enough. What use to rebuild if we don’t have a guarantee of peace and safety?”

His words struck home as we found a dozen large cement trucks in a builder’s yard, all turned over on their sides and smashed, tank tracks still visible in the sand. Any hope of rebuilding seems a distant dream.

I talked to two families who preferred to live crouching under the rubble of their former homes. They had lost four family members, as well as their subsistence farming business across the border, now beyond reach.

The saddest sight was Samouni Street, home to the extended family of the same name, and now a pile of smashed concrete. Three small girls told us a heartrending story of terror and death: troops moved them out of their houses; their new shelter was bombed; a brother was run over by a tank; and a mother decapitated, her daughter left sitting by the body.

The task of reconstruction is daunting and the magnitude of the work cannot be underestimated. However, the truth is that efforts to rebuild Gaza can only succeed if accompanied by credible political steps to resolve the crisis.

It is not enough to just go back to the way things were before the conflict. What is needed is sustainable economic development; but this will be possible only if political steps prepare the ground. The first and most urgent measure should be to end the isolation of Gaza, particularly the restrictions on the movement of people and goods. In Israel, the targeting of civilian areas must also end.

The role of politicians and world leaders and the role of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement must not be confused. However, we share a common goal that can be reached only if we all work together, so that the delivery of humanitarian aid is complemented by the commitment of all involved in bringing about lasting peace.

Our mandate requires us to provide aid on the basis of need, and need alone, without recourse to ideology, politics or difference. But from political actors an honest and courageous peace process is required: to stop the destruction of thousands of civilian lives and to enable people to rebuild their communities and live with dignity. We will continue to fulfil our mandate. I urge the politicians and world leaders to fulfil theirs.

While world leaders gathered here to unleash soothing words on the financial tsunami swamping their economies, the daring “responsibility to protect” doctrine adopted by U.N. members three years ago was being buried in the killing fields of eastern Congo.

For the sake of your bank account, hope that the international community can protect dollars, euros and yen more successfully than it protects the lives and safety of people who happen to live in failed or rogue states.

In three years, “never again” has become “sorry about that.” Humanitarian intervention — proudly proclaimed as a universal mission by Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and other Third Way leaders and eventually adopted at the 2005 U.N. summit — has fallen into serious disrepair.

The slaughter, looting and forced removal of defenseless Congolese civilians around the city of Goma this month — even though they were theoretically under the protection of 17,000 U.N. peacekeepers — are grim testimony to the consequences of making righteous-sounding promises without thinking enough about the means to carry them out. The money men and women of the Group of 20 should take note.

So should the incoming Obama administration, which will have to fashion a new basis for the use of force abroad for a Democratic Party that has been divided by that issue since the Vietnam War.

The responsibility of the world’s nations to act together to protect citizens against massive human rights abuses by their own governments was shaped by Clinton, Blair and Kofi Annan out of the sickening failure to prevent genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and the successful military campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo later in the decade.

Humanitarian intervention provided Democrats with a unifying, and comfortable, middle ground from which to support military action abroad. Even U.S. cities, including Barack Obama‘s own Chicago, have adopted resolutions demanding that the responsibility to protect — known to its advocates as R2P — be made a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy.

But wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have stretched thin the military capabilities of the United States and its allies and made public opinion much more negative about intervention abroad in any guise.

Reams of pious words have been written or uttered, including by Obama, about the need to do something to halt the brutal ethnic conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan. But the failure of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and other regional organizations to intervene effectively there and now in eastern Congo may be the final nail in the coffin of R2P.

The civilians around Goma have been effectively abandoned by Congo’s dysfunctional national army, which more often victimizes them than protects them. They are caught between this feckless force and the far more efficient, better-armed and absolutely ruthless rebel movement led by Laurent Nkunda, who declared on BBC television last week that he intends to overthrow President Joseph Kabila.

Nkunda’s bid to go from regional warlord to national leader is covertly backed by neighboring Rwanda. Kabila has the support of Angola, which may have already secretly provided troops to the Congolese army. This conflict could erupt into an international crisis about the time that Obama is being sworn into office.

If it does, there will be plenty of blame to go around. Alan Doss, the adept U.N. special representative in eastern Congo, asked the Security Council on Oct. 3 for an increase of 3,000 troops. The blue-helmet force also needs relief from crippling rules of engagement that prevent it from defending civilians. But there has been no response by the council to Doss’s plea.

“What is happening in Goma is very damaging for the responsibility to protect. It could be a turning point,” says Bernard Kouchner, France’s foreign minister and one of the doctrine’s founders through his own humanitarian work. “We are witnessing the consequences of the arrival of nationalism on a continental level.”

That is, African governments accept humanitarian disasters rather than give foreign-led forces the support or freedom to carry out massive rescue operations. Kouchner, visiting Washington last week, also cited Zimbabwe as a tragic case in point.

He does find one ray of hope — the election of Obama, who has a direct family connection to Africa and promises a fresh start in U.S. foreign policy. “This could change everything,” Kouchner said, “and not only for Africa. You Americans have just held a world election. President Obama should not wait to show what that means.”

Biting the hand that feeds the world doesn’t seem like a great strategy. But at the United Nations, it’s normal. Last year, in a masterstroke, the UN General Assembly put Zimbabwe in charge of Sustainable Development. Yesterday, the world leaders who gathered at the UN in New York found a new excuse to rage against America, the world’s biggest aid donor, for having the cheek to try to save the West from recession.

“Using the bailouts of the international banking system,” the Chilean President said, “the scourge of hunger on the planet could have easily been eliminated.” She moved straight on to complain that “financial instability is threatening to generate a worldwide recession in which, as always, those most affected will be the world’s poorest”. Yup. The world is a complicated place. Sadly, you can’t keep economics and poverty in separate compartments.

Aid officials understandably worry that wealthy nations are falling behind in their promises. But they need to remember the terms of the deal that was done at the G8 three years ago. A doubling of aid to Africa was supposed to be contingent on clean government, and respect for democracy. That deal has not always been honoured. Last November, to take one example, Britain announced a new partnership with Uganda worth “at least” £700 million. This is the country whose President changed the country’s Constitution, so that he could stand for a third term. Who jailed the opposition leader. Who has been bankrolled by the West for so long that half of his Government’s budget is now foreign aid. It beggars belief that we are still pumping money into the Swiss bank accounts of his cronies. But we are, because we fear it will hurt the poor more if we withdraw. Or is it because it will hurt the aid industry?

The past few years have been boom years for aid, just as they have been for banking. The aid industry has not been entirely free of reckless lending, nor even from moral hazard. When we wrote off Nigeria’s debt in 2005, did we really want that country to think of debt as a free lunch? Did we know that it was about to become the world’s sixth-biggest oil producer? If so, how could anyone have thought that a $1 billion write-off was value for money? Or was value for money not an issue?

When I graduated in the 1990s, I thought that my career would be in aid. I studied development economics in America. I did stints at the World Bank and in Bangladesh. I left the aid industry because I feared it was just that – an industry weighed down by vested interests.

In Bangladesh I met Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank, which gave small loans to poor women to start businesses. It has since given eight million of the poorest people in the world the means to build and control their own lives. I naively offered some of my agency’s cash. But Yunus didn’t want my money. He didn’t need our staff. He clearly thought it would be corrupting. And I feared he was right.

Humanitarian aid is different. In situations of desperate extremity, long-term economic considerations, or the morality of a country’s leader, must be put aside. And humanitarian aid is relatively effective, because Oxfam, Save the Children and the World Food Programme distribute aid directly to those who need it. Yet only 16 per cent of Britain’s aid spending is humanitarian. Most of the £5 billion spent by our Department for International Development each year goes to governments. Some of it is working – in places such as Zambia and Mozambique – but some is not. We need to ask why. And if we can justify nearly doubling the budget to £8 billion by 2010.

In recent years, British aid spending has shifted away from infrastructure projects towards health and schools. Vaccinations against malaria and treatments for HIV have a demonstrable and dramatic impact. They are powerful emblems of our obligation to our fellow human beings. They also offer the real hope of eradicating disease – one of the Millennium Development Goals set by the UN in 2000.

But when it comes to eradicating poverty, there is only one answer. That is to create jobs. For that you need to create businesses, which need access to credit, non-punitive tax regimes and recognition of contract law. If those conditions do not prevail, we should be calling governments’ bluff rather than throwing in more cash.

The statistics on economic growth are staggering. The rise of China has lifted 400 million people out of poverty, more than have been helped by any aid programme. That is why the number of people below the poverty line is falling even while the world’s population is booming. The average rate of growth in poor countries is now outstripping that of rich ones.

China is transforming the landscape that has dominated aid thinking for decades. Its hunger for natural resources is pushing growth in many African countries to unprecedented levels. In 2006, the Chinese President hosted the largest Africa summit held outside the continent. He promised to double aid to Africa, cancel much of its debt and – crucially – to lift trade restrictions, which will do more to help than any other single measure

Fareed Zakaria, in his book The Post-American World, tells an instructive story about the Nigerian Government negotiating a $5 million loan for railway systems with the World Bank. Before the deal was done last year the Chinese Government stepped in and offered $9 billion to reconstruct the entire rail system with no strings attached. That means no impact assessments or capacity-building workshops. It cuts the rug from under the World Bank. It also suggests that Nigeria should no longer be among the top ten recipients of British aid.

We can do a great deal to save people from starvation and infectious diseases. But we need to demand the same stringency about aid that we do about other government spending.

More than 60,000 people may have died as a result of Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, and at least 1.5 million are homeless or otherwise in desperate need of assistance. The Burmese military junta, one of the most morally repulsive in the world, has allowed in only a trickle of aid supplies. The handful of United States Air Force C-130 flights from Utapao Air Base here in Thailand is little more than symbolic, given the extent of the need.

France’s foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, has spoken of the possibility of an armed humanitarian intervention, and there is an increasing degree of chatter about the possibility of an American-led invasion of the Irrawaddy River Delta.

As it happens, American armed forces are now gathered in large numbers in Thailand for the annual multinational military exercise known as Cobra Gold. This means that Navy warships could pass from the Gulf of Thailand through the Strait of Malacca and north up the Bay of Bengal to the Irrawaddy Delta. It was a similar circumstance that had allowed for Navy intervention after the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004.

Because oceans are vast and even warships travel comparatively slowly, one should not underestimate the advantage that fate has once again handed us. For example, a carrier strike group, or even a smaller Marine-dominated expeditionary strike group headed by an amphibious ship, could get close to shore and ferry troops and supplies to the most devastated areas on land.

The magic of this is that an enormous amount of assistance can be provided while maintaining a small footprint on shore, greatly reducing the chances of a clash with the Burmese armed forces while nevertheless dealing a hard political blow to the junta. Concomitantly, drops can be made from directly overhead by the Air Force without the need to militarily occupy any Burmese airports.

In other words, this is militarily doable. The challenge is the politics, both internationally and inside Myanmar. Because one can never assume an operation will go smoothly, it is vital that the United States carry out such a mission only as part of a coalition including France, Australia and other Western powers. Of course, the approval of the United Nations Security Council would be best, but China — the junta’s best friend — would likely veto it.

And yet China — along with India, Thailand and, to a lesser extent, Singapore — has been put in a very uncomfortable diplomatic situation. China and India are invested in port enlargement and energy deals with Myanmar. Thailand’s democratic government has moved closer to the junta for the sake of logging and other business ventures. Singapore, a city-state that must get along with everybody in the region, is suspected of acting as a banker for the Burmese generals. All these countries quietly resent the ineffectual moral absolutes with which the United States, a half a world away, approaches Myanmar. Nonetheless, the disaster represents an opportunity for Washington. By just threatening intervention, the United States puts pressure on Beijing, New Delhi and Bangkok to, in turn, pressure the Burmese generals to open their country to a full-fledged foreign relief effort. We could do a lot of good merely by holding out the possibility of an invasion.

The other challenge we face lies within Myanmar. Because a humanitarian invasion could ultimately lead to the regime’s collapse, we would have to accept significant responsibility for the aftermath. And just as the collapse of the Berlin Wall was not supposed to lead to ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, and the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein was not supposed to lead to civil war, the fall of the junta would not be meant to lead to the collapse of the Burmese state. But it might.

About a third of Myanmar’s 47 million people are ethnic minorities, who have a troubled historical relationship with the dominant group, the Burmans. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the heroine of the democracy movement, is an ethnic Burman just like the generals, and her supporters are largely focused on the Burman homeland. Meanwhile, the Chins, Kachins, Karennis, Karens, Shans and other hill tribes have been fighting against the government. The real issue in Myanmar, should the regime fall, would be less about forging democracy than a compromise between the Burmans and the other ethnic groups.

Of course, Myanmar is not the Balkans or Iraq, where ethnic and sectarian rivalries were smothered under a carapace of authoritarianism, only to erupt later on. Myanmar has suffered insurgencies for 60 years now, and may be ripe for a compromise under a civilian government. But neither can we be naïve. Just because Myanmar is not Yugoslavia doesn’t mean it isn’t like Russia; it is a mini-empire ruled by the ethnic-Burman military that could crumble into its constituent mountainous parts, especially as the democracy advocates have demonstrated little ability to run a country. Here in Mae Sot, a center for non-Burman ethnic dissident groups, complaints over the disorganization of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s movement are rife.

It seems like a simple moral decision: help the survivors of the cyclone. But liberating Iraq from an Arab Stalin also seemed simple and moral. (And it might have been, had we planned for the aftermath.) Sending in marines and sailors is the easy part; but make no mistake, the very act of our invasion could land us with the responsibility for fixing Burma afterward.

You don’t have to be cynical to do foreign policy, but it helps. A sigh of relief rose over the west’s chancelleries on Monday as it became clear that the Chinese earthquake was big – big enough to trump Burma’s cyclone.

To add to the relief, Beijing was behaving better than it has over past calamities. Since this might have been thanks to the west’s “positive engagement” with China’s dictators – even awarding them the Olympics – we could possibly take credit from the week’s tally of disaster. Sorry about that, Burma.

The Burmese cyclone of 11 days ago has already slid into liberal interventionism’s recycle bin, a purgatory called Mere Abuse. The regime’s refusal to aid some 1.5 million people reportedly facing starvation in the Irrawaddy delta has been subjected only to a “shock and awe” of adjectival assault.

Gordon Brown called the refusal “utterly unacceptable” (which means accepted). The aid minister, Douglas Alexander, professed himself “horrified”. The foreign secretary, David Miliband, used the words “malign neglect … a humanitarian catastrophe of genuinely epic proportions”. The UN secretary-general registered “deep concern and immense frustration”. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy found the inaction “utterly reprehensible”, and in Germany Angela Merkel found it “inexplicable”. George Bush declared the regime “either isolated or callous”. As Kipling would have said, if Kruger could be killed with words the Burmese regime would be dead and buried.

What is it about Burma? The very same politicians who spent the past seven years declaring the virtue of intervening wherever the mood took them are now, if not tongue-tied, hands-tied. Where are the buccaneers of Bosnia, the crusaders of Kosovo, the bravehearts who rescued Sierra Leone from its rebels, the Afghans from the Taliban and the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein? Where are the gallants who sent convoys into Croatia in 1992, to relieve human suffering in conditions of chaos and hostility?

Overnight they have become signed-up members of the “you-can’t-solve-all-the-world’s-problems” party. Those who claim the lunatic Afghan adventure “a good war” and remark that “we cannot just leave these people to their fate”, find no problem in “leaving” hundreds of thousands to die abandoned by their rulers in Burma. It is said to be a long way away, a matter of national sovereignty, very difficult, a harsh environment, not covered by international law.

The same legal experts who burned midnight oil trying to justify invading Iraq are now doing overtime to justify not sending relief into Burma. In 2005, the west’s leaders boasted the UN’s “responsibility to protect” principle, claiming that this “R2P” justified the security council in authorising action against negligent states. It would provide cover for intervention if, for instance, a government in Kabul or Islamabad or Khartoum was experiencing domestic massacres but were denying access to aid workers.

Legal opinion now asserts that this meant only cases of genocide, ethnic cleansing and “crimes against humanity”. It did not embrace deliberate negligence following a natural disaster, but rather acts of overt violence. The R2P doctrine is (I am told) “an immensely delicate instrument” that would be better tested somewhere other than Burma. Burma’s dead, in other words, are just the wrong sort of corpses.

All the UN’s fine print was not needed for a contested humanitarian intervention in Kosovo in 1998. It was not needed to topple the Taliban or Saddam Hussein when political retribution demanded it. Anyone who wants to help the Burmese within the law need only summon Lord Goldsmith from retirement. He does exonerations to order.

Regular readers know I do not favour inappropriate interventions in the affairs of foreign states. They usually breach the UN charter on national sovereignty without meeting any of the tests legalising such breaches, including the informal one that a breach must at least work.

Burma validates any breach. If ever so-called humanitarian intervention were justified, it is now. As many civilians may already have died as were lost in the entire 2004 tsunami, when 230,000 were unaccounted for. Over a million civilians are at risk as a direct result of decisions made by a dictatorial government that places pride and security ahead of the care of its people.

On the most optimistic estimates, only 30% have yet received any help at all. As the French veteran aid worker, Pierre Fouillant, of Comité de Secours Internationaux, reportedly said yesterday, “It’s like they are taking a gun and shooting their own people.”

Yet there are ships, planes, helicopters, supplies and doctors aplenty waiting offshore. They do not want to topple any regime. The American commander aboard the one relief plane allowed into Rangoon at the weekend offered three ships and two dozen helicopters, which could land supplies and leave Burmese territory for Thailand each day by nightfall. Burmese soldiers could be on the planes. He was sent packing.

I am not in Burma and am not an aid worker. For that reason I am ready to be convinced that there are logistical reasons why dump-and-run operations from ships offshore are impractical, even if Rangoon airport remains closed. I am less persuaded by the Pentagon’s reluctance to extend possibly hostile activities this far into south-east Asia, or by some aid agencies who value their relations with odious regimes too much to welcome unauthorised drops.

After days of hand-sitting and abuse-hurling, the thesis that “diplomatic pressure” is going to burst the dam of Burma’s hostility seems naive. I have read not one observer who believes this regime will admit aid workers, while many accept that it would be unlikely to contest a dump-and-run airlift under appropriate air cover. If the west refuses even to plan such an operation, it would be more honest to admit to doing nothing and stop counterproductive abuse of the regime.

What is sickening is the attempt to squeeze a decision not to help these desperate people into the same “liberal interventionist” ideology as validates billions of pounds on invading, occupying, destabilising, bombing and failing to pacify other peoples whose governments also did not invite intervention.

Offending national sovereignty is apparently fine when it involves oil, opium, Islam or a macho yearning to boast “regime change”. It is not to be contemplated when it is just a matter of saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

They are “cruel, power-hungry and dangerously irrational,” in the words of one British journalist. They are ” violent and irrational,” according to a journalist in neighboring Thailand. Our own State Department leadership has condemned their “xenophobic, ever more irrational policies.”

On the evidence of the past few days alone, those are all accurate descriptions. But in one very narrow sense, the cruel, power-hungry, violent and xenophobic generals who run Burma are not irrational at all: Given their most urgent goal — to maintain power at all costs — their reluctance to accept international aid in the wake of a devastating cyclone makes perfect sense. It’s straightforward: The junta cares about its own survival, not the survival of its people. Thus the death toll is thought to have reached 100,000, a further 1.5 million Burmese are at risk of epidemics and starvation, parts of the country are still underwater, hundreds of thousands of people are camped in the open without food or clean water — and, yes, if foreigners come to distribute aid, the legitimacy of the regime might be threatened.

Especially foreigners in large numbers, using high-tech vehicles that don’t exist in Burma, distributing cartons of rice marked “Made in the USA” or even “UNDP,” of course. All natural disasters — from the Armenian earthquake that helped bring down the Soviet Union to Hurricane Katrina, which damaged the Bush administration — have profound political implications, as do the aid efforts that follow them. The Burmese generals clearly know this.

Hence the “logic” of the regime’s behavior in the days since the cyclone: the impounding of airplanes full of food; the initial refusal to grant visas to relief workers or landing rights to foreign aircraft; the initial refusal to allow American (or, indeed, any) military forces to supply the ships, planes and helicopters necessary for the mass distribution of food and supplies that Burma needs. Nor is this simply anti-Western paranoia: The foreign minister of Thailand has been kept out, too. Even Burmese citizens have been prevented from taking food to the flood-damaged regions, on the grounds that “all assistance must be channeled through the military.” The result: Aid organizations that have workers on the ground are talking about the hundreds of thousands of homeless Burmese who may soon begin dying of cholera, diarrhea and other diseases. This isn’t logic by our standards, but it is logic by the standards of Burma’s leaders. Which is why we have to assume that the regime’s fear of foreign relief workers could even increase as the crisis grows, threatening the regime further.

If we fail to persuade the junta to relent soon — despite what I hope are assurances that Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders and the U.S. military will bring only food, not regime change, much as we all might like to see it — then we have to start considering alternatives. According to some accounts, the U.S. military is already considering a variety of options, including helicopter deliveries of food from ships and supply convoys from across the Thai border. The U.S. government should be looking at wider diplomatic options, too. The U.N. Security Council has already refused to take greater responsibility for Burma — China won’t allow the sovereignty of its client to be threatened, even at the price of hundreds of thousands of lives — but there is no need for any country to act alone. In fact, it would be a grave error to do so, since anything resembling a foreign “invasion” might provoke military resistance.

Unfortunately, the phrase “coalition of the willing” has been forever tainted — once again proving that the damage done by the Iraq war goes far beyond Iraq’s borders — but a coalition of the willing is exactly what we need. The French (whose foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, was a co-founder of Doctors Without Borders) are already talking about finding alternative ways to deliver aid. Others in Europe and Asia might join, too, along with some aid organizations. The Chinese should be embarrassed into contributing, asked again and again to help: This is their satrapy, after all, not ours.

Think of it as the true test of the Western humanitarian impulse: The international effort that went into coordinating relief after the 2004 tsunami has to be repeated, but in much harsher, trickier, uglier political circumstances. Yes, we should help the Burmese, even against the will of their irrational leaders. Yes, we should think hard about the right way to do it. And, yes, there isn’t much time to ruminate about any of this.

We were four men of a certain age, sitting above the pews at the altar end of Great St Mary’s Church in Cambridge, late last Friday afternoon.

The doors were open to the sunshine outside and to King’s College opposite, and the occasional cultural speculator would look in and then, usually, wander off again. We speakers said what we liked. The audience asked what they liked. And, given that the Burmese disaster was relevant to our discussion, we might as well have been on the Moon.

The first speaker argued that we had to be very careful, we in the West, about assuming that we knew what other peoples wanted, or that we could give it to them – unless there was some kind of regional or local connection, we could rarely intervene to good effect. The second speaker, also an academic, took the line that given “our” history of rapacity in the Third World, our intervention was neither wanted nor needed, and we should butt out. I burbled on in the warmth about these being counsels of despair, but aware that my own arguments for interventionism looked rather more exotic and unrealistic than back in, say, 2002, before Iraq.

Meanwhile, on Earth, the Burmese junta – which does not permit such discussion – was preventing outside aid reaching its own people hit by Cyclone Nargis, failing itself to act on their behalf, refusing to take calls from the UN and all the while finding the necessary manpower to police a rigged constitutional referendum. The result is likely to be that tens of thousands of people have died as a consequence of deliberate governmental neglect, to add to those killed directly by the cyclone.

It was easy to understand the impulse that led David Cameron to agree with some Americans, that aid ought to be dropped to needy Burmese in defiance of their dreadful Government. For some reason Mr Cameron’s deadline for the junta’s co-operation with the international community was today, though he is in no position to set one. And despite there being a wartime SOE-type romance in dropping supplies into occupied territory, it is hard to see how such assistance can benefit people on the ground. Even so, I applaud the sentiment.

Not everyone does. There has been, right from the first day of this crisis, a wing of the anti-interventionist movement that has sought to shift blame for the aid debacle from the Burmese generals to the West in general and America in particular. I first heard it from some professor interviewed on the Today programme, and have read it several times since. The junta (this apologia suggests) is just paranoid, this paranoia is justified because of the West’s hostility, and therefore it makes sense from the Burmese point of view not to admit foreign aid workers, who might be CIA spooks.

In a way I prefer this adamantine daftness to the slippery arguments of those who have used the Burmese disaster to attack liberal interventionism, while suggesting that in this particular instance there are grounds for some kind of uninvited action. Their reasoning runs like this: Burma’s crisis is different and more urgent than was the case in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo, because of the immediacy of the humanitarian disaster. So the stakes are clear, and whereas it would be illegal to remove the Burmese junta, it is somehow legal to invade Burmese air space and docks to deliver and defend supplies. Presumably (though the anti-interventionist interventionists don’t spell it out) we would protect our aid convoys from attack, so the possibility of military action is implicit.

But they must secretly know, as we all do, that it’s too late. It’s too late again. A country may, of course, be hit by a natural disaster, no matter what the ideological nature of its government. But the way it reacts to a catastrophe will be entirely consistent with its form of administration. For several decades Burma has had a Government whose authoritarianism and isolationism has made it almost inevitable that the consequences of any natural disaster would be magnified by its craziness. We have all known this because we watched on our screens just eight months ago as freedom protests were suppressed.

True, after the Second World War there grew up a kind of admiration of the mobilisatory capacities of totalitarian governments. Stalin had saved Soviet heavy industry from the Germans by moving it physically from Belorussia to the Urals. The command economy had proved its worth by building gazillions of T34 tanks. By the late 1950s and 60s this was translated into praise for the Sputniks and Gagarins of the Soviet space effort and in the 70s into warm words about Cuba’s health system.

It was a hallucination. The democracies had done as good a job in war production as the dictatorships, and were to prove massively superior at technological innovation. By the late 1970s it was becoming clear that the only thing real communism – or any totalitarianism, including theocracy – was good at, was repression.

The Burmese Government acts the way it does not because of any action by the West, but because it inhabits a fearful, but uncontested world. Its assumptions cannot be tested by a free press, let alone challenged by alternative political parties. The only sounds are its own pronouncements; it exists in an echo chamber in which it hears its own voice and imagines that it is listening to the authentic voice of Burma. Utterly isolated from the real needs of the ordinary Burmese – who dare not express their desires – it nevertheless identifies its own hold on power with the abstract interests of the people. The junta imagines it is the people, and therefore imagines that those who oppose it are against the people. It will deny, to the last moment, that there is a disaster, and when forced to acknowledge it, will blame outsiders and traitors.

We see this from Robert Mugabe, who has probably already planned the means of his “victory” in the second round of the Zimbabwean presidential election. If he is permitted to get away with this, then the Zimbabwean catastrophe – whatever its cause – is only a matter of time.

How often do we need it proved? The issue isn’t whether we have the right to intervene – because the consequences of vicious dictatorships usually catch up with us in time – but whether or not, practically, we can. Everything else is a polite conversation in a sunny church.

It is over a week since Cyclone Nargis brought devastation to Burma, and its people are in mourning – although there has been no official condolence from the ruling junta. Now, everyone is pointing the finger at Senior General Than Shwe, his ministers and army leaders – first, for failing to issue advanced warning of the cyclone to those living in the Irrawaddy delta region, and second, for responding so slowly to the devastation.

Most shocking, the regime stalled aid packages coming into the country and delayed issuing visas to international aid and medical workers. While the rest of the world has been eager to help, Burma’s generals are only interested in consolidating their power.

And so, only a week after tens of thousands were killed, while 1.5 million remain hungry and homeless, the regime went ahead with its planned referendum to approve a new constitution at the weekend. It is the first vote in the country since 1990, when the detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy won a landslide victory, which the military ignored. The regime insists that the new constitution will pave the way for democratic elections in two years’ time.

But critics and international observers have dismissed the referendum as nothing more than a political ruse to legitimise the military’s grip on power. They note that the proposed constitution reserves a hefty chunk of parliamentary seats for the army and junta supporters, and effectively bars opposition leaders – including Suu Kyi – from holding office.

On Saturday, exactly a week after the deadly storm, Than Shwe came out to vote accompanied by his wife – the couple had not been seen in public since the cyclone – defying the opinion of the international community as well as his own citizens. Clearly, the regime is manipulating a positive result. Many voters spoke of being handed ballot papers that had already been filled in with a tick, indicating approval of the draft constitution. They also complained that the referendum was not free and fair, saying they were watched closely by officials as they cast their ballots, and in some cases were advised how to vote.

A few days ago, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, expressed his concern about the welfare of the people of Burma and suggested that it would be more prudent to focus on relief efforts. Now, a population that has suffered under a dictatorship for decades must face both this natural disaster and Than Shwe’s scheme to prolong his rule.

The deeply superstitious Burmese people believe that the cyclone was divine intervention to disrupt the referendum and undermine the stability of the regime. Certainly, the heavens opened and the winds lashed the country – but the generals appear to have escaped. However, divine intervention or otherwise, the cyclone has changed the country’s political dynamics and disrupted the regime’s constitutional process. It has revealed Than Shwe and his regime’s true colours to the world.

The current calamity is unsustainable. Political unrest and growing calls for humanitarian intervention will continue to haunt Burma’s incompetent military leaders. It maybe wishful thinking to suggest that Than Shwe’s days are numbered, but it is a hope widely shared among the victims of cyclone. His regime will not remain in power forever but people are paying a high price. The Burmese do not want ballot papers but food, shelter and freedom from the tyrant.

Burma’s intensifying agony is confronting the “international community” with further uncomfortable evidence of its own impotence in the face of man-made humanitarian disaster. As if Rwanda, Darfur and Zimbabwe were not shaming enough, the lethal blocking by Burma’s generals of most external aid for the victims of Cyclone Nargis is another chastening reminder of the limitations imposed by status-quo politics and national self-interest.

Burma’s internal opposition, outside pressure groups and individuals, desperate to prevent a crisis becoming an epic catastrophe, are turning to revolutionary answers. Echoing Vladimir Lenin, they ask: “What is to be done?” And in the case of the All Burma Monks Alliance and the ’88 Generation student movement, the reply is insurrectionary.

“To save thousands of lives before it’s too late, we urge the UN and foreign governments to intervene in Burma immediately to provide humanitarian and relief assistance directly to the people of Burma without waiting for the permission of the military junta,” the opposition alliance said in statement. Individual countries need not wait for a UN go-ahead, either, they said. Just come now.

Similar calls for unilateral action have been heard in France and the US but so far lack official backing. Asked about using US forces to help the aid effort, as after the Asian tsunami, defence secretary Robert Gates said he “could not imagine” doing so without prior Burmese government agreement.

David Cameron predicted at the weekend that if the generals continued to make difficulties, “the case for unilateral delivery of aid by the international community will only grow stronger”. Britain’s Conservative opposition leader may partly be responding to grassroots pressure. John Moger, writing in yesterday’s Guardian letters page from the Tory heartlands of Eastbourne, said it was time to forget the UN. “Think big and send in the navy,” he urged. Fortunately for Cameron, such a decision is not (yet) his to make.

Despite or perhaps because of his fierce verbal criticism of the junta, David Miliband also risks accusations of ineffective posturing. Burma’s thwarted “saffron revolution” last autumn was his first big crisis as foreign secretary. It quickly became plain then that there was next to nothing Britain could do to prevent the ensuing military crackdown on the mass protests. But that did not stop Miliband, in a speech in Oxford in February, declaring that Britain and others have a duty to support pro-democracy “civilian surges” and oppose authoritarian regimes by all means at their disposal.

“There will be situations where the hard power of targeted sanctions, security guarantees and military intervention will be necessary,” Miliband said. “In extreme cases the failure of states to exercise their responsibility to protect their own civilians from genocide or ethnic cleansing warrant military intervention on humanitarian grounds.”

Former Labour minister Denis MacShane argues passionately that is exactly what is happening in Burma now. “By any definition there is a crime against humanity being committed by the Burmese junta against the Burmese people,” he said in a letter to Miliband. “When in Rwanda or Darfur governments did nothing to prevent the deaths of scores of thousands of their own people, we rightly called such action genocide. Are the Burmese generals guilty of anything less?”

Pressure is growing on Britain, current chair of the UN security council, to seek authorisation for tougher, collective action. But to the Brown government’s probable tacit relief, China and Russia, as in the crisis over Zimbabwe, can be counted on to block or veto any move towards direct intervention.

The democratically-challenged rulers of Moscow and Beijing fear a precedent. After all, if the UN moved to bypass and perhaps unseat Burma’s bosses, what might be the effect of such action on restless Tibetans, Uighurs or Chechens? Ironically, China, Burma’s biggest, most influential trade and business partner, is probably the only country that could force the generals to change tack without physically pushing them out of the way.

While direct western or other intervention in Burma currently appears unlikely, it is inaccurate to say that intervention never works – rather that as a tool of international statecraft, it is applied to the “wrong” sitautions at the “wrong” times. Tony Blair evolved a whole philosophy of uninvited humanitarian intervention – the Chicago doctrine – and saw it implemented to initially beneficial effect in Sierra Leone and East Timor. But the Blair approach, problematic in Kosovo and ineffective in Sudan, fell apart in the crucible of Iraq, leaving a legacy of nervousness about intervention in principle.

Despite Blair’s post-facto justification for the Iraq war – that it was morally right to save Iraq’s people from Saddam Hussein – Iraq and Afghanistan were, initially at least, primarily self-interested military-led operations that had little to do with saving lives, more with assuring an illusory “western security”. If this were not so, Blair would in all logic have supported intervention to protect Palestinians against their Israeli occupiers or North Koreans against their murderous rulers.

Opponents of US “war on terror” policy fear that recent, limited unilateral interventions, such as Israel’s bombing of a supposed nuclear reactor in Syria and US air strikes against Islamist militants deep inside Somalia, could yet presage another larger-scale convulsion – namely, a Bush administration attack on Iran. In such a situation, the White House would hardly worry about first gaining Tehran’s permission.

In other words, interventionism is too often mistaken in its priorities and misdirected in its targets. And thus are those who scorn the international will, such as Rangoon’s heartless generals, emboldened in their brutish defiance.

When a parent abuses or neglects a child, government steps in to offer protection. But who steps in when government abuses or neglects its people?

Nearly three years ago, the United Nations announced an answer to that question: It would. At a summit celebrating the organization’s 60th birthday, 171 nations agreed that they would intervene, forcefully if necessary, if a state failed to protect its own people. The action was seen as both a sign of remorse for the failure to stop genocide in Rwanda and a rebuke to the United States and its unilateral ways.

“I’m delighted that the responsibility to protect, a Canadian idea, now belongs to the world,” said Canada’s prime minister at the time, Paul Martin. “The United Nations will not find itself turning away or averting its gaze.”

Since then the United Nations has averted its gaze as Sudan’s government continues to ravage the people of Darfur. It has turned away as Zimbabwe’s rulers terrorize their own people. Now it is bowing to Burma’s sovereignty as that nation’s junta allows more than a million victims of Cyclone Nargis to face starvation, dehydration, cholera and other miseries rather than allow outsiders to offer aid on the scale that’s needed.

In light of America’s troubles in Iraq, the pendulum in the United States has swung toward multilateral solutions and international law. All three candidates to replace President Bush have promised to restore alliances and put more faith in allies.

But the stalemate in Burma, also known as Myanmar, shows how difficult it is to translate “responsibility to protect” into action. It’s hard to imagine a government more deserving of losing the national equivalent of its parental rights; yet it seems more likely that hundreds of thousands of people will die needlessly than that the United Nations will act.

Dr. Chris Beyrer, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has spent years in and around Burma, fighting the intransigence of the regime to help the Burmese people. What he has learned, as he said last week, is that “the regime does not have the interest of the people as its fundamental concern.” Almost all its actions before the storm and since can be understood in this light: The junta cares about its own survival, not the survival of its people.

So even before the devastating storm swept in around midnight May 2, the Burmese were vulnerable. One-third of children under 5 were undernourished. With 3 percent of government spending going to public health, compared with 40 percent to the military, there was a dearth of doctors and clinics. In many areas malaria and tuberculosis posed severe threats.

The government failed to warn people of the approaching storm and has failed to help them since. It apparently does not want to risk whatever benefit might redound to Western countries for deploying the “soft power” of assistance. Saturday it deployed its army northward, to beat and browbeat people to vote yes in a phony referendum intended to make military rule permanent, rather than southward, where 1.5 million people were homeless and 65 percent of territory was under water.

Yet when France reminded the United Nations of its “responsibility to protect,” China, Russia and their ever-reliable voting partner, Thabo Mbeki‘s South Africa, slammed the door. So tons of aid float just offshore as Burma’s generals sleep comfortably in their remote jungle capital and China’s rulers can proudly, once again, take credit for defending the principle of national sovereignty.

Meanwhile, the Burmese people themselves do not give up. Small teams of aid workers from persecuted dissident groups are making their way south, offering what little assistance they can, though soldiers at times confiscate their goods. And in the delta, one Burmese managed to inform a friend outside, “many people keep looking up to the sky — literally.” Ten days after the cyclone, they are waiting for helicopters, which for many will appear too late or not at all.

The soothsayers surrounding Than Shwe, the paranoid general at the apex of Burma’s monstrous military regime, are in high favour. Their prophecies of civil unrest followed by a great natural disaster swayed his decision three years ago to move the capital north to Naypyidaw (“abode of kings”), an isolated eyrie remote from storm-blasted Rangoon and the fetid sea of devastated or obliterated townships, bloated corpses and destitute survivors that the fertile Irrawaddy delta has become.

Naypyidaw was untouched by Cyclone Nargis. The only “damage” was to the telephone, on which Than Shwe was said to be unable to take calls all week, not even from Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General. A good omen in the generals’ eyes, this immunity is an awful omen for the stricken Burmese. Naypyidaw’s lucky escape can only reinforce the regime’s determination to put self- preservation first, even if this means that up to a million more people die, needlessly, denied access to readily available international relief.

The junta is not, of its own volition, going to let in anything like the volume of aid required, at the speed required, to prevent a natural disaster turning into a monstrous, and manmade, humanitarian catastrophe. It does not admit, perhaps not even to itself, the deadly truth. The official and implausibly precise toll has inched upward to 28,458 dead and 33,416 missing. Yet according to the army’s Irrawaddy divisional headquarters, the cyclone killed around 50,000 in or near Bogalay, where 142 villages were submerged; another 20,000 in Labutta; and at least 10,000 in Pyapon. Four out of 400 survived in Khaing Shwe Wa village; in hundreds more villages not a trace of life remains. Remoter areas cannot yet be reached, but in these three districts alone more than 700,000 are without shelter, food or corpse-free water; untreated wounds are turning septic, infant dysentery is rife, and cholera, already reported, could rapidly become epidemic.

The generals don’t want to know. At Thilawa port, rice for Bangladesh was loaded on to a container ship late last week and the regime insists that it will meet all its export commitments. The only rice released to victims, in handfuls, from the port’s warehouse was rotted by flood damage. The state media, parroting the lie that Burma is returning to normal, has switched to “reporting” massive turnout in Saturday’s constitutional referendum, which Than Shwe unconscionably refused to postpone – those soothsayers again, no doubt.

This constitution’s sole and unconstitutional purpose is to perpetuate the junta’s illegitimate rule and forever exclude Aung San Suu Kyi, the symbol of Burmese aspirations to democracy. Few Burmese have read it and fewer still dare to oppose it: the penalty is a three-year prison sentence.

Troops and trucks galore were available to police this anti-democratic farce, just as they were to beat the hell out of last year’s uprising; but there has been no mobilisation for disaster relief.

So far the world has confined itself to pleading with the junta, and pleading has got nowhere. The driblet of aid allowed is slowly becoming a trickle, but for thousands it is already too late, and for millions more this is nowhere near enough. What little has got in has been impounded or, in the case of trucks of emergency plastic sheeting delivered from neighbouring Thailand by the UN Commission for Refugees, just dumped near a pagoda close to the frontier. This refusal of international humanitarian aid is, the UN laments, “unprecedented”. Unprecedented – or almost unprecedented – decisions are called for.

Governments with the power to help must insist on doing so, with or without the junta’s co-operation – with the approval of the UN Security Council if they can, and without it if they must. Governments had the approval neither of Saddam Hussein nor the Security Council in 1991, when they airlifted aid to fleeing Kurds in northern Iraq. The idea that states can do what they please within their borders has been modified since 1945 by a growing acceptance that states have responsibilities as well as rights, and that gross violations of those responsibilities are an international concern. Forcing aid on the regime would be a risky venture; but to cite sovereignty as the reason why nothing can be done without its assent would be to let this foul regime get away with mass murder.

Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister and founder of Médecins Sans Frontières, has called on the Security Council to insist on humanitarian access to Burma. He invokes two principles: the “right to intervene” in catastrophic situations, accepted by the General Assembly in the 1990s; and the “responsibility to protect” victims of genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity. This advance in international law was unanimously endorsed by all UN member states at the UN’s 60th anniversary summit in 2005, The fact that many governments now regret that endorsement is testament to the power of the concept. In essence, it is about getting states to accept “help” to change their ways, implicitly backed by the threat of military intervention.

History is on Mr Kouchner’s side. This is an idea whose time has come, and Burma’s agony is a test of the UN’s moral and political authority.

Predictably, France is opposed by China, Russia and, with Zimbabwe in mind, by South Africa. China even had the gall to suggest that the Burma crisis is no worse than the French heatwave in 2003. Shamefully, the usual suspects are supported by Indonesia – whose experience of the 2004 tsunami taught it that every hour’s delay costs lives, but which demurs at “politicising” a “technical” matter.

Still more shamefully, the British Government, which chairs the Security Council this month, is sitting on the fence, muttering that the responsibility to protect was devised for terrible crimes, not terrible disasters, even though the disaster now unfolding is palpably attributable to criminal negligence on the junta’s part.

Mr Kouchner is undaunted. He has dispatched 1,500 tonnes of aid on the Mistral and insists that France will distribute it directly to the victims. Britain, Australia and the US should go where he leads, and plan to move in directly, if all else fails. Better that than impotently counting rice sacks in Thai warehouses. If the generals get the message that “no” will not be taken for an answer, they may decide to join what they can’t beat. And if not? Imposing aid is a messy business. Dying for lack of it is messier by far.

Exactly four years ago this month, a cyclone, the strongest in 30 years, hit Myanmar. A journalist, writing one month later in The Irrawaddy (a news magazine published by Burmese exiles), wondered how the country’s state-controlled news media could fail to make any mention of a typhoon that the United Nations said killed at least 140 people, sunk vessels and made an estimated 18,000 people homeless.

The journalist, Dominic Faulder, wrote that “a town of 100,000 could burn to the ground here and nobody would ever know about it.” Here, he concluded, is a country “where disasters don’t happen, officially.” For the people of Myanmar, this truth is more devastating — and its tragedy more lingering — than anything that nature may bring.

If information can flow as freely as nature’s elements, the consequences of many calamities — be they earthquakes, floods, droughts, hurricanes or storms — are manageable and even preventable. Absent such freedom in news and information, all “natural” disasters are ultimately man-made.

When the military junta in Myanmar refused on Friday to accept relief workers into the country, its actions underscored a terrible reality: the ruling generals view independent information as more dangerous to them than Cyclone Nargis, which may have killed 20,000 to 100,000 people and left up to a million people homeless. And for the Burmese people, a drought in information can be deadlier than the forces that despots seek to deny.

Catastrophes of this scale are inconvenient to governments of this peculiar character because they give aid agencies compelling arguments to be allowed to operate in even the most notoriously secretive of states. Once inside, relief workers can afford the world a glimpse of the poverty within the world’s most restricted borders.

In Myanmar, caught between the need to aid its people and the reflex to hide any suggestion of vulnerability, the junta has been consistent in its choice. After the tsunami of December 2004, Myanmar’s generals made the World Food Program wait two weeks before its workers could even visit the affected areas.

Four years later, Indian meteorologists were warning of Cyclone Nargis as early as April 26. As predicted, the cyclone made landfall in Myanmar on May 2 — the eve of World Press Freedom Day. The irony is worth noting because the tragedy wasn’t that India’s advisories fell on deaf ears. Rather, they were relayed to the gagged.

Myanmar has the worst conditions for press freedom and access to information in Southeast Asia. All broadcasting systems are state-owned and the largest newspapers are controlled by the government. The junta’s censorship of publications is so thorough (and deliberately slow) that daily papers do not exist. The Internet, too, is heavily restricted and monitored and foreign journalists are routinely denied visas into the country.

As a result, the rescue and relief efforts in Myanmar will inevitably continue to be tragic. By now it is plain that the junta’s uncompromising policies regarding the press and access to information are a source not only of political repression, but also of humanitarian emergency. Aid workers are not the only essential element for relief and recovery that the country’s callous leaders are denying their people.

Until free and reliable news and information become available in Myanmar, the Burmese will continue to suffer horrors that are literally untold.

Even before the devastating cyclone hit Burma at the weekend, the country was in desperate need of help. The government now says 22,000 people have died and 41,000 are missing, figures far higher than it originally admitted. The biggest problem will be obtaining access to affected areas. Burma’s government has long been suspicious of international aid agencies, and although it has accepted help from UN agencies already working there, their activities are tightly controlled.

Burma only receives around $3 per capita of international aid, far less than its neighbours: Vietnam receives $33 per capita, Cambodia $47 and Laos $63. This is a result of the international sanctions in place since the mid-90s. Some humanitarian agencies, such as Médecins Sans Frontières, have left the country, while the Red Cross has suspended its programmes due to government restrictions.

Burma used to be one of the largest rice exporters in the world, but decades of conflict and economic mismanagement by its reclusive military junta have pushed much of its population to the brink of starvation. According to the World Food Programme (WFP), one of the few international agencies allowed to operate in the country, 10% of the population does not receive enough food to meet its basic daily needs, and 30% lives under the absolute poverty line. This figure climbs to 70% in many rural areas.

It is extremely difficult for agencies to obtain permission to begin operations. Those allowed to do so must accept restrictions as to where they can work and have to submit their assessments, surveys and reports for clearance by the authorities. During the uprisings last autumn, the UN country team issued a statement highlighting the difficulties faced by the population daily. Although it drew exclusively on government statistics, this brought a furious rebuttal from the regime. It expelled the UN humanitarian coordinator and has since carried out a bureaucratic harassment of aid workers – delaying visa applications or refusing accreditation.

Countries such as Burma and North Korea, where the WFP also has a large programme, pose a real dilemma for humanitarian agencies about how far they should be prepared to accept such restrictions in the interests of the people they are trying to help. When Afghanistan was ruled by the Taliban, some humanitarian agencies, such as Oxfam, suspended their programmes rather than comply with the Taliban’s anti-women edicts. Oxfam eventually concluded this had been a mistake that had caused greater suffering to ordinary Afghans, but there clearly is a tension of conflicting principles in such situations.

A couple of years ago I spent a week on the Burmese-Thai border talking to opposition activists about the human rights and humanitarian situation there. Most felt that the presence of the international community had helped provide cover for the development of Burmese civil society, although clearly there is a dilemma as to how much “constructive engagement” merely legitimises the regime. During a humanitarian crisis, however, such calculations need to be set to one side, since the imperative is to provide people with life-saving help.

Aid agencies estimate that about a million people may be without shelter after the cyclone tore away their homes, and whole villages have simply vanished in the floods. The problem with mounting humanitarian operations during complex emergencies such as this is that it is very difficult to separate the effects of conflict, natural disaster and the overall political situation. This has blurred the distinction between development and humanitarian aid, because countries like Burma are now in chronic crises in which the man-made disasters weaken their capacity to deal with natural ones.

Burma has experienced several decades of conflict, and there has been a number of ethnically based insurgencies, which the regime has dealt with through coercion and cooption. This has led to the creation of military fiefdoms which in effect ruled by former warlords. Even when humanitarian agencies have obtained central government permission to operate in a particular area, they often have to negotiate it again at a local level.

The opium trade has done much to fuel the conflicts, and both warlords and the army are accused of conscripting labour and levying taxes. This creates a further dilemma for humanitarian agencies, whose staff often witness such violations. Ignoring them might be seen as tantamount to condoning them, but speaking out could bring loss of access.

In practice, most agencies tend to opt for private advocacy with the authorities and a continual reassessment of the costs and benefits of their presence. Some have argued that aid should be made conditional on the government agreeing to meaningful political reform and dialogue with the pro-democracy movement. But if the government rejects this, then refusing aid will simply increase the suffering of the poorest and most vulnerable people.

As one UN official told me recently: “We simply cannot delay providing assistance until a viable political situation evolves. The human costs for the Burmese people will be too high.”

Last September the Burmese people were on the streets, fighting for their political rights. Now they are on their knees, fighting for their very lives. In both cases, the main obstacle they face is the military junta that has ruled the country with merciless brutality since the 1988 coup.

Just as the pro-democracy protests last autumn were bloodily and thoughtlessly crushed, so does the regime’s paranoia, ignorance and hapless incompetence threaten to undermine or even derail international relief efforts in the wake of Cyclone Nargis. As one aid official warned today, the aftermath could prove more lethal than the storm itself.

Any government would struggle to cope with a disaster on this scale but, thanks in large part to the generals, Burma is exceptionally ill-equipped. The country still relies on infrastructure created roughly a century ago. There has been little or no investment in modern roads and railways and internal transportation of relief supplies looks likely to be a major headache.

The secretive nature of the regime, discouraging open, efficient communication, is set to be another problem as aid workers desperately try to identify the main areas of need. The junta’s failure to alert the Burmese people to the approach of the cyclone – there is no early warning system – has already drawn protests and probably exacerbated the storm’s human toll.

“This is yet another example of how the regime ignores the welfare of the people of Burma,” said Mark Farmaner, the director of Burma Campaign UK. “Instead of warning people about the potential danger, state-owned newspapers were full of propaganda telling people that they must vote for a sham constitution that will keep the military in power.”

The referendum vote has been widely dismissed by western governments as a clumsy, see-through attempt to defuse external pressure for democratic reform following last autumn’s crackdown. Having characteristically refused to recognise the size of the disaster, Burmese officials finally announced today the vote would be delayed for two weeks in worst-affected areas.

Increased access for independent NGOs, and for foreign media keen to publicise Burma’s needs, are another looming point of friction. Two days after the cyclone hit, the generals issued an unprecedented appeal for assistance. It was as if they were suddenly acknowledging they were part of the international community they have consistently shunned and rebuffed.

But the flood of offers of help from UN agencies, the US, the EU and countries such as Australia, all critics of the regime, will certainly trigger the mistrustful, fearful caution for which the country’s dictator, General Than Shwe, and his cronies are renowned.

In coming days, as the shock wears off, the junta may try to set conditions and pick and choose donor partnerships. It may prefer dealing with less judgmental China, Burma’s biggest trade partner, and the usually compliant, politically toothless Association of South-East Asian Nations. But their expertise, resources and generosity do not begin to match those of western nations.

While all these factors are expected to hamper the relief effort, Burma’s basic dilemma remains unchanged: a regime that has been at war with its people for years is now being called upon the save them.

Its reputation for cruelty, mismanagement and corruption only adds to the gaping trust deficit between oppressors and oppressed. In most countries, news that the army is being deployed to help would be welcome. In Burma, it will only increase the trauma many ordinary Burmese are experiencing.

People always looks for good out of bad, and it may be that the prising open of Fortress Burma’s gates by an advancing army of humanitarian workers will wreak a permanent, beneficial change in the country’s relations with the outside world.

Australia’s foreign minister, Stephen Smith, made the point today. Rather than use the crisis to attack the junta, the focus should be on food and other emergency aid. “The priority now is rendering assistance to thousands of people who urgently need our help,” Smith said.

But the US first lady, Laura Bush, who has become the Bush administration’s unofficial spokesperson on Burma, showed no such restraint yesterday. The US would help, she said, but only if the junta – on which Washington has imposed tough sanctions – swallowed its pride and asked for it. She also suggested the nature of the regime would hinder outside relief efforts.

“The response to the cyclone is just the most recent example of the junta’s failure to meet its people’s basic needs,” Bush said. “The regime has dismantled systems of agriculture, education and healthcare. This once wealthy nation now has the lowest per capita GDP in south-east Asia … we know already that they are very inept.”

Such overt hostility at government level is certain to put backs up in Naypyidaw, the regime’s remote capital, and is likely to be counter-productive. Indeed, the cyclone disaster may have an opposite effect to that hoped for in the west. As the urgent impulse to help fellow human beings in trouble takes over, the crisis could divert the spotlight away from junta’s feeble, self-serving efforts at political reform.

If they are allowed to, the generals will simply take what they need in the short term, then carry on dictating.

The efforts made by the global community to help the continent of Africa to manage its way out of its difficulties have doubled and redoubled over the past 20 years.

The world has certainly not forgotten Africa. In the field of health alone, numerous bodies from the Global Fund to fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria to the various United Nations agencies have committed many billions to Africa — so much so that the continent sometimes seems awash with well-heeled concern. Perhaps all this money and compassion have emerged so dramatically because of the unexpected horror of HIV-Aids, on top of all the traditional diseases. Perhaps it was because more big hitters began to understand the problems of Africa or that technology gave everyone a better chance of making a lasting impact.

Whatever the reason, things have changed. And yet, the facts on the ground remain obstinately horrifying. Aids rampages onwards, malaria is as yet largely unabated, and the old killers such as cholera, measles and above all diarrhoea sweep through helpless communities in all their medieval pomp. Nothing seems to stop them. And now, on top of all this comes the hellish scourge of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis. Life expectancy continues to fall.

Not surprisingly, researchers and think-tanks are constantly looking for a solution. There is talk of magic bullets, of the glue that binds and, more dramatically, of the holy grail.

But there is a simple and practical factor that is overlooked time and again, and that is the question of transport for healthcare and for development. It may not be a thrilling subject to some people, but it is for me. But then, as well as being Patron of Riders for Health, something of which I am very proud, I am also President of Save the Children, which pioneered the Stop Polio Campaign with the help of Riders for Health. And as it happens, I have my own HGV licence.

But much more to the point, when I began to travel in Africa all those years ago, I couldn’t help but be struck by the alarmingly obvious: no one could get around. Transport for poor people was sporadic, unreliable, dangerous and expensive and transport for public services such as healthcare was almost at a standstill.

What this meant then, and still means now, is that doctors and nurses could not reach communities that needed their help. They could not bring the benefits of public health education (for example, important advice about only using clean water and washing your hands, which cost nothing but reduce the likelihood of catching cholera) or immunise people. We have an effective vaccine against measles, so why have we not eradicated the disease? The answer is transportation — or rather lack of it. In Africa there is a very, very limited capacity to distribute anything at all.

This was the single issue that Riders began to address, back in 1989. What they were up against was lethal isolation. What stood between rural communities and a healthy life was not information, not technology, not pharmaceuticals (we had all those) but distance. Well-trained public health professionals had to walk for anything up to 20 miles to reach communities they were supposed to serve. And for the people who remained isolated and unreached, the consequences were catastrophic.

The charity’s founders realised they could do something useful when they visited an aid project in Somalia. Seeing broken motorbikes intended for health workers lying in the dust, useless for the want of a missing part or for a lack of mechanical knowhow, they realised they could make a vital difference by training local people in the art of vehicle maintenance, of teaching them how to make their vehicles work — and stay working — in the most inhospitable of terrains

I have been Patron of Riders for ten years. During this time I have watched them slowly but surely build innovative and sustainable systems for managing vehicles from The Gambia to Kenya, from Nigeria to Lesotho in such a way that they can operate normally, without breaking down, in the most hostile of conditions. And what this means is that health workers using the motorcycles and other vehicles in their systems can reach farflung communities time and time again.

Riders is the bicycle chain — the link that allows the key components of aid to work. It is, and can be, the mechanism by which all the wonders of 21st-century medicine and technology reach the people who so desperately need them. Through this year’s Christmas appeal, The Times and its readers have the chance to accelerate rapidly the pace at which healthcare races across the continent of Africa. In years to come, looking back, we may even wonder if, in its modest way, it was a little bit like a holy grail.

For details about how to give, log on to timesonline.co.uk/appeal

One of the problems with discussing humanitarian intervention is that the term itself means different things to different people. For legal scholars it describes military intervention to come to the aid of people facing acute danger, for humanitarian aid workers it is the impartial distribution of emergency relief.During the 1990s the two activities became increasingly intertwined as military convoys were used to open “humanitarian corridors” to civilians trapped in conflict zones. Aid workers also felt increasingly compelled to speak out about the atrocities that they witnessed. “One cannot stop a genocide with medicines,” proclaimed Médecins sans Frontières during the Rwandan crisis of 1994, and a year later others mourned the “well-fed dead” of Srebrenica.

“Political humanitarianism” emerged in response. Drawing on concepts based on international human-rights law, its advocates argued that certain circumstances created a “duty to intervene”. Humanitarian organisations should urge action by western governments to end atrocities. The neutral Red Cross approach, like the system of collective security based on the UN Charter, had become an excuse for inertia and indifference to global suffering.

In its practical application, however, political humanitarianism has been a resounding failure. Brendan Behan’s observation that there is no situation so dismal that a policeman can’t make it worse could be readily applied. From the UN’s first chapter seven action in Somalia, soon dubbed “operation shoot to feed” by its critics, to today’s Save Darfur campaign, the political humanitarians are proving that the road to hell really is paved with good intentions.

As Jonathan Steele recently observed on these pages, there are now some good reasons to be cautiously optimistic about the future of Darfur. Progress in talks between the various rebel factions could lead to a common negotiating platform. The Sudanese government has meanwhile agreed to the UN’s latest resolution on the deployment of a peace-talking force, largely due to the diplomatic efforts of the Chinese.

Britain and France, which sponsored the UN resolution, also deserve some credit, not least for not undermining the nascent peace process. The sudden arrival of western diplomats during the negotiations in May last year forced the pace too fast, leading to a breakdown, although an inclusive agreement was described as “astonishingly close”. There is now a real chance of the type of deal that brought peace to southern Sudan after its decades-long civil war.

In these circumstances it was utterly irresponsible of the Save Darfur Coalition to run advertisements claiming that the time for negotiating with the Sudanese government had ended. That it did so without the consent of humanitarian organisations and claimed that these groups supported military action borders on breathtaking. Aid organisations are all that stand between many civilians and starvation, and this action imperilled their ability to operate. But, as a statement by Action Against Hunger – one of the few organisations still in Darfur – noted, the claim is clearly also flawed within its own terms. The belief that western troops can fight their way into Darfur, routing the Sudanese army and disarming militia forces, is simply not credible. Even those not prepared to learn the broader lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan must accept that existing commitments remove the threat of serious western military action.

Gordon Brown should also learn the lessons of the rhetorical failures of his predecessor. Darfur is not “the greatest humanitarian disaster the world faces today” as he claimed. It is a brutal messy conflict, currently being investigated by the international criminal court. This has already indicted one senior Sudanese government official, and if more evidence emerges, more charges should follow. But arguing for political prosecutions as a means of pressuring the government is anathema to the notion of international justice.

Neutral humanitarianism needs to take back the moral high ground. There is nothing obtuse about refusing to take sides and, in my experience, most gunmen look similar up close. One of my saddest days in Afghanistan was when I took the humanitarian emblems off my organisation’s vehicles because the symbols designed to protect us had come to identify us as “legitimate targets”. It is a shame that those who display such moral eloquence in the cause of political humanitarianism cannot understand the simple tragedy of that act.