By Gordon Brown and Hilary Benn
October 19, 2005
This year's catalog of natural disasters, while engendering a compassionate public response, has shown beyond all doubt that the world needs to get better at delivering humanitarian aid and carrying out reconstruction. Charities and national governments are far better coordinated than ever before. But international institutions need to improve their preparedness, speed of action and coordination of response.
There is a UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and an existing UN fund for emergency response. But the fund is only $50 million and can be used only to loan money to UN agencies that already have pledges from donors. So it only addresses the time gap between donors pledging to a project and actually handing over the money. This is not good enough. A world that in just a year has seen a chain of disasters ravage communities and continents needs an international response that is more proactive in its ambitions and more coordinated in its reach - and quite simply gets more money support more quickly to where it is needed.
We believe there is a way forward. First, afflicted countries should be able to call immediately upon a new shocks facility at the IMF. Money should be frontloaded, fast disbursing and readily accessible. And potential borrowers should include all poor countries, not only those suffering from natural disasters but those affected by the oil-price rise or sharp falls in prices for their main exports. And donors must help these countries meet their total financing needs as estimated by the IMF.
With both loan capital and help for subsidies needed, Britain and France have agreed to finance the first stages of the facility. Oil-producing countries should contribute when the managing director, Rodrigo Rato, visits the Gulf states this week. The new facility should be set up immediately when the IMF board meets on Oct. 31.
The World Bank has always played a bigger role, not least in the financing of social and economic reconstruction after disasters. In our talks with its president, Paul Wolfowitz, there is recognition that a dedicated facility for responding to shocks is worthy of consideration. The bank should now come forward with proposals for increasing its support for countries in distress, through additional financing to their poverty-reduction plans for disaster recovery and contingency planning and preparedness.
For reconstruction to work, emergency assistance must also work, a fact recognized within Europe by the creation of the European Solidarity Fund in 2002. So it is clear there is a need for a new humanitarian world fund into which donors pay and from which humanitarian coordinators can immediately draw funds when a crisis threatens.
Our priority, then, must be to reform the UN's Central Emergency Revolving Fund, and the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs will indeed later this month make detailed proposals for this reformed fund. At present, six donors have pledged around $150 million (of which Britain's contribution is $70 million), but we would like to see it grow. When the General Assembly meets on Nov. 14, it should agree to a fund that would start immediately, at the latest by January of next year.
And there is yet another vast area for global cooperation that we ignore at our peril. Millions are not vaccinated against even the most basic of diseases. We should invite more countries to contribute to the new International Finance Facility for Immunization. By frontloading $4 billion of additional expenditure, the fund will be able to save five million lives between now and 2015. With support from additional countries, it could do even more.
Out of the ruins of a year of catastrophe, we have seen helping hands reach across ancient conflicts, from Indonesia to Sri Lanka to the subcontinent. Now as the IMF, the World Bank, the European Union and the United Nations look at how they can do better, we have a unique chance to be better prepared, swifter in response and fully coordinated to cope both with disasters and post-disaster reconstruction.
A year that began by reminding us of the extraordinary power of nature to destroy can end by revealing the extraordinary power of humanity to build anew.
