Tackle woes at source, says departing UN chief
The outgoing United Nations humanitarian chief is warning that an ‘‘explosion’’ in demand for humanitarian assistance in recent years will keep getting worse until major powers tackle the root causes of hunger and desperation – conflicts, extremism, climate change, poor governance, corruption and violence, to name a few.
Mark Lowcock, who stepped down yesterday after four years, said the world had been dealing with symptoms, including people displaced by fighting and natural disasters or at risk of famine, which is now stalking Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray region and Yemen.
In a very divided world, where the geopolitical system had failed to manage conflicts very well, there had been a ‘‘failure of the leading powers’’ to tackle the causes, he said.
‘‘If the world wants to see less humanitarian suffering, you have to deal with the causes of that suffering. If you tackle the causes, you can make progress, you can improve people’s lives.’’
The 58-year-old British economist said that during his lifetime, the world had moved from having more than half the global population living in ‘‘the most extreme poverty’’ to less than 10 per cent in that situation before the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020.
The people and countries left out of that economic progress were ‘‘the ones enmeshed in humanitarian suffering’’, he said.
Lowcock was highly critical of the world’s rich countries, and especially the Group of Seven leading industrialised nations, for ‘‘not acting much more aggressively and generously and protecting the poorest countries coming out of the pandemic’’, not only with vaccines but by supporting their economies, which had taken the biggest hit in relative terms and were under huge strain.
It was also in the self-interest
of wealthier nations to help poorer ones, he said, because the problems that could brew in fragile countries – becoming havens for terrorism, places where climate change was hardest to tackle, and sites where new diseases emerged and old diseases like Ebola re-emerged – ‘‘come back to bite you if you don’t invest enough to contain the problems’’.
Lowcock called for a much bigger effort to help poorer countries out of the pandemic. Rather than just announcing that it was donating vaccines, he said, the G7 should have made clear that it would work with the larger Group of 20 major economies to do a lot more.
The G7 leaders promised 1 billion doses for vaccine-hungry countries, far short of the 11 billion doses the World Health Organisation says are needed to inoculate at least 70 per cent of the world’s population and truly end the pandemic.
Lowcock said the G7 announcement involved enough vaccine to reach about 10 per cent of the people who needed it in low- and middle-income countries.
Also, the G7 didn’t announce money to get the vaccine from the manufacturer into the syringes of health workers who could immunise people, he said, when there were ‘‘huge costs in the delivery system’’.
By comparison, he recalled that during the much smaller financial crisis of 2007-08, ‘‘the leading countries in the G20 instructed the international financial institutions to provide a lot of assistance to the most vulnerable countries, and they bankrolled that’’.
Lowcock said that for the last 15 months, he had been pressing the G7 and the G20 to provide a lot more economic help to the poorest countries.
‘‘That has not happened through this crisis,’’ he said.
‘‘If more resources don’t come, then the pandemic is going to last a lot longer than it would otherwise do, and that will ultimately harm the rich countries as well as adding to the misery and suffering of the poorer countries.’’
He was also worried that funding for humanitarian aid was voluntary, and that there was far too much reliance on a small number of countries. As a prime example, he said, 70 per cent of the US$20 billion (NZ$28.8b) the UN raised for humanitarian relief last year came from the United States, Germany, the European Union and the United Kingdom.
Historically, the system for humanitarian relief had been far too reactive, Lowcock said. ‘‘It’s waited for the problem to get almost overwhelming before doing something about it.’’
He said an earlier and faster response to a humanitarian crisis was cheaper, and also more humane.