Zambia's Plight Goes Begging in Year of Disasters - New York Times

"Aid to reugees is a crapshoot..."
Zambia's Plight Goes Begging in Year of Disasters - New York Times: "NANGWESHI REFUGEE CAMP, Zambia — Hundreds of refugees from Angola's civil war have walked away from this remote United Nations outpost where most have lived for years, many roaming on foot as far as the Namibia border, 85 miles away. The journey was not by choice. The refugees were looking for food."
In January, to stretch its thinning supplies, the United Nations cut its already basic food rations to war refugees in Zambia by almost 40 percent — not just for the Nangweshi camp's 15,100 residents, but also for 57,000 refugees from Congo in four other camps.

The cuts were made after the developed world did not respond to United Nations' pleas for help to feed the refugees. Like similar appeals, they went unheeded in a year of many disasters and what aid specialists call a growing malaise among donors about such emergencies.

That thousands of war refugees cared for by the United Nations should go hungry for want of about $8.5 million, what amounts to a rounding error in the budgets of wealthy countries, may seem surprising. But the international system that is supposed to protect refugees from hunger and privation is prone to breakdowns like this one, which has rendered 72,000 war victims in Zambia hungry for weeks on end...

Why shortfalls of aid to refugees and other equally vulnerable groups occur at all is vexing. The system that funnels food to the world's needy rests almost wholly on the generosity of the well-off, and each donor's impulse is subject to different forces.

"The system is basically a crapshoot," Larry Minear, who leads Tufts University's Institute on Humanitarianism and War, said. Fluctuations in food prices, the size of crop surpluses in donating nations, politics in donor and recipient nations, and the inefficiencies of the global aid bureaucracy can all play a role in what aid specialists euphemistically call "pipeline breaks."

Food shortages have become so regular in parts of Africa that some governments consider them normal, rather than emergencies — an attitude many aid officials say was at the root of the sluggish response last year to widespread hunger in Niger.

Often, as in Niger, money comes only belatedly, after wealthy donors have been harangued by the United Nations or embarrassed by news media coverage of hungry masses.

That is the crux of the problem, many aid specialists say. Support for global emergencies is purely voluntary, forcing humanitarian agencies to go hat in hand to governments, not just to sustain continuing programs like refugee camps, but for new emergencies like the 2004 tsunami.

"We are professional beggars," said one Europe-based United Nations official on condition of anonymity for fear of angering donor nations. He added: "Some activities, you can decide whether you want to voluntarily fund or not. But things like Darfur, like refugees — for that sort of thing, we should have a system that produces money faster."