The other problem is people using it for their own gain and all you can do is only let a few large, well known organizations in, let no one in or let everyone in and kick out the bad ones (or put them on trial) when you catch them. There is no regulation committee for this, so all you can really do is point out the bad ones to the world.

The USA and Katrina was an example of ego gone wrong and the problem with President Bush, but a different issue from China and Burma.

I’d rather listen to opinion of an uneducated but experienced fireman than listen to a bunch of dweebs talk about a subject for their master’s thesis that no one will ever read.

what we should do is rely on cold hard data and snipe from the sidelines in a bid to prove how us foreigners who are embedded in China are so much more knowledgeable about pretty much anything China related than those on the outside. I mean, what do international rescue groups really know about international rescue? How many of them can even read Chinese? How many of these so-called ‘experts’ have ever polished the news at CCTV9?

fucking charlatans.

Well, thank you very much! Hope to hear from you soon!

Tatiana Sabadini

www.correiobraziliense.com.br

For example, this article about the tsunami in Thailand points out how aid workers can “add to disasters” by carrying out questionable religious-related activities (such as the Scientologists) or incompetent vaccinations:
http://www.globalpolicy.org/ngos/credib/2005/1005tsunami.htm

This piece by investigative journalist John Pilger takes an more cynical look at the motivations and impact of foreign aid in Cambodia:

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/May05/Pilger0526.htm

“‘Join the aid community. Travel to exotic, distant lands. Meet exciting, unusual people. And make a killing.’”

Roughly half of all aid to Cambodia is spent on “technical assistance”, or TA. Between 1999 and 2003, this amounted to 1.2bn dollars. What is TA? It is an invasion of “international advisors” on whom up to 70m dollars was spent in 2003 alone. Add to them “international consultants”, who each cost more than 159,000 dollars. By contrast, the cost of a genuine foreign aid worker in a truly independent NGO is less than 45,000 dollars, and the cost of recruiting a Cambodian expert is an eighth of this.

More than 740 foreigner advisers and experts earn nearly as much as 160,000 Cambodian civil servants, who get as little as 25 dollars a month. In many ministries, the pay of foreign advisers exceeds the entire annual budget. It is more than twice the budget of the agricultural ministry and four times that of the justice ministry.

Foreign aid workers constantly complain about local corruption, often justifiably. But they rarely identify and measure their own legitimized corruption. “There has been no systematic analysis of the effectiveness of TA in Cambodia,” says ActionAid. “Government of Cambodia officials [have] suggested that this is because donors don’t want to recognize the ineffectiveness of their aid.”

This is not to take anything away from genuinely qualified and effective groups such as Doctors Without Borders. It’s just that people should not immediately assume that foreign aid workers will be the most appropriate solution in all cases.

Adam Sweet expresses his heartfelt and no doubt genuine sentiment; sadly however, this sentiment and good will is not shared by all and does not always translate into effective action.

Clearly there needs to be some kind of vetting process to make sure that the volunteer rescue teams are competent, qualified and adequately equipped. It would be irresponsible of the authorities to allow in volunteers who may become a danger to themselves and others.

First do no harm.

well that makes a whole load of sense. Instead of spending 30K to try and help out in some way, the IRC should have invented a time machine, gone back to 2001 and invested that money in building schools that can stand up to an earthquake. what an idiot.