UK to double aid to Myanmar

Bangkok: One of the main aid donors to Myanmar (formerly Burma), the UK government, has announced it is doubling its humanitarian aid to the impoverished country over the next three years, in response to what it describes as a "staggering" humanitarian crisis.

The UK provided around �8 million in humanitarian aid in 2007, supporting projects run by UN agencies and non-governmental organisations in the fields of health, basic education and poverty alleviation.

It also provided nearly �1 million to help Burmese refugees who have fled the country.

Over the next three years, the UK's Department for International Development (DFID) will gradually increase aid to Myanmar's most needy people to around �18 million per year by 2010/2011.

"The scale of humanitarian crisis afflicting the Burmese people is, quite simply, staggering," Douglas Alexander, the UK's secretary of state for international development, said during a recent visit to Bangkok.

Challenging environment

Myanmar is a highly challenging environment for international humanitarian work, according to most observers. They say the military regime is highly suspicious of foreign aid workers, and domestic civil society groups, and seeks to tightly control their activities.

However, Alexander said DFID's partners, including UN agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), were already successfully delivering aid to Myanmar's needy, without channelling assistance through the government.

"There are very clear and established mechanisms which we use in a range of environments in which we are not able to work with the government, and those are fully implemented in Myanmar," he said.

According to the UN, around one-third of Myanmar's people survive on less than US$ 1 a day, half of all children fail to complete primary school, and HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria claim hundreds of thousands of lives each year.

In ethnic minority border areas, where the army is still battling armed ethnic minority insurgents, many civilians have been displaced by fighting and conflict, and are living in desperate poverty, the UN and aid groups along the border say.

Myanmar's economic conditions, political repression and conflict have also pushed an estimated 1.5 million people into neighbouring Thailand, where around 140,000 are living in refugee camps, while the rest toil as poorly paid labourers, vulnerable to official harassment and exploitation, UN agencies say.

How the money will be spent

Alexander, who travelled to the Thai-Myanmar border to visit refugee camps, clinics and other facilities assisting the Burmese in Thailand, said he could not yet say precisely how the increased British humanitarian funding would be spent.

"We have not yet reached a judgement as to the balance of funding between in-country support and cross-border support," he said.

"There are urgent pressing humanitarian needs for people both who have crossed the border ... and those suffering [inside].

"We'll take quite a careful look at where we can secure the maximum return for our investment," he said.

Burma Campaign UK, an activist group, has been calling on DFID to provide greater support for Thailand-based groups that seek to aid people living in the sensitive but highly porous Myanmar border areas, where the military regime restricts aid agencies in-country from working.

Alexander said one of the purposes of his trip was to assess "the ability of the organisations working on the border to scale up their capacity" to address humanitarian needs in the otherwise off-limits border zones.

Source: IRIN

User comments

"Poverty and Subsidies from Abroard"

Author: David Chester

Time: 18.01.2008 15:53

Comment: The trouble with the subsidies from abroard is that the giver seems to think he knows best how the money should be used. What is more, in order that it is not wasted, he makes a half-hearted effort to see that this money goes to what he thinks are the right places. There are two things wrong with this situation.

1) The giver is not necessarily correct and the intended use of his "gift" is not always going to help the recepient. How many times have we heard of money for education being wasted in buildings that are unsuitable or never finished or used. Here the money is spread instead between the government clerks and officials whose job is to select the building contractors and of course these clerks take a good kick-back or bribe for themselves. It would be hard not to allow the money to go in this way, once the decision to use it in a building program has been made. But the net results is to help create a monopoly of property owners and controlers whose domineering ways results in more poverty for the locals, not better public health, education or even domestic services of sanitation and electrification etc.

2) The effect of such distribution of money for capital goods for farmers and industrialists is to create monopolies in the production of the goods and the witholding of useful sites. The land is otherwise vital for anybody to live from and in particular it would otherwise become available for entrepreneers to use for small-scale manufacturing of competitive and resultingly cheeper production. The effect of the money going to the few monopolists is thus seen to be one of rising prices and limited employment, due to land holding and speculation with greater separation between the rich and the poor.

The only long-term solution to poverty is to allow the land to be properly used by anyone. In rural communities this means a lot of small-holdings and everyone farming. In towns this means small-scale production in usefully competing small businesses and manufacturing factories, to provide local markets with better and cheeper goods and with the means to pay the employees at a reasonable rate without any penalties imposed on them by the need to not use the sites close to the population centers (which are the most productive and valuable ones that are often being speculated in without proper use). This improved method of land tenure results in the ability to farm and build up industry, but without the landlords taking over the natural resources and getting rich by their speculation in the rising land-values.

Consider what conditions were like before there was any organization of the land ownership. Everybody who wanted to farm could do so and there were all poor but with more equal living standards. As soon as land falls into the grasp of a smaller number of owners, this situation changes and the few get rich whilst the many starve.

To encourage the use of the land in this reformed way requires the introduction of leglislation and a fairer way for the access to land to be shared. Also by taxing the value of the land (whether it is used or not) and not the earner of wages, the burden of supporting the government and the national economy falls on those who take something from this economy (namely the land owners and opportunity with-holders) rather than those whose efforts have helped to sustain the community, namely the employees and workers.

Thus the best use of such a gift from abroad should be to create socially just laws and to help enforce them and not to provide the education, health, sanitation and communication aid, that often does not work but instead enables the land-lords (by means of the banks who join in this speculation by lending money for land acquission) to become rich at the cost of the earners of wages, who are having to pay the taxes instead.

In short to eliminate poverty one should tax takings not makings. The laws of the land need to be adjusted so that there is a greater equality of opportunity by allowing everybody the same rights to their birthright, namely land. Money given for development programmes should be with these aims in mind.

Regards, David Chester.