Former UN emergency relief co-ordinator welcomes recommendation to build up resilience
Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011
In March BBC News reported that Sir John Holmes, former emergency relief co-ordinator at the UN, welcomed Lord Ashdown’s Humanitarian Emergency Response Review commissioned by DFID - particularly the point about “building up resilience of countries before disasters happen - that’s absolutely crucial and we don’t do enough of that”.
Both ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ countries are vulnerable
The current globalised system has created vulnerability, not resilience - a large set of countries, both rich and poor, dependent on others for their food and energy. They are ‘import-dependent’ – a term usually applied only to the developing ‘two-thirds world’.The Global Risks Report 2011 from the World Economic Forum outlines the risks and Chris Arkenberg’s review of its message comments starkly:
“Elites consolidate more money & power, further driving disparity and eroding governance. What results is an interstitial vacuum where corporate intervention fails to see any profit motive and where state intervention lacks the funds or will to govern effectively.
“In effect, the combination of super-empowered non-state actors, failures of state governance, and widespread economic disparity undermines the Rule of Law by releasing elites from accountability . . . “
The damaging corporate desire for the cheapest labour
Another damaging feature of globalisation is the mass movement – legal or illegal - of the poorest peoples, to serve the corporate desire for the cheapest labour, antagonising the economically weakest, largely unemployed 10% of the host nation.
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The only convincing prescription?
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The only convincing prescription seen by the writer, which addresses this uneasy dependent fragility, appears in a book by the convenor of the Green New Deal Group,Colin Hines: LOCALIZATION: A GLOBAL MANIFESTO, Earthscan.