Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200-212)
MR JOHN
SCICCHITANO AND
DR JOHN
TWIGG
6 JULY 2006
Q200 Ann McKechin: In USAID's written
evidence to this inquiry you said that for slow-onset natural
disasters a hurried humanitarian response can be counterproductive.
When we were in Pakistan, people had been returned back to their
villages but were now being evacuated for the second time because
the monsoon season was about to hit. There was a risk of landslides
as aftershocks were still occurring as a secondary risk. They
had been returned back before the secondary risk had been evaluated.
I wondered what both of you believe needs to be done to ensure
that humanitarian actors take sufficient account of those longer
term development contexts in their work. Is it realistic to attempt
to integrate long-term risk reduction into the recovery phase
of a disaster?
Mr Scicchitano: You refer to my
written evidence and the case of the Sahel. In that case, the
humanitarian actors were not well informed about the context of
the development concerns. We, as humanitarian actors, can do much
better, number one, to listen more closely to the development
actors on the ground because the natural response of humanitarian
actors is that we are good at moving quickly, moving resources,
moving people and responding quickly to save lives. That is extremely
important but particularly for slow-onset disasters it is a bit
different than the distinction made here between natural and manmade
disasters. It is a distinction between slow-onset disasters and
rapid onset disasters. Particularly for the case of slow-onset
disasters humanitarian actors do need to pay more attention to
the concerns and the efforts of the development actors. They do
also need, particularly in stable situations, to pay more attention
to what the government is saying and work to strengthen government
services and government ministries. That is something that was
one of the early weaknesses of the Sahel response, as I described
in my paper. Since then I believe humanitarian actors have come
to learn those lessons and are now responding more carefully,
but we need to assure that that happens in the future as well.
Q201 Ann McKechin: They need to consider
the individual circumstances of a particular area rather than
a one size fits all approach?
Mr Scicchitano: Exactly, particularly
for slow-onset disasters, to resist—
Q202 Ann McKechin: Just running in
with the food aid?
Mr Scicchitano: Exactly.
Dr Twigg: I think it is a really
important question. It is something we perhaps do not understand
quite as well as we should. It is partly to do with sequencing.
Humanitarian actors come in; they do their job for three, six
or nine months or whatever it is and then they pack up and go
home because that is when the money has run out anyway and it
is left somehow to the development people to pick up the pieces
and take it forward. That idea of disaster sequencing is quite
dangerous, as John said. You need much closer integration much
earlier in the process because ultimately it is going to be development
agencies that take the risk reduction process forward in the long-term
because they will be there for the long-term. This is not an area
I am expert in. I know you have David Peppiatt speaking next and
ProVention has done quite a lot of work on disaster recovery.
It is something we need to pay very careful attention to in understanding
those processes by which people start to recover from disasters
but also to become more resilient to future ones. It is not something
that is terribly well understood at the moment and it is very
long-term.
Q203 Richard Burden: Could we talk
about the role of the media? We have already referred briefly
to it in one of our earlier evidence sessions. We had quite a
long session with the BBC on how the way the media respond to
disasters can not only affect materially what comes in but how
far things move up or down priorities and, in a sense, the nature
of response. There have been various comments already about Niger
and the reality was not quite the same as maybe some of the media
portrayals. In your view, how do you think humanitarian actors
and development actors engage with the media at the moment and
how could that engagement be improved or changes to be able to
engage with the more effective response, particularly in slow-onset
disasters?
Mr Scicchitano: I did also mention
the media role in my written evidence. Of course the media plays
an extremely important role because the public plays such an important
role in our responses to disasters. As governmental agencies,
the public is at the base of what we are doing. We know also that
the public more directly provides funding to NGOs and other actors.
Their awareness and understanding is extremely important. In the
case of the Sahel in 2005 the media played the very important
role of bringing attention to a situation that many people did
not know about. I worked for many years in Burkina Faso and when
I would go back to the US most people had never heard of Burkina
Faso and did not know whether it was a rock band, a name of a
fruit or a name of a country. Of course there were shortcomings
in the media's portrayal of the situation and, in the end, it
potentially produces a response that is skewed. In the case of
the Sahel, as I mentioned in the paper, we saw a response that
was skewed, number one, towards Niger whereas it is clear from
the evidence that the problem is really a regional, Sahelian problem
and not just a problem in Niger. It skewed the response across
time because we had a very important short-term response in 2005
in Niger. We had over $100 million of food aid in Niger and yet
that response is certainly trickling down to a much lower amount;
whereas that funding could perhaps have been better used if it
was better equilibrated across time. To answer your question how
can we be more effective working with the media, I will go back
to one of the remarks made in an earlier presentation of evidence
where one referred to the case of the Mozambican woman who gave
birth in a tree. That is an interesting example because the media
talked about that as a human interest story, putting a human face
on the situation. There are ways that we can do that better to
explain a situation in its context that we had not done well in
2005. In 2005, for example, we did that by showing the starving
child with its mother which is a very moving scene but there are
other images and stories that can be told that maybe are not as
sensational and in some ways may not sell as well as the story
of the stick figure child. They are important stories and if we
tell them well we can inform the public in a much better way.
We can inform our Congress in the US in a much better way and
we can have a much more rational allocation of resources. Together
as NGOs—I had many experiences working with NGOs before
I came to USAID—our relationships as government actors with
the media as well as the UN, I think we can do better, telling
those stories in ways that match the context more accurately.
Dr Twigg: It is really difficult
because it seems to me that the media go into every disaster with
a prewritten script. You know what they are going to say. It does
not matter about the particular location and the circumstances.
You know they are going to give the impression that most people
are helpless and dependent on outside aid whereas in fact most
people in most disasters are helped by friends, family, neighbours,
local communities, local services and what have you. You know
that they are going to be more interested in the body count than
the wider impact on society which led one BBC reporter—I
think it was in the 2001 floods in Mozambique—to say there
was not a disaster because he had not seen enough dead people.
The fact that thousands of livelihoods had been completely trashed
by the flooding escaped his notice. That was not what he had gone
there to see. You know you are going to get stories about anarchy,
chaos and looting. Again, there will always be some in disasters
but a lot of research over the years shows that collaboration,
cooperation and pulling together produce a much stronger spirit
than anarchy and chaos. You know there are going to be stories
about disease outbreaks because bodies are not buried in time.
The World Health Organisation will tell you that is not a major
consideration in most disasters but time and time again you will
get the same stories and it is really hard trying to get that
through to journalists. The best you can hope for is usually an
article a few weeks later on page 16 of The Guardian or
something that looks at it a bit more thoughtfully, but that has
been negated by the miles and miles of newspaper coverage devoted
to other issues.
Q204 Richard Burden: Admittedly the
people who gave evidence to us were involved in fairly weighty
stories a lot of the time but the kind of message they were giving
to us was that whilst, yes, their paper has to sell and their
TV or radio station has to get the ratings; but certainly they
were saying they have to respond to things as they emerge. If
they get a phone call at six o'clock in the morning that something
has happened in Pakistan, you get on the plane and try to find
out what is going on but they were trying to emphasise to us that
they were, as people involved in the media, trying to address
this issue and do longer term, forgotten crises type programming
and so on. Is that really whistling in the wind? Whilst the occasional
article or programme may be made, it is still fundamentally changing.
Dr Twigg: I think it is BBC2 rather
than News at Ten.
Q205 Richard Burden: What could they
do? Is there anything they could do or you could encourage them
to do?
Dr Twigg: They need to be a little
better informed about the more general issues before they go out
there. Part of the problem is that a news journalist who has to
cover a disaster is covering all sorts of stories so they do not
have the background and understanding. As you say, they are woken
up at 6am and they have to take a plane somewhere but they are
involved in that extremely chaotic situation around them visibly,
which they are trying to make sense of. It is difficult but I
think it is a question of how much weight you give to particular
elements of a story. If you cannot see for yourself, if you cannot
get the big picture, you are getting anecdotal evidence which
is masquerading as the whole picture. I am not even sure we can
overcome that, to be honest.
Q206 Joan Ruddock: We are all aware
and agreed on the fact that development agencies tend to play
a more significant role in the slow burn disasters than in the
sudden onset disasters. Both of you have spoken about the need
for humanitarian operations to have more regard to the development
pattern. I wonder if you can say what lessons have been learned
by the development agencies in slow-onset disasters about how
to get the development community more involved in disaster management
more broadly?
Mr Scicchitano: There were a number
of lessons learned going into the experience of the Sahel 2005
crisis. Many actors of the humanitarian community and also the
development community got together through the invitation of ODI
but again it happened later in the Sahel with government actors.
One of the points that came out very strongly—this was one
of the questions in the guidance—was are we undermining
or enhancing resilience for future responses. I am not sure that
we have complete agreement but I think many would say that some
of the actions in 2005 in the Sahel served to undermine resilience
and we do not want to make that mistake again, particularly in
the Sahel. We learned some things about nutrition that we did
not know before. Another point is that actors who perhaps are
not nutritionists or do not have a lot of experience in nutrition
but are decision makers learned a lot about nutrition or enough
so that the same mistakes would not be made again. In terms of
enhancing resilience, one of the things we saw in Niger in 2005
was that there was a neglect of the public health facilities.
The public health facilities have heroes who work year and year
out in responding to the needs of communities and yet in many
ways they were put aside. Certain international actors said, "Move
over. We are here now." This is a lesson learned. We need
to work through these structures. In this kind of crisis that
has been present for a long time, by neglecting them we have really
undermined the future response. There is another example that
can be provided in terms of the analysis of information. We set
up structures to analyse information but neglected the governmental
structures that were there already. In West Africa we had Interstate
Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS) that many of
our governments have funded in the past to strengthen the ability
of local governments to respond to crises. This is something that
we did not work through and with enough in 2005 and we learned
that lesson. Development actors were telling humanitarians, CILSS
is here. Why are you not working with CILSS and humanitarian actors?"
In many cases, they were not even aware that that structure was
there.
Dr Twigg: A lot of development
agencies are involved in disaster reduction sometimes without
knowing about it. Back in the 1990s I worked for a British development
NGO which did a lot of work with poor communities in Sahal and
sub-Saharan Africa generally. It was working in Sudan, Kenya and
Zimbabwe and other places. They had a very active food security
programme with farmers living on arid land, helping them to improve
their crop yields in good and bad years. I would have called that
vulnerability reduction and disaster prevention or whatever, disaster
mitigation. They called it food security, but the goals were the
same. The use of language sometimes disguises the fact that we
probably have more in common than we think.
Q207 Joan Ruddock: That is a point
that would be well taken by the Committee because there is long-term
expertise in issues of food security, particularly in drought
and so on. I was very concerned about John Scicchitano's answer
to my previous question on climate change and I wonder if I can
put that to you because international scientists now give us the
strongest impression that all our development aid can be wiped
out, all its results can be wiped out, by the potential for climate
change to cause disasters in developing countries. I wonder if
you have any thoughts on what should be being done by development
agencies to take this factor into consideration, because we were
talking about the timescale which is well within the planning
needs of any development agency.
Dr Twigg: You will find most of
them talk about it.
Q208 Joan Ruddock: Indeed and I wonder
what they are doing.
Dr Twigg: That is the key point.
The problem for them is knowing what does this mean from our programme
in this country at this time or in 10 years' time. The scientists
on international climate change are very cagey in terms of making
predictions especially at sub-regional level where the evidence
can become less certain. They have not in the past looked very
closely at the relationship between natural disasters and climate
change. That will change with the fourth report that is coming
out next year. For an operational agency, I think it is very difficult
because they cannot assess what that is going to mean to them,
except as a broad issue. It is very difficult for them at the
moment to see what the trend is going to be and how much they
need to invest in, say, a particular strategy at a particular
time.
Mr Scicchitano: Going back to
the issue of climate change, although I am not well versed in
climate change at a global level, if I change the terminology
and talk, for example, about desertification that is something
that clearly could be linked to climate change. It is something
that development and humanitarian actors have concerns about.
If you look at, for example, the agro-pastoral band of the Sahel,
it is a band where desertification is occurring and the livelihoods
of those agro-pastors who are relying on both agriculture and
animal raising for their food security are being affected and,
in a way, squeezed down towards the south. That is the population
that was heavily affected by the Sahelian crisis, particularly
by the locust invasion in 2004. Humanitarian actors certainly
were intervening in the locust crisis and again in 2005 but it
is important that the humanitarians also look towards what the
development actors are doing to assist those same populations.
As a specific example, humanitarian agencies were providing restocking
to pastors who lost their herds in the 2005 crisis. At the same
time, development actors were assisting the same populations to
improve animal health. In other words, improving the restocking
mechanism in the longer term. Although perhaps in the immediate
response as I said earlier, without the context, the reaction
of humanitarians is that these people need aid immediately, in
the medium term as we began to understand better the context,
there were more links between those humanitarians and the longer
term efforts, for example, to improve animal health.
Q209 Chairman: WaterAid have had
a group of people visiting this country this week. We were told
in Tamil Nadu that the water table had dropped very heavily because
people had no long-term plan. They had put in a plan that did
not solve the climate problem, although it has rained more recently,
but they had been able to use the resource more effectively and
more efficiently. That is kind of a development programme. Secondly,
we were told in Brazil, when talking about water supplies, they
had done an economic analysis that showed that, for every dollar
spent on delivering clean water to poor people, you save between
$4 and $43 on medical expenditure as well as better survival and
mortality rates and so on. There is no point, for example, in
giving a child treatment for typhoid if they go straight back
to the house where they contracted the typhoid because there was
no clean water. If you are looking at disaster relief, I guess
it is that cultural, psychological change which says this is not
an extra cost; it is a real investment about poverty reduction
and long-term development.
Dr Twigg: I think decision makers
are starting to understand that now because there is more and
more evidence showing that disaster mitigation or disaster reduction,
whatever you want to call it, pays. You can do it in that crude,
cost benefit analysis way if you wish to do. There is also a lot
of field experience—you talked about replenishing water
tables and what have you—from rain water harvesting initiatives
in India especially but also in Africa and other places which
has been hugely successful at very low cost and they are very
easy to maintain.
Q210 Mr Hunt: Could I return to this
question of slow-onset disasters because I think we have been
having a very interesting discussion this afternoon. To me it
is becoming clear, without sounding frivolous, that our total
failure as the international community to be able to address effectively
slow-onset disasters is itself a slow-onset disaster. We have
had climate change, for example, this afternoon which is a slow-onset
disaster. You compare that to the tsunami which raised more money
than we were able to spend. Then you have climate change where
everyone agrees we are not doing enough. You have AIDS which every
year claims eight times as many deaths as the number of people
who died in the tsunami, on an ongoing basis. We have completely
failed to deal with that slow-onset disaster. I want to ask you
very controversially: you said that BBC reporter said he was not
interested in watching that situation because there were not enough
dead bodies. I am sure that was not a reflection of his own personal
callousness; he was simply reflecting what television viewers
are willing to see. Given that we know that, when there is a rapid
onset disaster, it is very easy to mobilise public opinion because
of the strength of the TV images, the main focus of development
agencies and USAID and DFID, the largest donors, should be on
slow-onset disasters and we should focus on that area because
it is at the moment our area of greatest weakness.
Mr Scicchitano: I disagree that
we have completely failed to address slow-onset disasters. Rather
the issue is that our responses are far less visible. They are
far less exciting and far less media worthy but they are there,
building resilience, working with governments, working in the
long-term with slow-onset disasters requiring in some ways slower
responses that produce results over a longer length of time. Again
referring to the example of West Africa, there are considerable
investments that have been made to reduce the vulnerability of
these populations. There have been food security interventions.
USAID has invested heavily in food security interventions that
increase the productivity of farmers, that allow them to irrigate
lands that have not been irrigated before, that allow them access
to better seeds, for example. These are interventions that may
not be as exciting as a woman giving birth in a tree but they
do have impact on the population. By calling them slow-onset disasters
I think we were perhaps looking for the wrong kind of response
and we do not see what is there. In terms of nutrition, there
is a particular response that is incredibly effective and it has
been proven to be effective. In USAID we call it Child Survival.
It addresses the main causes of child mortality of children under
five. They are long-term programmes. They are investments made
again in collaboration with government but they reduce the rates
of global acute malnutrition, which is what the crisis was all
about in Niger in 2005. You probably would not have seen much
about these interventions in the newspapers but they are there
and they are effective. We do need to continue supporting them
as well as informing the public, going back to the issue about
the media, about these kinds of interventions, somehow making
them appropriate for public consumption because they are extremely
important and we do need greater equilibrium between that short-term
response and that longer term, slow-onset response.
Dr Twigg: I would agree with what
John says. There is a huge amount of invisible work in food security,
famine reduction, that has gone on and that is very important.
Policy makers' agendas shift responsively as much as the media
agenda does. At the end of the 1980s the UN set up an international
campaign for natural disaster reduction. There was a huge amount
of international interest. Five years later it was mostly forgotten
because of the Yugoslav crisis, the Great Lakes crisis and so
on. Suddenly, complex political emergencies were what everybody
was interested in. A few years after that we had Hurricane Mitch,
the flooding in Bangladesh and the cyclone in Orissa and natural
disaster of a different kind were back on the agenda. Then it
was 9/11 and so on. There is always a tendency to see the last
major disaster or disasters as the area where you are weakest
and you need to focus. There has been a huge amount of interest
in tsunamis and tsunami early warning systems and all the rest
of it because of what happened at the end of 2005.
Q211 Chairman: When was the last
one of that scale and when will the next one be?
Dr Twigg: You do not know. In
geological time it could be hundreds of years. It does come back
a bit to planning ahead. We know there will be a very large scale
earthquake in a very populated part of Asia in the next 50 years
which probably is not very well prepared for. I am not sure people
are really geared up to that. It is much easier to gear up to
the things that you can deal with in a relatively straightforward
way, such as a lot of the drought and famine reduction work, a
lot of work on flooding which is what affects most people year
in, year out round the world. Some of those bigger issues are
rather harder to tackle.
Q212 Mr Hunt: Mr Scicchitano, where
I am not sure I agree with you is that I am sure there have been
some interventions that have been valuable over time and a lot
of money has been spent on them, but there are quite specific
examples of what USAID does which most people would say are not
helping to prevent slow-onset disasters, such as the fact that
through USAID the World Food Programme gives out a lot of food
packages of grain that comes from the United States rather than
being grown in Africa which does not therefore foster the independence
and the long-term food security that is needed in those situations.
I am not talking about development because obviously DFID, USAID
and development agencies think a lot about development. I am talking
about slow-onset disasters which I categorise as something very
different. Do you not think we need to step up the sophistication
with which we look at slow-onset disasters and in particular the
examples such as the one I gave?
Mr Scicchitano: Absolutely. There
are many areas in which there is room for improvement in our level
of sophistication of understanding, in our level of rationality
of response and, I believe, as actors we are all working on that.
That is one of the reasons that we are here today. On your specific
remark regarding food that USAID provides, USAID provides food
and it is careful to analyse the situation to assure that food
is needed, is an appropriate response and does not negatively
affect farmers and producers in the country where it is being
distributed. I agree with you in that we have quite a long way
to go in terms of improving our sophistication, improving our
level of response, but efforts are under way and I believe drawing
greater links between those relief and development efforts is
going in the right direction.
Chairman: The Committee did have the
opportunity to meet your colleagues when we were in Washington
last year. A point has been made, but I think we have had that
discussion and we will no doubt continue to have it now that we
are back, and so I appreciate that. Can I thank both of you. I
think it has been a helpful and somewhat encouraging discussion,
which does suggest that some things are beginning to come out.
We very much appreciate the fact that you have taken the time
to come and give evidence. Thank you.
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