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| January 4, 2005 |
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| World Bank, IMF, UN Coordinating Tsunami-Relief Plans |
WASHINGTON - January 4, 2005. The World Bank, IMF and the United Nations are coordinating plans to help
tsunami-affected countries make the transition from receiving humanitarian
relief to long-term recovery, Agence France Presse reports.
"This is a crisis of massive proportion, requiring a massive response from the international community," said World Bank President James Wolfensohn, who is traveling to South Asia and Southeast Asia. In the days immediately after the tsunami devastated Indian Ocean coastlines on December 26, the World Bank announced it would commit an initial $250 million for emergency
reconstruction while further financing for longer-term reconstruction
needs is identified. The World Bank's assistance is being tailored to
individual country needs, taking into account the local capacity for
effective implementation and disbursement.
The IMF said separately Monday that it was in contact with authorities in
affected countries and preparing "detailed assessments of macroeconomic impacts and financing needs, country by country." The IMF executive board was briefed Monday on ways in which it can help afflicted countries, including through emergency lending and adjustments to IMF-supported policy programs and associated financing, the Fund's spokeswoman Gita Bhatt said.
Reuters reports that World Bank experts are starting to evaluate what
needs to be done to rebuild shattered communities over the next several
years. World Bank engineers, economists, and development experts should be on the ground from this week to begin work on a recovery strategy.
Margaret Arnold, head of the World Bank's Hazard Management Unit, said
their assessments should give governments, international donors and
lenders an idea of the scale of funding needed to rebuild towns and
villages wiped out by the tsunami.
She said because of the scale of the disaster and since many areas were
inaccessible, bank officials will have to work off loose estimates. Arnold
said the short-term emergency response - temporary shelter for the
homeless, sanitation and clean water - should last between six months to a
year. She added that the challenge was not only providing urgent shelter
and clean water, but to ensure that long-term development was integrated
with reconstruction.
The Associated Press meanwhile notes James Wolfensohn will visit Sri Lanka
this weekend to view firsthand the destruction caused by the Dec. 26
tsunamis that killed more than 30,000 there, the bank said in a statement
Tuesday.
Reuters explains the World Bank said Sri Lanka was proportionally the
worst hit, with most of the population living on the coast and about
two-thirds of the coastline destroyed. Deborah Bateman, World Bank country
director for Sri Lanka, estimated that 800,000 to 1 million people are
homeless, the majority of them very poor. She said the bank had already
released money from existing loan projects to buy medicines, build
emergency toilets and fund government health offices that had run out of
cash. World Bank assistance to Sri Lanka has averaged about $200 million
over the past two to three years. Bateman said $100 million could be added to that in 2005 because of the tsunami. The bank said an assessment team would arrive in the Maldives on Tuesday. Staff from the International
Finance Corp, the bank's private-sector lending arm, which supported
tourism on the island, were expected to help to evaluate financing options
to revive tourism.
In other news, The Wall Street Journal Europe further reports US president
Bush tapped his father George H.W. Bush and former US president Bill
Clinton to lead private fund-raising efforts for victims of the disaster.
George H.W. Bush and Clinton will spearhead a nationwide effort to
persuade American citizens and companies to contribute to private
charities already working in the devastated region, the president said.
The announcement both meshed with Bush's philosophy of limited government
and helped him to deflect criticism that his administration responded too
slowly to the humanitarian disaster.
Meanwhile, in a letter published in the Financial Times, Robert Picciotto,
Director General of Operations Evaluation at the World Bank Group, writes that the initial response to the crisis has revealed a great deal about the state of the global aid system. First, the electorates of industrial democracies are far more inclined to help poor countries than their governments. Second, learning from past experience is not a characteristic of the humanitarian enterprise. Responses to natural and man-made emergencies are invariably fragmented, improvised and inchoate. Third, the extraordinary logistical problems faced in delivering supplies and helping the victims displays the limits of development strategies that neglected infrastructure, ignored horizontal inequalities and concentrated resources on well-endowed countries and regions. A global forum hosted by the UK's Department for International Development in London on January 13-14 will bring together policymakers from the development assistance committee of
the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the European
Union, the United Nations Development Program and the World Bank. The
event offers a timely opportunity to learn from experience: the aid system
urgently needs adjustment to respond more nimbly and effectively to the
mounting human security problems of fragile societies.
Reuters finally notes that the United Nations put the latest death toll in
Asia's tsunami at around 150,000 and warned it could still soar as relief
workers were confronted by huge devastated areas without roads, bridges
and airstrips. "There are many, many more who have disappeared or who are
missing or who are for us nameless as of this stage," said Egeland, adding
that the toll there could rise by tens of thousands.
Source: The World Bank |
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