The Stingy Emerging Powers

 The United Nations will convene a high-level donors meeting Thursday to prod frugal governments to contribute more to relief efforts in Pakistan, where massive flooding has affected nearly 20 million people but where aid contributions have paled in comparison with previous large-scale disasters. The sluggish response has underscored how difficult it is to mobilize international ...

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 The United Nations will convene a high-level donors meeting Thursday to prod frugal governments to contribute more to relief efforts in Pakistan, where massive flooding has affected nearly 20 million people but where aid contributions have paled in comparison with previous large-scale disasters.

The sluggish response has underscored how difficult it is to mobilize international relief for slow-building natural disasters that, unlike tsunamis or earthquakes, don’t instantly kill tens of thousands. It has also underscored the degree to which emerging powers, particularly oil-rich Persian Gulf nations and the new Asian economic powerhouses, have been hesitant to channel their wealth into the United Nations’ emergency relief efforts.

The vast majority of funding for the U.N.-led relief operation so far has come from traditional donors – principally the United States, Australia, Denmark and Britain. Many of Pakistan’s regional allies and neighbors, including China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as other developing countries, have sent only a trickle of aid in the crucial first weeks of the crisis.

"It’s been abysmal, it’s been terrible. There is no relationship between the number of people in acute need of help and what has actually been provided in this first month," said Jan Egeland, a former U.N. relief coordinator who managed the international response to the tsunami in South Asia in 2004."We got more in a single day just after the tsunami than Pakistan got in a month."

Read the full story I wrote with Griff Witte in the Washington Post.

Follow me on Twitter @columlynch

Colum Lynch was a staff writer at Foreign Policy between 2010 and 2022. Twitter: @columlynch

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