Yesterday, I wrote about disaster relief foreign countries have offered to victims of the hurricane and floods. John Quiggan, writing at Crooked Timber, provides an interesting comparison of aid following Katrina and aid following the tsunami.
Ten days after the New Orleans disaster, the US has accepted offers of foreign aid totalling $US1 billion, but most of the assistance is not getting through because of red tape. The total amount given by the US government in response to the tsunami was $950 million (at a comparable point in time after the tsunami, the figure was $350 million).
As a further comparison, here’s a report from December 31, 2004 of aid finally reaching a city in Aceh, close to the epicentre of the earthquake/tsunami that struck 5 days previously. That’s for a more widespread disaster, in the middle of a war zone, in a Third World country, with few roads, and thousands of kilometres from the countries giving most of the aid.
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