UN Unable to Help Darfur

The UN is cutting its food rationing in Darfur in half. Says it doesn't have the money to provide food. And some still think that the UN is the answer to this and other conflicts?

The food program said it had received just a third of the $746 million it had requested from donor nations for all of its operations in Sudan. As a result, individual rations that include grain, blended foods, beans, oil, sugar and salt for people in Darfur, where a brutal ethnic and political conflict has raged since 2003, will be reduced from 2,100 calories a day to 1,050 calories — about half the level the agency recommends.

In March, the agency announced an initial cut of sugar, salt and beans to some Darfur residents, but that reduction did not include grain, blended foods or oil, the rations' main sources of calories.

In recent days, Bush administration officials have repeatedly noted that the United States provides 85 percent of the food aid for the millions of displaced people in Darfur. On Friday, a senior administration official noted that a spending bill under debate in Congress would provide more food aid if approved.

But Adam Ereli, the deputy State Department spokesman, said he did not believe "any one country should have to bear this alone."

"This should serve as a wake-up call to all those other countries that should be contributing," he said.

Other countries around the world simply don't give a damn what is happening in Darfur, and of those that do - many have vested economic interests in maintaining the deadly status quo. Where is humanitarian aid from China or Russia? It wont be forthcoming because they're in tight with Khartoum to supply oil to those countries. Thus, the burden remains on the US to take action, and provide humanitarian relief.

Technorati: darfur, dafur, UN, sudan, chad, janjaweed, and Kofi Annan