By Ray Fleming
LORD Ashdown was unlucky with the timing of his report on Humanitarian Emergency Response on Monday. At the moment anything except Libya and Japan's nuclear reactors finds it difficult to get a word in edgeways in the media.
But the report is important. David Cameron asked for it after the obvious failure of the emergency response to the Haiti earthquake last year. Ashdown begins by noting that there is currently a perfect storm of climate change, population rise, economic crisis, food shortages, increased seismic activity and political upheaval that is making the world more dangerous than ever -- and the number of natural disasters is increasing year-by-year.
He goes on to say that the United Nations is currently not geared to respond adequately to these emergencies and needs to change its organisation to do so more effectively -- a point of view which has been expressed quite frequently in these pages of the Bulletin in the past, most recently in relation to Haiti.
Paddy Ashdown's involvement in this matter is very welcome and David Cameron would do well to give him an official post to pursue his recommendations in the international community. Under present arrangements the relative failure in each emergency is quickly forgotten and little is done to prepare for the next disaster. That should change.