US Red Tape Keeps Emergency Rations from Hurricane Victims
When the British government arranged to send military ration packs (known to Tommies everywhere as “rat packs”) to Louisiana to help out, this journal ran a rather lighthearted piece about British cuisine in general and the rat packs in particular. It turns out the 500,000 meals that could have been given to the hungry in the Gulf Coast are still sitting in a warehouse where it costs taxpayers $16,000 to store them. The American ban on British beef is the culprit, but the State Department is looking for another needy country to which to ship the food.
The worry is mad cow disease, which is a rather nasty way to die, and which is responsible for as many as 141 deaths in the UK between 1994 and 2004 according to the British health authorities. This is a piffling number, and while even one such death is one too many, it must be put in context. It takes as long as 20 years for the disease to turn up, and in that time, there are no obvious symptoms. While it would be unfair to compare it to the deaths caused by tobacco (which is subsidized by Uncle Sam) or alcohol (some of which is also imported from Britain – notably Scotch, gin and beer), one a month out of a population of 280 million is pretty slim.
However, the real problem appears to be the general inability of the American government to figure out what it was doing. No fewer than 6 bureaux, agencies or departments were involved in the rat pack mess. Even now, no one in the Bush administration is sure which office shipped the stuff to 14 different places in Louisiana. FEMA says the US Agency for International Aid was in charge. USAID says it only did logistics for stuff that the State Department arranged from overseas. On September 8, the US Department of Agriculture put up the red flag -- spokeswoman Terri Teuber said, “no beef or poultry of any kind is accepted from Great Britain. There was a careful review of the law to determine whether there was some flexibility, and at this point that has not been the case. We didn't want to distribute food that's not approved on a daily basis for American consumption to those impacted by the hurricanes. There is no question that different consideration would have been given to the situation if people were going hungry.”
Apparently, the people standing on their roofs in New Orleans begging for food and water merely wanted a different choice of entree and a more stylish brand of bottled water. A spokesman for the British Embassy in DC told the Washington Post (anonymously for diplomatic reasons), “There was a specific request for emergency ration packs, and we responded to that. We had no reason to believe there would be a problem.”
While it may be excessively charitable, perhaps this was merely a case of good intentions gone awry. However, the food has been warehoused for almost six weeks now, and the State Department is trying to give it to Guatemalan flood victims, but there is no way to distribute the stuff there. And Pakistan’s earthquake victims aren’t going to see the rat packs either for cultural reasons – the Hindus there won’t eat beef and the food is not halal for Muslim consumption. A State Department official, as anonymous as the Brit, said, “Everyone wants a happy ending. No one wants them to go to waste. Everyone wants them to be put to good use.” Maybe the food could be sent to southern Iraq – the British troops in Basra won’t refuse it. And maybe next time, the Bush administration can get itself organized enough not to have to beg for help.
© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
Produced using Fedora Linux.
Home
|
|
|