The Celtic League is an accredited non governmental organisation of the UN (Economic and Social Committee) ECOSOC. Manx branch secretary, Allen Moore, in this article welcomes the award of the Nobel Prize to its World Food Programme:
“I switched on the radio at Sunday lunchtime and first found Manx Radio, with Howard Quayle speaking in praise of Chief Constable Gary Roberts for getting some award from the English Monarchy. With all due respects to Mr Roberts and the job that he does, I am not a fan of the Monarchy, British Empire or any other bastion of Imperialism, so I switched over to BBC Radio 4. The BBC has a long running programme called the Food Programme, and this week it was about the United Nations World Food Programme winning the Nobel Peace Prize. They included reports from their work in Yemen, Syria and Ethiopia, all countries with millions of people suffering famine.
https://www.nobelprize.org/…/2020/wfp/acceptance-speech/
“We have written about the War in Yemen on many occasions, including how the Isle of Man allows the UK to train pilots of the Royal Saudi Air Force to practice low flying approaches while attacking civilians in Yemen. The connections between war, political instability and starvation have long been known, and are issues which the World Food Programme’s (WFP) aid campaigns in Yemen, Syria and Ethiopia try to help alleviate. The WFP said on the BBC programme that Yemen has the World’s worst humanitarian crisis. Referring to the WFP’s own website, of a population of 30.5 million people in the country, 24.3 million needed humanitarian assistance in 2020. That was almost 80% of the total population of the country.
Yemen | World Food Programme (wfp.org)
“The BBC programme also mentioned many other problems causing starvation around the World, such as Climate Change and now Covid 19. In November, the UK Government reduced its overseas aid budget from 0.7% to 0.5% of gross national income. People interviewed on the BBC programme pointed out the false economy of the move. Indeed, the more people who are starved from their homes, the greater numbers of refugees there are who desperately try to move to other countries in the hope that they and their families can survive. As we have seen many times, refugees take extraordinary risks to get away from the dangers at home. Money spent through Government aid budgets, charities and the WFP help people stay at home. If not, those that flee to richer countries and survive the journey often end up costing more where they escape to. Cutting aid budgets is false economy.
UK aid cuts ‘unprincipled, unjustified and harmful’, say experts and MPs | Global development | The Guardian
“Some people simply think that “charity begins at home”, but if people in other countries are not helped, many end up needing to flee their own homes, to become a greater cost, if money is all that one thinks is important.
Allen Moore,
Mannin Branch Secretary, Celtic League”
Image: Child hunger in Yemen
Submitted (5th January 2021)
