NAIROBI, 28 June 2010 (IRIN) - The aid world is an acronym jungle. Sometimes there are simply not enough good ones to go around, so they get used twice.
One of those is "CAP".
About 40%, some EUR55 billion (about US$76.5 billion in 2009 prices), of the EC's annual budget is spent on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), a complex system of subsidy and support to farming in the bloc.
Meanwhile, appeals for some of the worst crises in the world are collated in what is known as a Consolidated Appeals Process (also, the CAP). These appeals cover the needs of some, but not all, of the world's most severe emergencies. This CAP raised some US$6.9 billion of an overall US$11.1 billion in humanitarian funding in 2009. Both figures are according to the Financial Tracking System of UN OCHA [http://www.reliefweb.int/fts].
The top five member state recipients of the EC's CAP (using a 2009 average of $1 = EUR 0.719) were allocated some US$49 billion in 2009. These figures are freshly released in June 2010 by farmsubsidy.org [http://www.farmsubsidy.org/], a non-profit group run by a network of European journalists, researchers and activists.
They donated about US$588 million. This, mathematically, is equivalent to just over one percent of their CAP receipts.
Receipts from the EC CAP Donations to the Consolidated Appeals
France 15,288,095,751 33,719,769
Germany 10,430,889,552 119,322,549
Spain 10,352,522,462 104,598,528
Italy 8,130,416,900 33,935,578
UK 5,155,201,160 296,318,489
[ Note: Member state contributions through the European Commission's humanitarian funding department, ECHO, are not included.
Other bilateral and multilateral and non-governmental humanitarian funds not through the CAP system are also not included. ]
Sources: OCHA FTS, www.farmsubsidy.org
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