US Food Aid Propaganda

[Phil Agre]

i think one of the british articles mentioned the point.
at least i'd heard it somewhere in the last day. but another
possibility is they're telling the truth, and 37k packages
is simply the first installment

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From: "Trei, Peter" <ptrei at rsasecurity.com>
To: cypherpunks at lne.com, "'Matthew Gaylor'" <freematt at coil.com>
Subject: RE: US Food Aid Propaganda
Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2001 10:16:59 -0400


This is one of those things where you can run the numbers.

      ...37500 meals dropped on Sunday. The packages don't
look like they weighed much more than a pound. Lets be very
generous, and say 1 kilo.

That's 37.5 metric tons in one night, max. Sounds like a lot?

According to the World Food Program website (www.wfp.org),
the UN is trying to truck in 52,000 tons a month. Assuming a
30 day month, that's 1733 tons/day.

The US bombing shut down the UN aid delivery for a few days,
(it's now going ahead again, even under fire, because the
need is so critical).

The US airdrops replaced, at the very maximum, less then
2.5% of the food whose delivery was prevented by the
bombing.

I'm reminded of the recent corporate ad from RJ Reynolds,
where they made of deal of delivering some amount (less
then 10 tons, I think) or aid to Kosovo. That amounted to
a single truckload. They then spent many times the cost
of the aid on airtime to trumpet their humanitarian efforts.

Peter Trei

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