*Disaster Relief Supply Management DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.94008*


needed. Relief groups, such as local community organizations, volunteer groups, or individuals are often short of budget to support their rescuing and relief operations. The regular budget provided by the government is minimal and only support the basic regular management. Disaster preparedness, including material, professional training, and community education, is often of the budget shortage. Large funds and donations are largely obtained after the disaster rather than in the earlier pre-disaster stages. The Brookings Institution investigates the hysteretic issues of donor funding, finding that the loss percentage could reach 7–28% per dollar [5]. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) declares that every \$1 the Federal Government invests in mitigation saves taxpayers an average of \$6 in future spending [6], which shows that pre-disaster investment indeed works.

6.Both natural and social environments in the disaster area are always complicated and changing. Locally prepositioned disaster relief inventories are most likely damaged and the nearby procurements are extremely difficult. A large amount of donated relief supplies moves in the disaster relief area need to be carefully inspected, classified, and coordinated. Some of these supplies are often found not much helpful or even useless. In the US 1988 earthquake rescuing process, more than 1000 tons of medical supplies, donated from different organizations, were destroyed or discarded due to the conformity of related regulations. Therefore, complex and ever-changing DRS policies need to be designed based on a combined effect of the political, economic, demographic, and environmental realities of disaster-prone areas. It is reported that many developing countries have strong bureaucracy, weak economic capability, poor transportation network, and slow information systems. New issues appear without any signal, but require disaster rescuing and relieving organizations to undertake non-regular tasks. During the 2002 African flood crisis, most of the disaster-affected countries refused to accept the food provided by the World Food Programme (WFP) as they found that these food products were genetically modified (GM) and forced the WFP to replace them with the non-GM products [7].
