AID GOING TO WASTE

Hundreds of tons of British food aid shipped to America for Hurricane Katrina survivors is to be burned because US red tape is stopping it from reaching evacuees. Nato ration packs, the same as those eaten by British troops in Iraq, have been condemned as unfit for human consumption. The food, which cost British taxpayers millions, is sitting idle in a huge warehouse after the Food and Drug Agency recalled it when it had already left to be distributed. Scores of lorries headed back to a warehouse in Little Rock, Arkansas, to dump it at an FDA incineration plant.

The Ministry of Defence in London said that 400,000 operational ration packs had been shipped to the US but officials blamed the US Department of Agriculture, which impounded the shipment under regulations relating to the import and export of meat. An aid worker said, "This is the most appalling act of sickening senselessness while people starve. Under Nato, American soldiers are also entitled to eat such rations, yet the starving of the American South will see them go up in smoke because of FDA red tape madness. The world's richest nation couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery and lets Americans starve while they arrogantly observe petty regulations." (Source: Daily Mirror)