Every picture I see shows a group of several thousand people.
They are walking along a road, or boarding buses, or waiting at a train station, or sitting in an empty field at a newly fenced border, or whatever.
Apparently, most of these points have a pretty constant stream of humanity flowing by–starting from the beaches in Greece , and going on for hundreds of miles through small and large towns in Hungary, Slovenia, Austria, etc, etc-while the route changes every few days as one nation’s politicians erect new fences, or a local government provides buses to transport them guickly to some other jurisdiction.
And left behind at each site are huge piles of trash:discarded life jackets on the beach, discarded clothing left in muddy fields, and torn plastic bags of all sorts.
My question is in the title: who is providing all this stuff?
Ten thousand human beings–sometimes walking for days, sometimes crowded into an area the size of football field – need to be fed, they need drinking water, and they need sanitary facilities. Feeding large crowds takes time, money, and most of all----organization.
Obviously the military in any country knows how to do this-- for a while. But this isn’t just one or two temporary sites, and it isn’t like setting up an organized army camp, or a refugee camp where the Red Cross keeps a central warehouse of food. with an office to manage it.
This is a constantly moving flow of people over hundreds of miles, crossing through different local jurisidictions, and crossing national boundaries.
Who is providing the food and water? How are the logistics handled? Who is paying for it?
It’s not millions at present but rather hundreds of thousands.
My impression from media reports is: mainly from civil defence stocks and with civil defence + police personnel + the prepared forces of disaster preparedness volunteers (any European country, even the smaller Balkan countries, needs the ability to temporarily accomodate and feed at least a five-digit number of people unhoused by natural disaster or WWII bomb disposal). Depending on what the standard civil-defence setup for the country is, either the national government or the first- or second-tier subnational division’s administration would be in charge. Plus citizens helping people who have arrived in their front yard, and individual volunteers flocking to camps.
Scaled down for population it’s probably what happens at present in Germany: leaves for police and emergency services cancelled in part, military reservists with logistics specialities called up, active duty soldiers sent to erect tents, retired civil servants asked to return, vendors of tents and accomodation containers mobbed by would-be customers. Germany has received civil defence stocks from as near as Switzerland and as far as North America (e.g. the German Red Cross got 15,000 camp beds from the US and the Canadian Red Cross, flown in 118 tons of airfreight)
According to Chancellor Merkel: One million this year alone [1]. (For comparison: population of Germany: 81,6 million, population of the United States: 322 million).
A prominent SPD politician and former district mayor in Berlin is expecting 10 million refugees until 2020 [2]. I don’t think there has been a population change this radical in Central Europe since late antiquity (→ Migration Period - Wikipedia )