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| Picture credit: NASA |
The chronic suffering unleashed by Haiti's earthquake was exacerbated by the country's environmental degradation. Deforestation has destabilized Haiti's ecosystem, making it unsuitable for farming and vulnerable to natural disasters.
UNESCO announced today that it is launching a campaign to protect the cultural heritage of Haiti. Amid the carnage, this may seem like a low priority, but, as Director General Irina Bokova explained:
This heritage is an invaluable source of identity and pride for the people on the island and will be essential to the success of their national reconstruction.
Thousands lugged heavy sacks of rice through the streets as the first day of a new United Nations distribution system got under way with few snags.The following post is by David Roodman, a research fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD) in Washington, DC.
Last week my colleague Michael Clemens blogged in this space about the "The best way nobody's talking about to help Haitians." So as a complement, here's what I think is the worst way that everybody's talking about to help Haitians: cancelling Haiti's debt.
I am not suggesting that Haiti's foreign creditors should stick to their guns in order to teach the country a lesson about the sanctity of international debt contracts. Canceling or reimbursing Haiti's debt payments over the next, say, five years, just as was done after the Asian tsunami, would make eminent sense. That would constitute debt relief but would not require debt cancellation.
Why not just cancel the debt outright, as the One Campaign, the Jubilee Debt Campaign, and Oxfam have demanded?
Reforming trade and migration policies, even getting donors to respond more effectively to disasters, requires confronting entrenched interests. But activists are at their best when they take on the tough fights. We owe it to Haitians to strive for what is best for them, not easiest for us.
A couple of weeks ago here on Aid Watch, Alanna Shaikh blogged under the title, Nobody wants your old shoes: How not to help in Haiti. Beyond the specific advice, she was voicing a big idea close to Aid Watch's heart: so many aid efforts go awry because the giver decides what the receiver needs.
I fear that calls to cancel Haiti's debt are the old shoes of political activism. Debt relief will hardly help Haiti recover from the quake. And in a crisis, if you're not helping, you're in the way. Let us do the equivalent in the policy realm of sending cash, by advocating reforms that will do far more to alleviate the suffering.
NEIL MacFARQUHAR in a good NYT story this morning (self-promotion alert: I am quoted in the story) notes all the discussion that the quake is an opportunity to sort out all the problems of long-run Haitian development. But an opportunity for whom? Apparently for foreigners. The story mentions some of the proposals for foreign intervention:
Haiti should be temporarily taken over by an international organization
{Bill Clinton as} Haiti reconstruction czar.
"Is it too wild a suggestion to be talking about at least temporarily some sort of receivership?" Senator Christopher J. Dodd, ….Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, echoed that thought, adding, "I think something far more draconian than just us working behind the scenes to prod reforms and those kinds of things is going to be necessary."
This current debate is an ironic echo of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, which is an excessively hysterical rant on how conservative foreigners impose free market doctrine on poor countries when they are reeling from things such as…natural disasters. Beneath Klein's purple rhetoric is the germ of a good idea, however: foreigners should not exploit disasters to bypass local, homegrown choices. The liberal version of the "Shock doctrine" is that disasters are an opportunity to impose their own statist solutions to development.
Even if the recipient of "shock therapy" does not have a democratic government, foreign intervention is also non-democratic. You can't trust foreigners to have the right incentives and the right knowledge – all they will wind up doing is delaying further the homegrown efforts of the locals to solve their own problems, with domestic politics distorted futher by xenophobic reactions against foreign intervention.
Foreign intervention is just another variety of the perpetual fantasy: the benevolent autocrat who will "get development right." We have already seen how this movie ends in Haiti, which has been the recipient of multiple military interventions and grand aid plans over more than a century – with the unhappy results that were on display before the earthquake.
Haitians certainly could benefit from some foreigners providing relief and aid to individual , but only if the foreign providers are humble searchers like Paul Farmer, and not grandiose and coercive foreign planners like those quoted above.
A very refreshing hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Haiti just concluded. Paul Farmer who is Bill Clinton's Deputy UN Special Representative on Haiti, RAND's Jim Dobbins (a UN Dispatch favorite), and Rony Francois, the incoming director of public health for the state of Georgia testified on what is needed for Haiti's long term recovery.
By Myriam Annette, read part 1 of Myriam's
"Thanks to TSF's calling operation, I could call my uncle in Venezuela. It was essential to reassure him about my family, to tell him that we all are alive. For me, the most important thing for survival is to keep the family connections, whatever the situation."
If we wish never to see a "nuclear Haiti," nuclear abolition must happen and it is up to all of us to maintain the pressure on our leadership until it does.
The Haiti earthquake not only collapsed buildings and killed as many as 200,000 people, it also destroyed the already fragile economy around Port-au-Prince. Now that the search and rescue phase has concluded, the UN is trying to jump-start the cash economy in areas affected by the earthquake. To that end, the United Nations Development program launched a "cash for work" program in which Haitians are hired on a day-to-day basis to help clear rubble and clean the streets. From the UN New
Problems with food distribution and infrastructure, rather than a lack of food supplies, are responsible for rising unrest on the ground in Haiti, U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Merten (the man looking into the camera at right) told The Cable in a phone interview from Port-au-Prince.
"The amount of food we have is sufficient; the issue is getting it out to people in a form they can most easily use and eat and getting it to certain distribution points in sufficient numbers," he said.
Merten confirmed that on Monday Brazilian personnel used tear gas on a crowd of Haitians at a food-distribution point. He said that aid groups were reevaluating the system for how much food to send where.
"People need to understand there's a great deal of frustration among people here," Merten said. "They have to wait longer. Their anger is understandable; it's unfortunate."
He also said he completely shared Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's sentiment that she "deeply resented" criticisms by other countries about the military face of the U.S. relief effort.
"The fact of the matter is the military is here because they have the immediate capability to bring humanitarian aid to the area," Merten elaborated. "They're close, they have the capability, that's why they are here."
"I would suggest that other countries maybe haven't thought that through."
The number of flights landing at the Haiti airport has actually gone down recently, but that's not due to a decrease in demand, according to Merten. There has been a rise in "no shows" -- planes that asked for landing clearance but then for whatever reason missed their appointed slots. U.S. Southern Command is still running the airport, but coordinating flight priorities with USAID and the U.N., he added.
Food distribution is the top mission right now, but in a few days that will shift to increasing the amount of temporary shelter. It's been fortunate for the relief effort that not much rain has fallen since the earthquake, but that luck won't last forever, Merten said.
It will still be several weeks, however, before any plans for large-scale reconstruction will be developed. The U.S. is evacuating orphans by the hundreds and the main challenges there are linking up the orphans with the correct foster families and making sure they really are orphans in the first place.
Overall, the aid mission is hampered most by poor roads and facilities that weren't in good shape in the past, but are now also covered in rubble. It takes an hour to travel just 5 miles, Merten said, and traffic congestion is horrendous.
"The infrastructure is a huge limitation here and there's a lack of appreciation of what the infrastructure challenges here are and were even before the crisis occurred."
There are now 56 confirmed American deaths in Haiti and 36 more reported but not confirmed. One embassy official, four local hires, and three dependents of U.S. government employees have perished since the crisis began.
JEAN-PHILIPPE KSIAZEK/AFP/Getty Images
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| Picture Credit: deloitte.com |
"It's time to stop having a conversation about charity, and start having a conversation about justice" says Richard Kim on Haiti's reconstruction and development. The country's vulnerability is not accidental. Since liberation from France in 1804, Haiti has been stymied by a relentless debt-burden. Recently, the IMF announced a new $100 million emergency loan. But Haiti is already bound to $165 million in IMF debt, and limited to the conditionalities imposed along with it.
By Mariko Hall, Consultant, Advocacy (IT Emergency Preparedness and Response Branch)
A new public service announcement on Haiti from the UN Foundation shows how the UN is helping Haiti.
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| Picture credit: CBS News |
Haiti Should Merge With the Dominican Republic FOXNews Haiti, a nation neighboring the Dominican Republic to its east, is on the island Hispaniola. Hispaniola was discovered -- well before what we now call North ... Learning about HaitiBurlington Times News Funds for HaitiSCSU University Chronicle Haiti's troubles preventableRutland Herald Stabroek News all 6 news articles » |
We've covered how technology has shaped relief efforts in Haiti and shown how it has affected our perception of the nation's continuing tragedy. CNN is now offering new perspectives of the devastated nation with three interactive, immersive videos.
The videos were shot over the last week in Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital and largest city, the third of which captures the destruction most strikingly. The technology comes courtesy of Immersive Media, a company that specializes in interactive 360 degree video and helped provide much of the data that powers Google Street View. Their website already had demos of their unique videos, in which the viewer has full control to pan and zoom even as the video plays, but it's good to see the technology being applied to a very current event and displayed on as visible a platform as CNN.com.
The situation in Haiti remains in many ways unfathomable, no matter how many reports or photos or statistics one consumes. But this type of project shows how technology is constantly providing new ways to experience and understand the world. [CNN via Boing Boing]
Newly minted USAID administrator Rajiv Shah stopped by the operations hub of the Haiti crisis response management team on the ninth floor of the Ronald Reagan building Monday morning, as the response effort shifts from lifesaving to food aid and eventually, development.
Shah was accompanied by World Food Programme Executive Director Josette Sheeran, formerly head of the State Department's Economics, Business, and Cultural Affairs bureau. Both officials traveled to Haiti over the weekend and reported that while rescue efforts are giving way to food and medical aid, the long-term needs and plans are still unknown.
"We're just assessing the magnitude of the damage and challenges ahead," said Sheeran. "What's important is the commitment of the world to stand by them beyond the crisis phase, which we're not out of yet... I don't think we yet know the full dimension of the problem."
"Our primary goal for the next few weeks is to support the WFP and support the capacity they have ... to reach as many Haitians as possible with food, water, and other critically needed supplies," said Shah.
WFP has delivered more than 1.5 million rations in the 10 days immediately after the earthquake and is ramping up that flow of meals every day. The rations are mostly what are called High Energy Biscuits so far, but now there is a drive to switch to regular commodities like rice, oil, and salt.
New sea and land routes are being opened up, the U.S. military is supporting food-distribution efforts by helicopter, and the first of a number of landing boats that can bring food right to the beach will arrive soon.
[[BREAK]]The core office pictured here will probably last only until the end of February, said one USAID official who was authorized to speak only on background. Plans for the response management team overall extend to the end of the 2010 calendar year. After that, most ground efforts will be rolled up and all Haiti efforts will probably shift back to USAID's regional bureau, the official said.
Shah gave no specific details about how the U.S. was thinking about the long-term Haiti commitment saying, "We were there before for a long time; we will be there going forward."
USAID is draining funds from its emergency and regular accounts to pay for the mission, but will need that funding replenished sooner rather than later.
"We're hoping on a pretty robust supplemental," the USAID official said.
One major question is over whether USAID really has a say in how the airport in Port-au-Prince, which is managed now by U.S. Southern Command, functions.
"DOD maintains control of the airport at this time," the official said, adding that about 150 to180 flights per day is the maximum rate. A spokesman for USAID said that USAID is involved in setting the priority for which flights get those spots.
Another emerging issue is whether the U.S. is actively searching for and dealing with refugees who may try to get to the United States. No refugees have been caught trying to make their way from Haiti to the United States. That's odd, considering that Haitians who are in the U.S. illegally have been given 18 months of amnesty from deportation, raising their incentive to make the trip.
So is the U.S. is just too busy to catch fleeing refugees? Or has there been some determination made to deprioritize that issue? Shah said the Coast Guard is on the job and closely monitoring the situation.
