It has been almost a year since the 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, killing an estimated 230,000 people and leaving more than 1.3 million people with just a tent or tarpaulin for shelter.
Now cholera has broken out on the island for the first time in 50 years and the disease is predicted to claim at least another 400,000 lives before it is brought under control.
Confronted with such a catalogue of misery, it is tempting promote a “year zero” approach to reconstruction, reasoning that the whole society should be rebuilt from scratch. But this is both wrong-headed and dangerous. Haiti is perfectly capable of governing itself, with a little outside support – neither military nor economic intervention. The country has an astonishingly resilient state and social structures, with intellectuals poised to design new structures, both physical
and economic. Historically, what has bedevilled Haiti are not natural disasters, but outside interference with its economy and government.
Before the earthquake, under a democratically-elected government, the economy was moving into growth for the first time in decades and malnutrition was on a marked downward trend. Left to its own devices, Haiti can and does govern itself well.
The first round of the presidential elections took place successfully on Sunday November 28, albeit with some disorganisation and violence. Allegations of vote-rigging were later withdrawn by the two leading candidates and a second round is due to take place on January 16.
The trouble is, it has often been in the interests of Haiti’s neighbours to exaggerate the level of instability in order to wield control. In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, the control tower at the airport was badly damaged, so the United States military brought in portable radar. Along with this essential radar, they also sent a tremendous number of personnel. The US deployed 11,000 marines and sailors on ships and 4,700 troops on the ground. Like all military operations, this force prioritised security objectives over humanitarian ones.
Peter Hallward, a Haiti expert who teaches philosophy at Middlesex University, wrote in the New Statesman at the time: “Plane after plane packed with essential emergency supplies was diverted away from the disaster zone, in order to allow for the build-up of a huge and entirely unnecessary military force. Many thousands of people were left to die in the ruins of lower Port-au-Prince, while international rescue teams concentrated their efforts on a few locations (such as the Montana Hotel or the UN headquarters) that could be enclosed within a ‘secure perimeter’.”
There is a very real risk that the reconstruction effort will also be distorted in a more subtle but similar way – that the requirements of foreign capital and the Haitian elite will be prioritised above the needs of the majority of the population in the name of “development”.
One of the key reasons that Haiti’s economy was so weak even before the earthquake was a trade policy designed abroad. Former US President Bill Clinton, now the United Nations’ special envoy to Haiti, publicly apologised last March for forcing Haiti to drop tariffs on imported, subsidised US rice during his time in office.
He said: “Since 1981, the United States has followed a policy, until the last year or so when we started rethinking it, that we rich countries that produce a lot of food should sell it to poor countries and relieve them of the burden of producing their own food, so, thank goodness, they can leap directly into the industrial era. It has not worked. It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas. It was a mistake. I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did.”
It was not only Arkansas rice farmers who benefited from this policy. Investors in the garment re-assembly industry opened factories in Haiti to employ those who could no longer earn a living off the land.
In the earthquake, the Canadian-run Palm apparel factory in Carrefour was one of the disasters deadliest sites, with hundreds of people working late to subsidise their meagre income unable to escape.
Nearly a year later, the reconstruction has been slowed to a crawl by the reluctance of institutional donors to release funds for fear of “corruption”. International NGOs such as Christian Aid have much smaller budgets, but operate under a different philosophy. We have run a development programme there for well over a decade, staffed by Haitian nationals and run in partnership with locally-based NGOs.
The money donated by the British public to us, and through the Disasters Emergency Committee, is monitored by our own staff. In the first six months, it went directly to emergency relief and is now being spent on building permanent housing in the countryside, while simultaneously building up small-scale economic enterprises.
It became clear after the Asian tsunami that there is no point in building new homes for people unless there is a means of earning a living nearby. For this approach to be successful, it is essential that local people are involved in decisions about how to re-build both houses and economic opportunities.
By contrast, the US government has so far transferred a mere tenth of the $1.5 billion reconstruction money it pledged to the World Bank-run Haiti reconstruction fund last March. Without technical assistance from the US, it has simply been impossible for the current Haitian administration, which lost many key personnel, along with dozens of public buildings and essential records, to meet the complex monitoring requirements imposed by institutional donors.
What Haiti needs now is not more economic or political advice, but to be able to spend the money that was already pledged to build new homes and stimulate small-scale enterprises. There is already a great deal of local expertise in this area. It just needs to be trusted.
Sarah Wilson is Christian Aid’s senior international journalist
