Archive | February, 2012

Check the Fine Print

20 Feb

A couple of weeks ago, the official American aid giant USAID announced that, at long last, it was going to allow non-US firms to bid on development contracts, potentially opening up its vast reserves of cash to companies actually based in the poor countries these are supposed to help.

This caught my attention, because in two books that explore and criticize the workings of the aid industry — or certainly aspects of it — USAID comes in for a fair share of the flack.

In Travesty in Haiti: a true account of Christian missions, orphanages, fraud, food aid and drug trafficking, anthropologist Tim Schwartz looked at the harmful effects of CARE’s food program in Haiti, part of which consisted of selling American (and Canadian)-grown grain and other foodstuffs on the open market.

Why was a charity engaging in commerce, and competing with poor farmers trying to sell their grains and produce? Well, instead of giving CARE, let’s say, a million dollars to spend on projects, USAID gave it something to sell instead and to earn those million dollars that way. Tim Schwartz — and many others — pointed out the immense harm created by the practice, but it took many years for the charitable organization to finally stop doing this. And according to CARE Haiti’s Yves-Laurent Regis, when it finally did, the resulting reduction in funds saw the firing of over 500 staff members.  (Some of their programs were offloaded to the UN’s World Food Program, and I can only guess from where it is getting its food, but I am assuming most, if not all, of it isn’t locally procured.)

Now I am reading Michael Maren’s The Road to Hell: the ravaging effects of foreign aid and international charity. In it, Maren looks at the play of circumstances unleashed by USAID’s supplying of US-grown food in Somalia in the 1980s. Here too, this influx of grains destabilized and gutted the local agricultural economy, sending peasant farmers into a deepening spiral of penury. How? Working as a food relief monitor, Maren writes, “After checking ledgers at refugee camps, I figured that most of the relief food being sent to the region –probably about two-thirds — was being stolen. Some disappeared from the docks in Mogadishu. Some disappeared from the trucks along the way to the camps. Sometimes entire trucks would leave the port and vanish forever. Most of it, it seemed, disappeared from the camps, sold by camp commanders, who were usually Somali military men, or were taken by … members of the Western Somalia Liberation Front. Along with the food, the WSLF also raided camps for able-bodied young men, unwilling conscripts for their murky guerilla war across the Ethiopian border in the Ogaden desert.”

For Maren, it was all part of complex political strategy on the part of Somalia’s dictator-president Siyaad Barre, to take over the piece of neighbouring Ethiopia inhabited by ethnic Somalis.

Even so, there was so much food being delivered to the camps that the refugees themselves — their numbers hugely inflated so that Siyaad Barre could access ever-larger amounts of it  — were selling the surplus. “We were getting too much food, so we would take it and sell it to buy soap and cloth and kerosene, a refugee named Aden Farah told Maren. “Several refugees opened shops …  and started selling the food. It was cheap, so the people were buying it. And it was cheaper than in Mogadishu, so merchants from the city came to buy the food.”

So the idea that USAID might buy food locally would be a welcome change, right? But unfortunately, the new policy rules are not quite as revolutionary as one might think and, according to the Guardian, “do not extend to US-funded food aid. Under federal law, the vast majority of American food aid must be bought from US suppliers and transported on US ships.” (This also makes the aid fair more expensive for the U.S. tax-payer.)

What’s more, as if such potential good news were being completely disemboweled in the regulatory fine print, food isn’t the only exemption. Motor vehicles and pharmaceuticals must also be purchased from American firms.

In other words, one of the biggest problems caused — as opposed to solutions offered — by USAID remains unchanged and as wrongheaded as ever.

Interview with Camille Chalmers,director of the Haitian Platform for an Alternative Development, or PAPDA

13 Feb

I shouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Chalmers has become a bit weary of journalists coming by to ask him what he thinks of international aid efforts to help alleviate poverty in Haiti. His initial response when I did was to laugh and say, “Of course not.” After all, he’s been saying largely the same thing for many years already. I recently found an article from New Internationalist from 1996 in which he criticized World Bank and other strategies that saw Haiti’s agricultural sector weakened by cheap food imports, the establishment of $3 day factory jobs as a panacea and the proposal to cut the already anaemic Haitian civil service by half. Nonetheless, he did go on to answer the following questions.

You’ve said that in spite of the growth in donor funding, your nation has become poorer, and economically and politically more dependent, and that both the state and national institution have become weaker. Why has international aid not worked well in Haiti?

First of all, international aid is built upon a completely erroneous vision of the country. So you have a kind of category of analysis that is completely off track, that does not correspond at all to reality.  And this is not new. It is something we have lived for a very long time, at least since U.S. occupation of 1915. There is really a considerable gap between the reality we are living and the perception, the vision that comes from abroad.

Secondly, since the 80s, there has been a process of submission to an ultra-liberal vision, or neo-liberal dogmas, which contributed rapidly to the de-structuring or weakening of the national economy. For example, the question of the opening of markets; it is a dogma that suggests that the more you open markets to the exterior, the better it will be. But this has led to a situation where Haiti, which was self-sufficient in food in 1972, has become a country highly dependent on food imports, with imports worth around $US600 million annually.

Also, the model of development associated with the aid is outward looking; based on a vision of an economy of enclaves, or poles of isolated production, that have very little relation to the rest of the economy, and that prioritize the exterior market. … And so financing comes with the vision of stimulating exports. Anything that is geared towards improving or building up the domestic market doesn’t interest donors.

What has been the effect of this neo-liberal strategy?

The period of neo-liberal hegemony is particularly harmful because they have imposed a series of measures, such as financial liberalization, of exterior markets, the privatization of public enterprises, the reduction of the state, etc. that has put us in this situation where we no longer have at our disposal the tools that permit us to get out of the crisis, that would permit us to have a different situation in Haiti.

I would say there is a long misunderstanding between Haiti and the donors, and that misunderstanding became dramatically more severe after the earthquake of January 12th.  It has radically eliminated all the Haitian actors from decision-making spaces. These strategic spaces are all controlled by the exterior.

Do you see a difference between NGOs and the official aid from bi-lateral and multi-lateral institutions?

Obviously the international aid market is composed of several actors. You have the U.S. government. You have the international financial institutions like the World Bank, the International Development Bank and do on. And you have the NGOs. Now, the NGOs are a very diverse world, so it’s hard to reach a global conclusion about them. One can say the most powerful NGOs, those that can marshal the most money, in general align themselves with the international lending institutions, with the dominant vision, which is the neo-liberal vision. You can find small and medium NGOs and that have a different reading, but overall that is not where the weight is.

You referred earlier to the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Fund, and to Paul Collier’s advice on how it should spend its money, as “a caricature of this dilemma.”  Why is that?

It proposes that one entrust the coordination of everything having to do with health and education to bodies outside of the state. All such funds will have a representative from the international community, and you’ll have the NGOs, and a representative of the state. So that is terrible, because it’s the means of assuring that there will never be a state in Haiti. Because in fact, the state is constituted in relation to the population, and this rapport will only exist to the extent to which it is a legitimate state, one that provides you with services, that is useful to you.

How can this legitimate state come to be?

You need two things. One must reinforce the state, reinforce its capacities and its structures, and at the same time one must change the state. One must do the two jobs at the same time. Reinforce it and democratize it, have a state that is open, respectful of rules and laws, etc. It is within that dynamic that one can move away from these contradictions. But by effacing the state and replacing it with something else, at that point, you have a situation that is worse, and you don’t have the possibilities to really construct coherent strategies.

And no, that is not difficult because, in Haiti, one has a very dynamic society, a lot of base organizations that work, that reflect upon, and make propositions. Unfortunately, since 1991, we had a break, but there is still a trend toward forming associations that can serve as a basis, in fact, for that dialogue with a state that is indispensable for cooperation and democratization.

What might be some solutions to Haiti’s poverty, especially when it comes to issues of land tenure and agriculture?

I think that we must have a double strategy, a strategy of reinforcing, accompanying and training small holding peasants, because, in spite of everything, they have shown a very great capacity for resistance.  This country exists, thanks to the small holding peasantry. But these peasant farmers work alone, are isolated and have no technical resources – I think one can improve on that and, at the same time, chose the ecosystems that are favourable to certain types of products, and also rationalize large areas of land, of land belonging to the state.

(Haiti’s mountainous landscape) is a constraint, but at the same time an advantage. Because we have a lot of eco-systems, micro-climates, of which one can take advantage. One must maximize this. We have a very large selection and biodiversity of fruits, of all kinds. We must invest in that, encouraging the peasant to conserve the biodiversity. At the same time, these reserves of productivity should above all connect agriculture to other economic sectors.

(For another interesting analysis of Collier’s views, see this blog post from Oxfam GB’s Duncan Green.)

First Impressions

6 Feb

Before my trip to Haiti, I imagined myself making almost daily contributions to The Global Kiosk, either short- or medium-sized doses of observations, facts and maybe even some analysis. But the longer I spent there, the less easy the wrapping up of my days became. I could blame the shortage of electricity and the wonky laptops at the nearest cyber cafe, or even the debilitating heat and a fairly busy schedule.

 

But the truth is, the longer I spent in Port au Prince, the more complicated and massive the job of taking it all in seemed.

Take CR3, for example, the IDP camp I wrote about in my first (and only!) entry:  further research indicated that many people in it and other camps may not necessarily actually be homeless, as such. Many are, but others stake out spots in the hopes they may get a better home with tenure rights sometime in the future. Or else the few services they get in the camps are better — or at least no worse — than what they had before. (Only recently did I hear a story from a CBC journalist about searching for someone previously interviewed in one camp, and learning that not only was that person not there, but that the family had members living in various camps, in case something better came up in one or another, thus allowing all of them to move.)

Then there is the line that all of the traditional international NGOs I looked into are adhering to. They maintained that their development projects are designed with civil society and local organization actors. Yet if that were true — and had been since they began working in Haiti — then surely one would see some incremental results of better lives and some prosperity in pockets of the country. Only I couldn’t really say I did.

Rather, it is the picture of poverty, one at a level where living in a tent in dusty crowded camp is a legitimate housing option, that is overwhelming. That and the total lack of most essential services, including water — only about 20% of people have access to tap water, electricity — available for a few hours a day, usually in the middle of the night — and garbage collection — basically non-existent. Even street sweepers, of which there are many, can be seen tipping their wheelbarrows of refuse into the nearest stream or canal.

And so a person tends to empathize with a government that doesn’t do anything simply because it is obvious that anyone would wonder where to even begin, especially when there is no funding. Fix the water and sewage systems or the power lines? Pick up the trash or clear the rubble? Build schools, or houses? And if you do build those houses, who gets to move into them: people in camps or people in camps who really have nowhere else at all to go?

No one, moreover, wants to trust the Martelly government to do any of it. And considering how much money President Martelly has spent on new SUVs and travel per diems for himself and his enlarged retinue, how could anyone object? (His ‘solution’ for dealing with the people in the camps so far, for example, has to simply provide them rent money for a year — something that could have been done back in 2010. And only those encamped in public spaces qualify, not people on privately-owned land.)

Complain about the pernicious effect of food aid, which is basically dumping subsidized food from the U.S., Canada and Europe, and you will be told, well, Haiti doesn’t produce enough food to meet its needs. Suggest beefing up agricultural production and you’ll soon find that most Haitian peasant farmers don’t have enough land to produce a surplus. That means agrarian reform should be on the cards, but as one NGO country director told me, “This is a subject that is completely taboo.”

That’s why, for some, the idea of transforming CR3 into a humane housing complex is a fantasy. And it is also why my conversation last Tuesday, my final day in Haiti, with Camille Chalmers of the Platform for the Advocacy of Alternative Development felt refreshingly down-to-earth. We brought the discussion back to role of foreign aid in Haiti. And for Chalmers, its results have been “nettement negatif.”

“If you compare the growth of the volume of aid money with that of the country’s GDP,” he said, “you see very quickly that not only has it not made an important contribution to growth, but that it has had negative effects.”

In future posts, I will put up some interviews with many of the people I met there over the past two weeks. But something beyond those first impressions will definitely have to wait. After all, that is what research is all about.

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