Tag Archives: Haiti

The Road to ‘Ivwa’

24 May

The Experimental Coffee Tree Nursery; photo courtesy my interpreter, Jacques Yoldy

The road to Ivoire begins with a right-hand turn from the coastal town of Mont Rouis, and rises steeply and windingly over a continuous bed of rocks, past chalk-coloured cliffs, stony fields and farm women with donkeys. It also leads from the kind of agricultural foreign aid projects that last a few years and may or may not work out very well to a vibrant, people-driven initiative that makes Ivoire, or Ivwa as people spell it in Creole, a truly special place.

It is part of a community of villages where crops are generally pretty good – last year’s severe drought taking a toll nonetheless – no-one goes hungry, water is filtered and clean, seeds are saved and stored to avoid paying the usual 200% interest rates for borrowing, and five schools allow children to study up to Grade 9 instead of Grade 2. There are even literacy classes for adults in the afternoons.

It is also a place where families are much smaller than usual in rural Haiti. “Before the organization,” said 30-year-old Marie- Clemita Jean- Baptiste, “there was a huge birthrate. Women were having children often and had really no control over their sexual domain.” Malnourishment, even kwashiokor, was not uncommon among children.

“Now,” said Marie Clemita, “ we have introduced family planning, the kind of plan that permits us to discuss with the whole family, to  say, this is we are going to proceed.”

The organization she was referring to is – in short form – OPD-8. Since 1994, the peasant farmers of the 8th section of the commune of Archahaie have been forging and refining this effective organization to bring about their own development, with guidance and encouragement from an NGO now known as Parternaires de Development Locale. It took two years of discussions and building small groups of 20 families into blocks, and the blocks into an association of about a thousand families. Together they set up the seed bank, a tool bank, improve their land and do reforestation. A dairy is next on the list.

OPD-8 is so in charge of its own community and regional development, they can actually take foreign aid projects that are not well designed and alter them so that they can be. Take the tool bank. A Canadian NGO called CECI donated the community a number of free tools, but instead of handing them out, OPD-8 sold them – at a subsidized price – to community farmers and used the money to buy more tools. This does a lot more than earn the organization some money; it removes the top-down, “White-Saviour complex” that is inevitably put into play when someone who is poor receives something for free from someone who isn’t.

With PDL, said Pierre Osmil Stiven, “we have been able to work together. We unite to plan the projects that need to be carried out. So we work together to decide what we will do, how much it will cost and what we will accomplish with the projects. There are always lots of discussions so that the final ideas are the ideas of each group, of the community and the NGOs.”

“On the contrary,” with other NGOs, he added, “we didn’t get round to discussions, or to planning what the project is really about. So it was them who imposed it – we’ll get together 500 people and we’ll do this, or that or the other.”

In Ivoire, the results are still coming in. But in many ways, they are  already as obvious as the enormous contrast between the beginning of the road to Ivwa – where farming is like cultivating a gravel pit – and the end: an undulating landscape of verdant foliage,  high up over the brilliant blue waves of the Caribbean Sea visible in the distance.

(A friend of mine made a short video of her journey to Ivoire last March.)

But at least, like the somewhat erroneously named dry Chaco of Paraguay, there were no deep trenches of treacherous puddles – like the one that once had me and an Equinox magazine photographer stuck for several hours in 1992.

Life … at Ste. Catherine Laboure

8 May

Yesterday I spent the day in Cite Soleil, a populous shanty town on the shores of the Caribbean in Port au Prince. Part of the afternoon took me to the Cite’s only hospital, Ste. Catherine Laboure.  It is a state-run hospital with green and cream painted walls and a big wrought iron green gate, and a friend of mine, Dr. John Carroll from Peoria, Illinois, volunteers his time there periodically throughout the year.

So he showed me around: the Salle d’Urgences with its three gurneys and beat-up grey cabinet of meds, the puddle filled ground floor courts and corridors, then up an outer set of stairs to the wards.(There also a few operating rooms but they are in disuse now.)

Ste. Catherine was run for almost two years after the earthquake by Doctors Without Borders. They managed the place, supplied equipment and medicines and offered their services for free. Last December, the Haitian health ministry took it over again and everyone still working there has noticed the difference. With a combination of user fees and inadequate supplies, the flow of patients as diminished considerably, I was told. The user fees aren’t high – and are now dispensed with for children under 5 — but for people with no money, prohibitive nonetheless.

But the really shocking thing about Ste. Catherine is the fact that for a district of 300,000 people, this is all there is: three gurneys, maybe 30 or 40 hospital beds, no OR, and worse, a small, vastly underpaid staff that leaves at 4 pm.

We walked through the upper wards that, not surprisingly, were filled mostly with babies and children. Dr. Carroll told me the nurses there earned about $70 a month. And as we looked around the walls with their peeling paint and uncapped electric outlets and empty oxygen tanks, it struck me that the one good thing the Haitian government might do would be to turn Ste Catherine into a star hospital. Clean it, re-paint it, fix the wiring and install the best equipment. Double the pay of the staff so that it would be a magnet for good doctors and nurses. Keep it open 24 hours a day and do everything in its power to show people not only that it is there, but can be run better by Haitians than the famous foreign doctors of DWF/MSF.

As we spoke, Dr. Carroll suddenly cut himself off mid-sentence and walked over to a tiny baby lying in a yellow-painted iron crib, inert and no longer breathing. As he applied CPR to the delicate chest, I could see the lack of response, the closed eyes, the miniscule lips slowly turning blue. I went for a nurse and Dr. Jeanty, the pediatrician, searched around to find a hand-held breathing apparatus. After what seemed an interminable amount of time, the baby began to breathe again.

The baby’s name was Robertson, and his 16-year-old mother, Genevieve. Shortly after four, the staff having left for their bus home, she remained there, like all the other patients and their family members, alone with her sister and fragile baby. Whether Robertson would make it through the night, no one could say.

Wiki-Solutions for a Hungry World

7 Apr

Sculpture: Natalia Porter

This month AlertNet, the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s news site for humanitarian issues, is posting submissions from the general public for its multi-media special report on  solutions to global hunger. This is my “silver bullet” idea:

A tragic paradox envelops the lives of small holding farmers throughout the Global South. They want to make a living from the land, but the economics of small scale farming force them to migrate to constantly expanding urban slums. Food prices rise as millions of peasant farmers lack the means — from enough land to sound eco-agricultural advice — to produce enough of a surplus to sell to the hungry. The world needs farmers while at the same time they make up the majority of its poor.

Yet the answer to the dilemma rests with peasant farmers themselves, and in ever increasing numbers, they know this. They are organizing themselves in democratic grassroots movements throughout the developing world, not only demanding but also working for change. From Indonesia to Senegal, and from Haiti to Brazil, the landless and the land poor are finding solutions to the contradictions of today’s macro-economic imperatives.

Here are just a few examples: The Serikat Petani Indonesia is not only working with their 700,000 members to reclaim land stolen during the Suharto dictatorship, but encouraging increased yields using organic techniques that cost nothing. In Senegal, regional farmers organizations, like the Union of Peasant Groups of Mehknes, ask all members to surround their plots with trees and to grow the drought-resistant crops their forefathers planted. Participation in Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers Movement, or MST, has permitted more than 350,000 families to own land and to run cooperatives, schools and small enterprises. Even in Haiti, where land is at a premium and instability a seeming fact of life, peasant organizations working with La Via Campesina and Partenaires de Developement Locale are taking the initiative and breaking free from both top-down solutions to improve and manage better production methods. The government of Brazil, for example, is basing all of its agricultural foreign aid to Haiti on advice from the La Via Campesina and the MST.

These are just a few of the many organizations flowering throughout regions we typically associate with poverty and helplessness. Other developing world nations with national peasant organizations include the Philippines, Thailand and Mozambique.  While their members don’t lack ideas, a sense of initiative or  a determination to succeed, finding the funding to expand their outreach is always a challenge.

Meanwhile, little of the billions of dollars affluent nations spend on foreign aid is going to support farmers and their families.  Rather, too many First-World development policies comprise a vision of letting giant agri-business conglomerates take care food production and leaving farming families no choice but to join an already vast labour force that will struggle to survive on cut-rate wages in modern factories and sweatshops. No wonder donors are asking themselves why so much poverty still exists in the countries to which they have been sending their money for decades.

At the same time the effectiveness and purpose of so many aid projects are being questioned, simple solutions are at hand — and have been for quite some time.

Just imagine if those of us in the rich countries could help the millions of small farmers in the developing world achieve land justice and plentiful crops.

Try and picture the results in farming villages when agriculturalists embrace their knowledge and abilities to produce healthy crops to sustain themselves and their urban counterparts.

Ask the average person who donates money to charity, and they are likely to react with enthusiasm at the idea, at the image of productive land, life-giving clusters of woods, decent schools and clinics, and vibrant markets filled with the fruits of the peasant farmer’s labour rather than wasted aid dollars, pounds and euros.

It is time to change the picture of rural poverty to one of rural power. Along with our donations to those NGOs that concentrate on empowering farmers, we can also pressure our governments to switch from foreign aid conditionalities that impoverish Third World economies to ones that insist on meaningful re-distribution of fertile land. In the United States, Canada and Britain, average people can tell their governments that we no longer want our tax money to spent on food dumping but on buying locally produced food for feeding programs and on practical help for farmers. How? Using a number of methods, from social media and the Internet to Amnesty International-style letter-writing campaigns, average people can influence government policies.

Aside from alleviating rural poverty, two immeasurably valuable consequences will come with this. First of all, we will find peasant farmers themselves taking on the task of conserving and protecting local forests and other fragile habitats. Environmental protection is already a hallmark of most if not all peasant movements.

Secondly, as their livelihoods improve, rural populations will feel empowered to demand accountability from their governments, insisting on honest and wise use of their nation’s financial resources.

The rural poor don’t want handouts and they don’t want banishment to dysfunctional lives in a slum. They want to land to till, fair markets in which to sell the fruits of their labour, and respect.  We can and must make it clear to our leaders and policy-makers that we want the same.

What do you think can be done to alleviate global hunger? I would love to hear your comments and your own ideas.

Promises and Debts

26 Mar

No Money for School?
Photo: Star of Hope International

Almost three years ago, I wrote a review of Dambisa Moyo’s book Dead Aid: Why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa.

In it I took issue with her notion that, were poor nation governments forced to come up with their own development dollars through the private sector — an idea that made Ms. Moyo’s book hugely popular among conservative pundits — they would spend those dollars more effectively. But, as I pointed out in the review, it’s not so much the source of aid funding that’s the problem as the kink in the money pipeline where someone important decides what to do with it. In other words, the source of aid money is one matter, but how it is spent is another — a point on which Dead Aid is silent.

Now, I find a case in Haiti where Dead Aid’s purported solution has been put to the test — and seems headed towards failure.

Throughout the city of Port Au Prince, banners hang from lamp posts (which rarely provide any actual light) declaiming President Michel Martelly’s achievement in getting more children into school, and more schools built and repaired. “Pwomes se Det,” it reads along the bottom, just below Mr. Martelly’s smiling face and domed pate. “A promise is a debt.”

The banners refer to a project whereby phone companies charge international users an extra 5 cents a minute, and banks a dollar and half on money transfers, which then go into a special education fund.  According to Digicel owner Dennis O’Brien, at least $11.1 million has already accrued by them and transferred into the fund. The National Bank of Haiti says it has $4.8 million form their so-called ‘Tax on the Diaspora.”

But questions persist — 10 months after the Martelly administration set up the fund — about what exactly is happening to the cash. His former education advisor says it has $28 million. His current education advisor, Dimitri Nau, admits that none of this money has been spent. He also said that more than half of the 903,000 school children were going to school for free had already been doing so before the National Fund for Education had been set up, their fees paid for by the Clinton Global Initiative. The remainder are being funded by the International Financial Institutions, bodies Ms. Moyo criticizes, like the World Bank.

What’s more, according to the general secretary of Haiti’s National Confederation of Educators, teachers have not been paid for months, and the schools are unable to buy any materials for lack of money. “There are teachers who, until now, have not received their salaries for this school year ,” said Lourdes Joseph last January, “because principals are waiting for the funds that are due from the program.”

Before the earthquake, only two thirds of eligible children were going to school, and for the average Haitian family who did mange to enrol their kids, the costs ate up about 40 per cent of their income. Less than a third of them could afford to study beyond sixth grade. And Unicef estimates that 5000 schools in Port au Prince alone — the vast majority of them private — were left in ruins by the earthquake and remain that way.

Digicel’s CEO told the New York Times in January that he was going to do an audit of the Fund, but that could be difficult. A number of bureaucrats seem to be involved in running it, yet none of them — including Mr. Nau — seem to know what’s going on.

So while the promise of a more efficient way to finance national education sounds good, when it comes to Haitian teachers and schools, all they’re seeing is debt. And the compelling need for more public schools, along with transparency in their funding, remains as critical as ever.

Giving and Receiving

4 Mar

Over the past weeks I have been following some of the debates about foreign aid and when — or whether — it is effective. Among the lighter reading, there are also a few blogs I follow, somewhat irreverent, sometimes comical, yet generally knowledgeable, written by — I’m assuming young — people involved in the ex-pat aid world. The other day, they had had me clicking  links to yet more blogs, including a couple that listed, Top 10-style, examples of some bad aid ideas.

Many of these have to do with so-called gifts-in-kind donations, or what their writers call SEDOW — Stuff We Don’t Want — to the poor of the Global South. There’s the guy in the U.S. who wears tee-shirts with different companies’ logos on them for a living (no, I did not make that up) and got the idea of posting a YouTube video getting people to send him all their unwanted T-shirts so he could send “1 Million T-shirts for Africa” in a shipping container to, yes, Africa.

Another subject of some contempt is TOM shoes, a company in California that will donate a pair of shoes (manufactured in China)  to a poor person for every pair a customer buys. Arguments about how there are already plenty of cheap shoes and tee shirts for sale in shops and market stalls through the developing world followed, along with the explanation that sending all that SEDOW can undermine attempts to grow modest domestic economies in those same countries. ((Indeed, according to Charles Kenny, “Garth Frazer of the University of Toronto estimates that increased used-clothing imports accounted for about half of the decline in apparel industry employment in Africa between 1981 and 2000. And those free shoes are another case in point: the founder of TOMS was first inspired to give away free shoes in Argentina, of all places, a nation that certainly has a lot of poverty but is also practically swimming in cows and leather.)

But it are the comments to these blog posts I find interesting, the number of people who take issue with the sort of snarky, ‘don’t-they-know-anything-about-real-life-in the-Third-World’ tone of the arguments. At least, they say, those people donating all this stuff to the needy are trying to do something, while the vast majority of us lazy-assed First World folks don’t even think about it. Why pick on them? Or, as one commenter suggested, why not go back to one of those African villages and take away the tee-shirts or yoga mats or Pop-Tarts and see how happy that would make people?

I admit that this made me wonder how those comment-writers can be so ignorant. Don’t they know that by law, most of the bi-lateral aid money our governments hand out with such self-serving publicity has to be spent in the donor nations themselves? Haven’t they heard about monetization, about the food aid that prices local small-holding farmers out of business, or the IMF conditions in countries like Kenya that reduced a textile industry that once employed 320,000 workers to just 20,000? Don’t they realize that when the National Football League ‘donated’ 100,000 tee shirts proclaiming the Pittsburgh Steelers as Superbowl XLV Champions to World Vision, they got a tax write-off for something that was worthless? Like, do some research, already, before you start excoriating the writers — the bearers of bad,  in a sense of discomforting, news.

But then I thought about how even I, when in Haiti just now, found it difficult not to give some money to little kids on the street. (I drew the line at requests for my sunglasses and baseball cap.) Then an American guy told me about the missionary’s wife who came once a year, changed $100 at a bank for Haitian gourdes and gave it all away as they walked down the street. And how anytime he was back in that town afterwards, he was surrounded by people wanting to know why he didn’t do the same.

I realized then that who probably got the most out of giving away, something that doesn’t really cost us anything is us, the missionary’s wife, or the person who bought shoes knowing someone poor child somewhere was going to get a pair as well. These ‘gifts’ don’t change anything, and certainly not the paradigm in which we are the ones who have stuff and they are the ones who don’t. We come from a culture that invented not just the sandwich but the Dagwood sandwich. We are the ones who have excess, choices, the ability to give, the luxury of not even thinking about poverty. The pale yellow tee shirt with the words “We Love You Grandma” I saw one guy wearing in Port au Prince, or the “McCain for President” one I saw on someone else, may give rise to a nano-second’s reflection on the personal human stories that might have led to their depositing in a donation bin somewhere, but more importantly, they were emblematic of our comfortable lives, of our need to want to do something for the poor and our power to do so — and of the wearer’s bottom-of-the-barrel status in our world.

On a ride back to Port au Prince after visiting a project in Gressier that had already built 100 stone houses for families who had lost theirs in the earthquake, a construction engineer named Lopez told me he thought that the families should put aside something, even 50 gourdes (about a dollar) a month to ‘pay’ for these great solid new homes. He felt it was important that the poor family who got the house, for which they would never been able to afford the materials even though they did help build them, contribute something in return, that it not be free. I had just an hour earlier, though, been speaking with a man who told me that he earned only 100 gourdes a day when he managed to find work on another man’s farm. With ten children, the amount of food he grew himself was only enough for them to eat. There was nothing left over to sell. So, 50 gourdes? It was unlikely he’d be able to manage even that.

More recently I was reading something about the Medicins Sans Frontieres Hospital in Cite Soleil, Port au Prince’s largest slum. Just last December, it was handed over to the Haitian government to run, and it is now charging what we could consider a miniscule amount of money for a consult –  25 gourdes, just a little more than fifty cents. But that was making it suddenly impossible for many people to seek help there, the financial margins of their daily lives already razor thin.

So what’s the answer? I know it’s not the dumping subsidized foodstuffs and SWEDOW and giving sovereign nations loans if they let our manufactured goods flood their markets. I know it has to do with things like better land distribution and jobs that pay more than $3 a day. I know it has to do with structural change.

But that’s the easy answer. Understanding our human urge to give and feel good about it is one thing. Understanding all the implications for the receivers is complicated.

(In this photo: a skit at the inauguration ceremony in Gressier, representing various national actors bringing a much-put-upon nation, portrayed by the woman in the centre, back to life.)

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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