Alex Dupuy, a native of Haiti, is a professor of sociology at Wesleyan University and the author most recently of “The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the Inter-national Community, and Haiti.” A shorter version of this article first appeared in the Washington Post on Friday, January 7, 2011.
By Alex Dupuy
The international community responded immediately and massively to the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010 and killed more than 200,000 people, injured more than 300,000, destroyed more than 250,000 homes, 35,000 commercial, industrial, and administrative buildings, and displaced more than 1.5 million people, 1 million of whom are still living in makeshift shelters in hundreds of camps. The value of the damage has been estimated at between 7 and 14 billion dollars. Thirty-nine countries and people from countries around the world sent money and emergency aid of one sort or another, including doctors, food, medicine, water, temporary shelters, portable hospitals, road and communication repairs, and heavy equipment to remove the rubble.
The Haitian population welcomed and was grateful for the humanitarian response and gesture of international solidarity. By contrast, today Haitians are increasingly impatient, discontented, and saying “they’ve had enough” with the United Nations, the international community, and the Haitian government for the lack of progress in rebuilding the economy and the lives shattered by the earthquake. Their discontent was exacerbated even more since the outbreak of the cholera epidemic last October that has caused more than 3,000 deaths so far and is widely believed to have been introduced in Haiti by a contingent of Nepalese U.N. soldiers.
To understand the widespread popular frustration and discontent that occasionally spill over into violence, it is necessary to separate the helpful and laudable humanitarian response from the short- and long-term objectives of the international community—the United States, Canada, and France; the United Nations; and the international financial institutions (the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Inter-American Development Bank)—in the post-earthquake reconstruction of Haiti. Their objectives and their policies first and foremost aim to serve the interests of these powers and institutions for the benefit of their investors, their firms, their farmers, their manufacturers, and their non-governmental organizations (NGOs). There is a dramatic power imbalance between the international community—under Washington’s leadership—and Haiti. The former monopolizes both economic and political power and calls all the shots. To be sure, the Haitian state and the tiny but wealthy elite who rule the country bear great responsibility for the abysmal conditions of the country—where 2 percent of the population control 26 percent of the national wealth and 76 percent live on less than $2 a day—before the earthquake. These local actors did not create these conditions alone but did so in close partnership with foreign governments and international institutions long involved in Haitian affairs, the same actors in fact who are now in charge of the post-earthquake reconstruction. It is not surprising, then, that this unequal relationship between the Haitian government and its foreign partners would be reflected in the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission (IHRC) whose 26 members are drawn equally from the foreign community and Haiti, and co-chaired by former US President Bill Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive. The IHRC, originally conceived by the U.S.
State Department, has effectively displaced the Haitian government and is in charge of setting the priorities and objectives spelled out in the Action Plan for the Reconstruction and National Development of Haiti. Despite the appearance of equality between the two sides, however, the foreign members of the Commission make all the key decisions.
When members of the Haitian Senate pointed out to PM Bellerive that Haiti had surrendered its sovereignty to the IHRC, he readily conceded that point, but hoped that it could become “autonomous in its decisions” at some point in the future. Haitian members of the IHRC have complained in a public letter that they are being shut out of the decisions of the Commission, as did PM Bellerive who criticized the international community in an interview with the BBC for channeling aid monies to outside agencies and not allowing his government and country to play a bigger role in its own reconstruction. For their part, organizations representing wide cross-sections of Haitian society decried the fact that their voices were ignored in setting priorities for reconstruction.
So far, the IHRC has not done much. Less than 10 percent of the US$9 billion pledged by foreign donors has been delivered, though not all of that money has been spent. Other than rebuilding the international airport and clearing the principal urban arteries of rubble, no major infrastructure rebuilding—roads, ports, housing, communication—has begun. But of the approximately US$267 million doled out so far in more than 1,500 contracts, only 20 of those, worth $4.3 million, or $1.60 out of every $100, have gone to Haitian firms. The rest have gone to U.S. firms, with 23 percent going to two large U.S. firms in no-bid contracts. Most of these firms buy their goods and services almost exclusively from U.S. suppliers even when they are also available from Haitian firms. In short, although these foreign contractors employ Haitian workers mostly on a cash-for-work basis, the bulk of the money and profits go to U.S. firms and are reinvested in the U.S. rather than in Haiti where the spillover effects could spread to other sectors and promote longer-term development.
That same logic applies to the 1,000 or so foreign NGOs, many of them religious, that are operating in Haiti with private and foreign aid monies amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars to provide services ranging from healthcare, schools,lodging, drinking water, sanitation, psychological counseling, and distributing food aid (71 percent of which is imported from the United States). These NGOs provide employment for hundreds of thousands, including the foreign staff who run them, many of whom went to Haiti after the earthquake and know little to nothing about the country and its culture. Their most deleterious effects, both short- and long-term, are that they operate independently of the Haitian government, reinforce Haiti’s dependence on foreign aid, reduce its food security, and sap even more the capacity and responsibility of the Haitian government to provide these services and meet the basic needs of its citizens.
The stage for this increasing dependence on foreign aid, investment, and NGOs was set in the 1970s when the international community, in particular the U.S. and the World Bank, devised their two-pronged development strategies that transformed Haiti into a supplier of the cheapest labour in the region for foreign and domestic investors in the garment industry, and one of the largest importers of U.S. food in the hemisphere. These outcomes were achieved through a series of “structural adjustment” policies that maintained wages low, dismantled all obstacles to free trade, removed tariffs and quantitative restrictions on imports, offered tax incentives to the manufacturing industries on their profits and exports, privatized public enterprises, reduced public-sector employment, and curbed social spending to reduce fiscal deficits.
But while highly profitable for the foreign investors and their Haitian contractors, the assembly industry did little to reduce unemployment, raise the workers it employed above poverty, or promote growth or sustainable development in other sectors of the economy. Similarly, the free trade policies and reductions of tariffs on food imports since the 1980s were detrimental. Whereas in 1986 Haiti still produced all the rice and 80 percent of the food it consumed, by 2008 it produced only 42 percent of its food and imported 80 percent of its rice, making it the fourth largest importer of U.S. subsidized rice in the world.
Reflecting on the free trade policies he pushed on Haiti in the 1990s in testimony to the Foreign Relations Committee in March 2010, former President Clinton remarked that compelling Haiti to cut tariffs on imported rice from the U.S. “may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked [for Haiti]… It was a mistake.” Expanding on his remarks later he also acknowledged that the structural adjustment or neoliberal policies he once championed have “failed everywhere [they’ve] been tried.” Yet, these are the very same policies that his IHRC and the IFIs are recommending for Haiti’s post-earthquake reconstruction. This obvious contradiction would boggle the mind only if one believed that the IHRC/international community have the best interest of Haiti in mind rather than those of their farmers, their firms, their NGOs, and their economies. But it must also be said that for their part the governing and economic elites in Haiti who benefit from the status quo have no alternative to propose and are all too willing to abdicate their responsibilities and eager to point their finger at someone else. Whatever new government emerges from the recent, though flawed, elections will not change that basic reality.
