Thinking about development in Haiti

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There is a fun talk by Paul Farmer on the tragic situation in Haiti on CSPAN's Book TV. The talk was occasioned by Farmer's new book, Haiti After the Earthquake. I recommend that you watch the discussion of the situation in Haiti after the earthquake and cholera epidemic. I want to think about a couple of points he made.

There are lots of explanations of the poverty in Haiti. Mine is historical. The slaves who gained independence from France at the end of the 18th century were ill prepared to build and run a nation. The French imposed ruinous reparations on the fragile Haitian nation in the 19th century. The United States, while many of its states were dependent on slavery, isolated Haiti and contributed to its poverty. United States troops occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, during which time the United States made deep cuts in the Haitian economy in order to repay Haitian international debts. Leaving Haiti in the depression, the United States had not built neither democratic nor bureaucratic governmental institutions in Haiti, leaving the country in the hands of rapacious dictators. Lacking adequate public health institutions, Haiti has been literally plagued by infectious diseases. (I recall that when an effective campaign in the 1940s wiped out yaws in Haiti, the estimated population increased by one third, as people with disfiguring yaws sores were healed and were able to leave the darkness of their houses.) The class system left the vast majority of Haitians poor and uneducated, and allowed a small, relatively affluent and educated upper class to exploit the rest and export human and financial capital. The result has been decades of misgovernment and convulsive revolutionary expression of popular discontent. Then came the earthquake, that destroyed almost all the government buildings and left the most developed parts of the country in ruins.

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Farmer makes the point that the non-governmental organization raise their funds from contributions of well meaning people. He reports that an amazing 50 percent of American households donated to Haitian earthquake relief. The NGOs carry out programs for which they are funded, which are basically short term relief, leaving many areas of long term development unfunded and unsupported. Governments, which pledged large amounts of funding to rebuild Haiti, have actually provided relatively little of that funding. The result is that not nearly enough has been done to build the Haitian infrastructure, much less to build the human and institutional capital needed to continue development. This situation points to a very important problem. Foreign aid generally is not well allocated to promote sustainable development. That problem can be ameliorated by effective government, but the poorest nations are generally the nations most lacking in effective government. Donor coordination committees, which exist for many poor countries, can help to better allocate and coordinate aid, but governments and NGOs are reluctant to give up autonomy and coordination committees are poorly equipped to really coordinate donor efforts.

Are "dependency" and "sovereignty" conflicting concepts? Farmer mentions that Haitians have "an allergy" to any hint of intrusion on Haitian sovereignty. (He is a physician, and uses the metaphor of the body's reaction to an allergen which is an overprotective effort by the immune system.) The word "sovereignty" is obviously related to the word "sovereign", and the Haitian "sovereigns" have obviously been people that you would not want to entrust with your donations. On the other hand, entrusting Haitian sustainable development to the charity of others is clearly a bad idea. I think we need a better concept than "sovereignty" to capture the intent of letting a people and individual people make decisions on their own futures.

How do we bridge the gap between good intentions and lack of institutional capacity? How do we bridge the gaps between the willingness of people of good will to support development, their lack of understanding of how best to do so, and their lack of ability to provide oversight to assure that their contributions are put to best use. Surely, the solution is not to dry up aid and allow people in desperation to try to deal with their problems without aid -- they will die unnecessarily, their children will live with lifetime disabilities. I don't have the answer, but a first step is to continue to ask the question.

Haiti is suffering and we are not responding adequately

Ten months ago an earthquake in Haiti killed an estimated 240,000 people and left one million more homeless. More recently cholera has broken out in a portion of the country, with 440 deaths so far; not only is the epidemic not controlled but there is fear that it will get into other camps and into the capitol, Port au Prince. A tropical storm hit yesterday flooding parts of the southwest of the country, leaving tens of thousands as refugees.

A man on a bicycle rides on a street flooded by heavy rains from 

Hurricane Ernesto in Les Cayes, Haiti, about 90 miles from Port-au-Prince.

The United States apparently has provided $1.1 billion in immediate disaster relief. Almost another $1 billion was promised months ago, but has not yet arrived. Part of the problem apparently was that while the Congress quickly passed the appropriation legislation, it took longer to pass the authorization legislation. Part of the problem apparently is that the State Department is taking a while to get the appropriated and authorized money to Haiti. Senator Kerry has introduced legislation to add another half billion dollars to the aid, but Republican Senator Tom Coburn is holding up that legislation.

In the meantime a million people are suffering, living in makeshift camps, unemployed, with terrible health conditions. $2.6 billion seems like a lot of money, but it is $2,600 per refugee. If it takes 26 months to get a handle on the refugee problem (and it has been ten months already) that will be $100 per month per person. That does not buy much food, much clean water, much hygiene, nor much medical attention even in Haiti. Moreover, a lot of that money does not go directly to benefit the Haitian refugees, but is spent in getting the aid to them (e.g. for American aid workers and Haitian intermediaries). The longer it takes to solve the problems, the less ultimate benefit the money is likely to bring.

It is time to get going and help Haiti more now! The American public would want that to happen if they were keeping up with the magnitude of the problem. Haiti is off our shore, and we are the natural source of humanitarian aid for the country.  Many of the long term problems of Haiti are at least partially due to a couple of centuries of bad U.S. policies toward Haiti.

Video: Artists for Peace and Justice Board Visit Haiti

Check out the Artists for Peace and Justice website.

"Health crisis in Haiti enters a deadly new phase"

Source: FRANK BAJAK, Associated Press via Yahoo! News, February 9. 2010

"The second stage of Haiti's medical emergency has begun, with diarrheal illnesses, acute respiratory infections and malnutrition beginning to claim lives by the dozen.

"And while the half-million people jammed into germ-breeding makeshift camps have so far been spared a contagious-disease outbreak, health officials fear epidemics. They are rushing to vaccinate 530,000 children against measles, diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough."

Comment: As Haiti fades from the media, the problems faced by the Haitians continue! JAD

Why Are We So Often Passive in the Face of Need: A Thought Based on 2 Different Stories

There is an article in the Sunday Washington Post magazine by Shankar Vedantam suggesting that we can worry more about a dog left to die on a drifting ship than about mass murder in Rwanda in part because our brains are simply not evolved to comprehend disasters affecting huge numbers of people. He also summarizes an alternative explanation:

The philosopher Peter Singer once devised a dilemma that highlights a central contradiction in our moral reasoning. If you see a child drowning in a pond, and you know you can save the child without any risk to your own life -- but you would ruin a fine pair of shoes worth $200 if you jumped into the water -- would you save the child or save your shoes? Most people react incredulously to the question; obviously, a child's life is worth more than a pair of shoes.

If this is the case, Singer asked, why do large numbers of people hesitate to write a check for $200 to a reputable charity that could save the life of a child halfway around the world -- when there are millions of children who need our help? Even when people are absolutely certain their money will not be wasted and will be used to save a child's life, fewer people are willing to write the check than to leap into the pond.

Our moral responsibilities feel different in these situations; one feels immediate and visceral, the other distant and abstract. We feel personally responsible for one child, whereas the other is one of millions who need help. Our responsibility feels diffused when it comes to children in distant places -- there are many people who could write that check. But distance and diffusion of responsibility do not explain why we step forward in some cases.

The second article, by Philip Kennicott, is also in The Washington Post.

The images coming out of Haiti are more graphic than those from recent natural disasters, and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's not clear if this reflects the magnitude and proximity of the disaster, or some change in the willingness of newspapers and other media to accurately present the full horror of the earthquake that devastated the desperately poor nation on Tuesday afternoon.

If the media follow conventions (of polity society) that result in our failure to fully appreciate the moral imperative to provide humanitarian aid, that alone might help to explain why we can donate to save a local cat or dog while remaining passive in the face of endemic hunger and disease in poor nations and even in the face of mass death that could be averted.

Of course, the mass media tend to broadcast stories that "interest" their audiences, and apparently their executives feel they can find more audience for the peccadillos of celebrities than for humanitarian crises abroad. Perhaps we should use the political and information tools at our disposal to encourage the media to be more responsible in broadcasting the important rather than the meretricious.

I find the response of President Obama to the crisis in Haiti to be an interesting exception. He has moved the U.S. Government response to cabinet level, rather than leaving it to the much lower level responsibility of USAID as has been done in the past, and has gone to the public to express concern, where many previous presidents have remained mute in the face of foreign disaster.

Could his exceptional behavior be the result of having seen the face of poverty as a child in Indonesia? Could it be a broadening of his definition of the social group with whom he feels solidarity, in part because he has learned to include relatives in Kenya and step-family in Indonesia as family? Could it be because, like Jimmy Carter, he comes from a nuclear family that feels and taught singular humanitarian impulses? Could it be because as a community development worker he lived with poverty and need in the United States?

The continual improvement of the global communications and transportation infrastructure means that people are no longer isolated by geographical location. The growing economic power of modern society means that we have increasing ability to help people in need wherever they are. The continually growing capacity of military technology implies increasing needs to learn to live in peace. It may be helpful to figure out why Obama empathizes with Haitians in order that we may encourage others to do so.

News about UN losses in Haiti

(The) 'UN mission in Haiti made new announcement about its losses during the earthquake. 36 UN workers were killed and 73 injured, 160 are still missing, including 8 workers of UNESCO mission in the country. 57-year old worker of the US State Department Victoria Delong was also among the quake victims in Haiti, US embassy’s three staff members became missing.'

Good for the U.S. Government -- some real help for Haitians

This is just out from CNN:

On Friday morning, the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson is to arrive in Haiti, carrying 19 helicopters and 30 pallets of relief goods......The carrier will help relief workers get around Haiti's ruined and debris-choked roads "to get good where they need to be," (Air Force Gen. Douglas) Fraser said.

Within four days, 700 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne will be in the quake zone. By next Tuesday, three more ships carrying 2,200 Marines and heavy equipment will join them. By Saturday, about 5,000 to 6,000 men and women dedicated to supporting the relief effort will be in Haiti.

And a week from Friday, the USNS Comfort -- a hospital ship staffed by a crew of 64 and 560 hospital personnel -- is to arriv

e.