Less covered questions on Haiti

By now, I imagine you have read about the devastating earthquake in Haiti this past Tuesday. Since Tuesday, much of the media focus has been on Port au Prince - the country's capital - where poorly constructed homes, schools, churches, hotels, the main political buildings including the Presidential palace, and even the prison were demolished. In the intervening days, most of the city's surviving inhabitants have lived on the streets and in open areas, a space they share with thousands of corpses. Unknown numbers of people remain buried in the wreckage, and it has been reported that, emanating from underneath, the sound of screaming is constant. Since Tuesday, mainstream media outlets have repeatedly charged Haiti's history of political instability and (urban-centered) poverty as local factors severely exacerbating the quake. Undoubtedly, the situation before Tuesday's disaster was tragic and rightfully commands attention. (For a visual illustration, this video is sufficient.) However, the questions that have been less attended to are those concerned with the sources of the country's political instability and penury. That is, as one analyst asked, "Why were 60 percent of the buildings in Port-au Prince shoddily constructed and unsafe in normal circumstances, according to the city's mayor? Why are there no building regulations in a city that sits on a fault line? Why has Port-au-Prince swelled from a small town of 50,000 in the 1950s to a population of 2 million desperately poor people today? Why was the state completely overwhelmed by the disaster?" Thus, to understand fully the roots of Tuesday's catastrophe, Haiti's social and political history requires consideration.

Once France's most productive colony, Haiti won its independence from the French in 1804 after a bloody 12 year war, and in doing so, became the only country in history to be born of a slave revolt. However, facing military threats and refusal of diplomatic recognition, Haiti agreed to compensate France for its 'lost property' in 1825. The amount adjusted to current dollars: $21 billion. This debt took its toll. Haiti did not pay off the debt until 1947, and in many years was forced to direct over 80% of government revenues to servicing it. (This would be akin to the British demanding payment from the newly-independent American colonies following the Revolutionary war.) When considering the country's destitution, remembering that it took Haiti until only 60 years ago to pay off this 'independence debt' is important.

Insofar as debilitating foreign interventions are concerned, the 20th century was equally unpropitious for Haiti. The anti-communism logic of the Cold War moved US foreign policy makers from 1957 to 1986 to support the successive Duvalier dictatorships. Despite absolutely brutal rule, a Caribbean counterweight to Castro was more important to the US than Haiti's state sponsored terror. During the 1970s and 1980s, Haiti complied with US-led, IMF and World Bank free market economic reforms, which, due to the required removal of agricultural subsidies, transformed Haiti from a net exporter of sugar, rum, coffee and rice to a country entirely dependent on imports and foreign aid. Unable to compete with US subsidized industrial agriculture, rural farmers were forced to move to urban centers in search of industrial jobs. Hence the urban population explosion and emergence of megaslums.

After a mass movement in the late 80s successfully removed the second Duvalier dictator from power, populist Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected president in free and fair elections. However, his land reform and market regulation efforts made him unpopular with the US, and in 1991, an American backed coup removed him from the presidency. Three years later, amid growing international discontent with the reigning military government, Aristide was reinstated by a US led international effort. In return however, Aristide agreed to an economic agenda predicated on the privatization of state-run electricity and phone enterprises, as well as further cuts in tariffs. As it became clear that Aristide would not fully implement the economic agenda which Haitians refer to as the "plan of death," he again lost popularity with US policymakers, and again was overthrown by a US sponsored coup. The succeeding presidents have been far more agreeable to free market economic reforms, which has resulted in such deep deregulation as to render the government effectually obsolete. As a result, the country is governed in large part by UN peacekeepers and NGOs which act only in a band-aid-esque manner, unable to address the structural roots of poverty and instability.

In an article published in 1997, Hazard geographer and Wilfrid Laurier University Professor Kenneth Hewitt coined the term "classquake" to characterize the highly uneven distribution of seismic risk in most cities. Discussing the 1978 earthquake in Guatemala City, Hewitt confirms nearly all of the "59,000 destroyed homes were in urban slums built in ravines, above and below steep, unstable bluffs, or on poorly consolidated young fluvio-volcanic sediments. Losses to the rest of the city, and among more expensive homes, were negligible, since they occupied much more stable sites." Given the extraordinary vulnerability of slums and resource-poor cities in the face of natural disasters, perhaps one of the best ways to prevent crises like the one facing Haiti is to focus on alleviating the kind of severe poverty underlying Haiti's catastrophe. A reasonable starting point might be to cancel unsustainable external debt, stop rural immiseration, discourage rapid urbanization, and prevent the building of mega-slums. Though this may seem like a tall order, it is actually quite doable. My hope is that this brief historical outline conveys that the larger problems Haiti faces were created by misguided political and economic policies, and thus can be undone by sagacious ones. Debt cancellation should be an immediate priority. The cessation of multilateral loans conditioned on free market economic reforms should follow. Instead, development and humanitarian assistance in the form of grants and Official Development Assistance (ODA) should be given generously. With international financial assistance, the government of Haiti should re-consolidate its authority as an economic regulator, job creator, and social service provider. Land reform and mass public housing projects would probably also be helpful. In sum, given our inability to prevent earthquakes, I think it would be wise to work on preventing the kind of social and economic destitution that made this quake so overwhelmingly destructive.



For further reading on the linkages between international economic policies and the emergence of mega-slums and mass urbanization, I strongly recommend Mike Davis's 'Planet of Slums'.