HAITI 2013
Why?
Why does
Haiti remain, year after year, leader after leader, hope after dashed hope,
program after program, perpetually a candidate for the top place, the most
impoverished and wretched of the three or four conspicuously failed nations of
the world? Why is there no reprieve
despite the millions, billions in fact, in aid and the activities of countless benevolent agencies and the
sympathy of all the world? Why? Why? Why?
Philippe
Girard, an historian with a background of experience in the French Caribbean,
has provided a richly detailed political and economic history of the nation in
a 2010 book: Haiti: The Tumultuous
History – From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation.. It is a fluent, astonishing
account of the contagion of corruption including mass murders that have dogged successive
regimes in Haiti’s 500 year history. Even Aristide, who started as an humble
priest, three times arrived as President and found himself drawn into the
murderous culture of his predecessors and competitors in ultimately losing
attempts to stay in office.
The erosion
of public purpose and public welfare in favor of personal interest and welfare
was persistent if not universal. Over-population
and a chaotic free market destroyed the landscape, the fuel supply, the water
system, the fisheries and ate all the agricultural land under slums and
erosion. Storms, the flood of September 19th 2004 following tropical
storm Jeanne, washed soils off the treeless slopes and filled valleys with feet
of sediments. Three hundred thousand were said to have been left without
housing.[1] Fifteen
hundred were killed. It was but one storm.
The
earthquake of January 12, 2010 was
worse. It may have killed 250,000. It left the government and the public in a
hopeless chaos of collapsed buildings and homeless citizens, broken families
and thousands of severely injured survivors. Water supplies were non-existent or
contaminated with sewage. Early in the efforts at recovery cholera, not surprisingly, entered the mix
and added to the mortality[2].
Haiti, the nation, had no resilience, no capacity to restore itself, no
effective governmental leadership and no potential to implement a plan if a
plan for recovery were available. The free market system sold food to those who
could pay, wherever the food came from. Others starved.
Murderous,
brutal governmental corruption in Haiti appears to be contagious and universal
and extends to the destruction of the government itself and its potential for
restoration of the public welfare as a purpose. One cannot avoid a comparison
with current political trends in the US as historic barriers are crossed by political
leaders in and outside government. In
elections distortions and slander on one side invite similar responses from opponents. The process moves
to a newly depraved low in performance
and in expectations. Inside government, when civil rights are abrogated
by an administration, as they have been, a new administration, although
committed to correction, finds it difficult to impossible to stop the machinery
established earlier and the corruption becomes the new standard, the new status
quo. The quality of government erodes and the erosion becomes irreversible.
Education
is ever a victim and has been in Haiti. A viable democracy requires an educated
populace aware of the issues and capable of
understanding the reasons for having a government and how a government
must behave to assure the public welfare. Starving school systems of money,
even closing schools, is an excellent way to destroy all public purpose and
deflect resources to enrich those in office.
So, too, in the US efforts to defund school systems and issue “vouchers”
to be used in any “school” are clear steps in that direction…. and intended to
be.
The
solutions to the Haitian nadir by historical economists including Girard are
stereotyped: move a simple factory to
Haiti and hire the unemployed to build an economic success which will enable a
political and economic recovery. South
Korea is the example, a glowing one, so far successful. But South Korea had not reached the depths of
the Haitian debacle with a virtually totally dysfunctional landscape vulnerable
to any storm and a complete breakdown of social and political order. There are
real environmental limits on economic and political ventures. One essential resource is a reliable system
for supplying clean water. Another is food for all at prices and in
circumstances that assure that those who need food are fed. Both require the functional integrity of the
landscape, the physical, chemical, and biotic integrity of land and water. The
requirement is even more demanding on an island where resources are obviously
finite and the marine resources are a part of the support system of the entire
island. In Haiti the marine resources have been destroyed by the siltation of
coastal waters carried from the eroding landscape. It is a futile hope that civilization
can be restored through a few jobs from a
shot of industrial exploitation without a comprehensive plan for restoring a
functional landscape and accommodating all the human population.
The answer
to “why” is too complicated, too expensive, and too intrusive in that it will
require a renovation in land use, a restoration of functional landscapes, drainage basins that
are stable, land appropriate for small scale agriculture, the re-establishment
of public schooling for all, and rebuilding the infrastructure, the roads and
public buildings required for contemporary civilization. And it will require a renewable
energy supply system. All of these innovations will be futile if there is no
acknowledgement of the necessity for limiting the human population and a plan
for doing so. The challenge is of the order of, but far greater than, the
original Tennessee Valley Authority, to rebuild a landscape and its occupied
places into a sustainable future.
Interest in
success extends well beyond the geographic boundaries of the nation. The world shares not only the human misery of
a failed state but must also respond to the inevitable and continuing hegira in
search of alleviation in any degree..
Few nations are prepared to accept the human overflow which is turned back to intensified
misery at home. Beyond that, the nation is a necrotic sore, a biophysical as well as a social and political
and economic burden on the world as a whole.
The world does not need a model of national failure. Quite the opposite. It
needs an example of restoration, the
Pearl of the Caribbean restored as a model for the New Post-Industrial World
of self-sufficiency, renewable energy,
and closed-cycle living. Where better to do that than on an island? And who can
better do it than the wealthy industrial world as it moves into the post fossil
fueled age?
It can be
done, but the challenge is a large one, far larger than most economic
historians or even practicing politicians are willing to contemplate. It is an
appropriate new vision, a mission for science, politicians and economists, all
focused on rebuilding civilization in the ultimate failed state. No one is in a
better position to show us all how than Jim Kim in the World Bank as he sets
forth in the next stage of his longtime mission in advancing human welfare. The world needs an example of that sort of
success.
Now.
GM
Woodwell
Woods
Hole
January
6, 2013
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