Haiti After the Earthquake by Paul Farmer

Author:Paul Farmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2011-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

Knowing that billions of dollars have been spent in Haiti over recent years can lead to cynicism about aid effectiveness. Tim Schwartz and several others have offered scathing assessments of the failure of development assistance in Haiti. The challenge before such critics—and I’m one of them—is not just to diagnose the problem but to fix it. Some aid agencies and foundations, paralyzed by failure, have been, at times, reluctant to work in Haiti. But they returned soon enough after the many crises of the past years—storm, flood, famine, quake, displacement, epidemic disease. The trouble was that no famine or refugee crisis or cholera epidemic was solely a natural disaster. They were always social disasters, and almost never local in their etiologies.

This insight is not new: Mike Davis made this point about what he called the “late Victorian holocausts”—a series of famines that occurred not in isolated backwaters but rather in settings firmly integrated into the British Empire.49 These famines were the result of policy decisions made far from the famine-affected areas, just as the late-twentieth-century collapse of Haiti’s rice production was triggered by biased trade rules set in North America and Europe. Small-scale Haitian farmers could not compete with huge First World agricultural subsidies after Haitian import tariffs were removed as part of strangely labeled free-trade agreements. 50 These policies were of course designed without the agreement of Haitian farmers, who then watched their livelihoods slip away within the space of a few years.

Unfair trade policies were nothing new, as any Haitian historian could tell you. What was new, or newly significant, was the rise of a massive machinery of humanitarian assistance, much of it rooted in the private sector. In the last few decades, the number of NGOs exploded, in large part because of the great and unattended needs of the increasingly unequal world. In a damning new book, The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?, Linda Polman dates this explosion not to the nineteenth century, when the Red Cross was founded, but to the Biafran War of 1967–1970, which led to the first televised famine and as stirring an international response as had been seen since protests over Belgian rule in the Congo a century ago.

Polman offers an unsparing ethnography of humanitarian assistance: “Wars and disasters generally attract a garish array of individual organizations, each with its own agenda, its own business imperatives, and its own institutional survival tactics.”51 The Haitian earthquake certainly attracted an array, garish enough, of organizations, each with its own imperatives and plans. By the fall, some of these organizations had already moved on to the next disaster. But plenty more were in Haiti to stay, joining an already dizzyingly complex mix of international NGOs, local NGOs, church groups, and mainstream purveyors of development assistance. Writing just after the quake, Mark Danner called Haiti “the great petri dish of foreign aid.”52 Few would agree that it has been a successful experiment.

The pitfalls of humanitarian aid are becoming better known. Indeed, careful consideration of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.