06/17/2017
2 articles on what is currently happening in HAITI... For those of you who are interested. The first is very uplifting. The second affirms the fact, yet again, that nothing is ever easy in Haiti. Good reading.
(You can either read the texts of the articles that I have included here, or follow the links to the original articles)
http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21723169-new-president-banana-man-trying-out-fresh-ideas-country-desperately-needs
"A time to sow" possible future for Haiti
A new president, “Banana Man”, is trying out fresh
ideas for a country that desperately needs them
Jun 8th 2017 | DESDUNES, ARTIBONITE VALLEY
SWIVEL, clank, scoop, dump. On the outskirts of Desdunes, a town in Haiti’s
fertile Artibonite valley, three enormous excavators sink claws into the
banks
of the muddy Duclos canal. Arching across it, their slender hydraulic arms
uproot small trees and drag them through the clay-coloured water as they
gouge
out mud from the canal bed. They deposit the glistening sludge, mixed
with tall
grasses, on their side of the channel, forming a neat ridge. Bored-looking
policemen lounge in the shade of palm trees, ostensibly to deter thieves
from
stealing the machines’ batteries. Blue-grey herons stand to attention;
cows and
horses graze. Ahead of the excavators, the canal is a mere incision
through the
fens. Behind lies the result of their work: the canal looks wide enough to
accommodate a battleship. Naked boys dive in, seeking respite from the
Caribbean
sun.
Stuart Leiderman [email protected]
Subject: follow-the-money cont'd: a one billion dollar "state within a
state"?
Why don't these two articles jive? Two different countries?
- - - - - - -
http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21723169-new-president-banana-man-trying-out-fresh-ideas-country-desperately-needs
"A time to sow" possible future for Haiti
A new president, “Banana Man”, is trying out fresh
ideas for a country that desperately needs them
Jun 8th 2017 | DESDUNES, ARTIBONITE VALLEY
SWIVEL, clank, scoop, dump. On the outskirts of Desdunes, a town in Haiti’s
fertile Artibonite valley, three enormous excavators sink claws into the
banks
of the muddy Duclos canal. Arching across it, their slender hydraulic arms
uproot small trees and drag them through the clay-coloured water as they
gouge
out mud from the canal bed. They deposit the glistening sludge, mixed
with tall
grasses, on their side of the channel, forming a neat ridge. Bored-looking
policemen lounge in the shade of palm trees, ostensibly to deter thieves
from
stealing the machines’ batteries. Blue-grey herons stand to attention;
cows and
horses graze. Ahead of the excavators, the canal is a mere incision
through the
fens. Behind lies the result of their work: the canal looks wide enough to
accommodate a battleship. Naked boys dive in, seeking respite from the
Caribbean
sun.
The Artibonite is Haiti’s
rice basket, capable of producing enough grain for the whole country. The
rice
grows in standing water, which requires irrigation and drainage. By 2015,
marshes had colonised so much of the canal that its waters had stopped
flowing.
The fields surrounding Desdunes have since lain fallow, costing farmers four
harvests.
“Whenever people see these excavators, they start dancing,” says
Samson Demosthene, the crew’s pot-bellied foreman. “Nothing makes them
happier.” When the work is done, the valley will come back to life.
The dredging fulfils a promise by Jovenel Moïse,
Haiti’s president since
February, who has vowed to make rural areas more productive. That he is
actually trying to keep this promise is startling in a country notorious for
bad government. Haiti’s
long-run economic record is atrocious. In countries that were as poor as
Haiti
in 1981, GDP per person rose by half on average by 2012; in Haiti it
dropped by
40%. After an earthquake in 2010 that killed more than 200,000 people and
cost
120% of GDP, foreign governments and NGOs donated $10bn, about 150% of
GDP. But
donor fatigue has set in and aid has dwindled to the flow rate of the
unexcavated Duclos canal. Even the hurricane that devastated Haiti’s
south-western peninsula in October brought only a drizzle of money.
Haiti has
not emerged from the shadow of the earthquake: amputees are disconcertingly
common on the streets of Port-au-Prince,
the squalid, chaotic capital; 50,000 people remain in tent cities. Mr Moïse
governs from the rump of the presidential palace, whose stately central dome
collapsed and has not yet been rebuilt. Nonetheless, he is the first
president
since 2010 who can move beyond a single-minded focus on reconstruction to
devise a new long-term development strategy for the poorest country in
the Americas.
“I have to deliver results so that people understand that politics is
relevant
to their lives,” he says.
Mr Moïse ran in a protracted election beginning in 2015 as the candidate of
the Shaved-Head Party, so named because both he and the previous president,
Michel Martelly, sport gleaming pates. Mr Martelly’s pre-presidential career
was as a compas singer known as Sweet Micky. His political heir has an
earthier moniker, Banana Man; he is a planter from Haiti’s
remote north-western peninsula. After leading in the first round of a
presidential election, Mr Moïse waited over a year to take office because
the
electoral commission ruled the ballot invalid owing to accusations of
fraud. In
the re-run last November, in which just a fifth of the electorate
participated,
he was elected with 56% of the vote, buoyed by support from the hinterlands.
A new crop of ideas
So far, he has focused on what he knows best: the needs of the countryside.
“We have to feed the people first,” he says. “That’s why agriculture is my
priority.” But growing more rice and bananas will not lift Haiti
out of poverty. Mr Moïse is casting about for new ideas in a country
where few
policies have worked as intended.
One source of fresh thinking bore fruit just after he took office. The
Copenhagen Consensus Centre (CCC), an NGO, completed a study of potential
policies
in Haiti. With
C$2.5m ($1.9m) from the Canadian government, the CCC commissioned dozens of
experts to score and rank a wide range of proposed initiatives by their
return
on investment. After a year of research, the CCC presented its findings
to Mr
Moïse in Port-au-Prince last month.
It has detractors. Its founder, Bjorn Lomborg, irks climate-change activists
by arguing that some efforts to reduce carbon emissions are a waste of money
(though he favours a carbon tax). Some critics accuse him of using shoddy
statistics, a charge he vigorously disputes. He is not responsible for the
calculations that landed on Mr Moïse’s desk, which are the work of
independent
economists.
The CCC’s call for “prioritisation”—concentrating on policies that offer the
biggest bang for the buck—should be well-suited to poor places like Haiti.
It promises to guide governments with cold-hearted maths, no matter how
unsettling the results might be. For example, among Haiti’s
woes is a cholera epidemic that was brought by UN peacekeepers in 2010
and has
killed more than 10,000 people. It might seem wise to vaccinate the entire
country. But Dale Whittington of the University
of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill found that delivering the full two doses of the vaccine to
every Haitian would be both prohibitively expensive and of limited value,
since
the disease has trouble spreading once a minimum share of the population is
resistant. He found that the highest return—a social “benefit-to-cost ratio”
(BCR) of 5.9 to one—came from delivering a single dose to schoolchildren,
whom
the government can easily reach, and counting on the resulting “herd
immunity”
effects to reduce the spread of cholera.
In practice, such calculations are sensitive to researchers’ choices and the
quality of their evidence. Studies that incorporate estimates of positive
knock-on effects or ignore negative ones yield higher BCRs than those
that do
not. The CCC’s models tend to give generous scores to health projects, whose
benefits are measured in “disability-adjusted life-years”, and disappointing
ones to the agricultural initiatives dear to Mr Moïse, whose benefits were
simply assessed on the cash value of a crop.
However, raising the productivity of subsistence farming, as in the
Artibonite valley, will also improve nutrition, an effect that some of the
CCC’s studies do not measure. And investments in health and education,
particularly for children, may provide less value to a country than their
BCRs
would indicate if the beneficiaries emigrate as adults because they
cannot find
jobs. A full accounting of such interactions could significantly change the
rankings. Similarly, distinguishing causation from correlation in social
policy
is an inexact science. All but one of the 85 evaluations in the CCC’s report
were either not based on randomised controlled trials (RCTs), the only
way to
prove that a policy under consideration will work, or sought to translate
RCTs
from other countries to the unique environment of Haiti.
Imperfect information is better than no information, the CCC argues. “What’s
important is not whether the BCR is [precisely] 2.3 or 0.9,” says Brad Wong,
its chief economist; the differences between the top and bottom of the
rankings
are big enough to judge which policies are worthwhile. The policies the
CCC endorsed
most heartily do enjoy widespread support—and Mr Moïse is listening.
The highest BCR comes from fortifying wheat flour with iron and folic acid,
which would prevent 150 infant deaths and 250,000 cases of anaemia a year
for a
trivial overall cost of $5m (see chart). This practice is standard even
in poor
countries. Jamie Marks, who runs Les Moulins d’Haïti, a big flour producer,
says his firm could add the micronutrients within months of the government
specifying a formula. Mr Moïse said he found the value of wheat
fortification
the most surprising of the CCC’s findings, and promised to require it within
half a year. That alone could justify the cost of the CCC’s research.
Another priority is training first responders. Haiti
is prone to natural disasters: it has suffered four times as many as the
neighbouring Dominican Republic
relative to its area. Deforestation makes the country vulnerable to
floods, and
unregulated house-building in vulnerable areas makes them devastating. It
would
cost just over $1m to provide first-aid instruction to volunteers across the
country, which the CCC estimates would save 700 lives a year. Ensuring that
they have access to vehicles and equipment would be more expensive, but
valuable. Brazil,
Venezuela and Cuba
have donated nearly 100 ambulances to Haiti,
but the government has not maintained them or equipped them with oxygen
tanks
and defibrillators. “They’re like ghost ambulances,” says Jean-Pierre
Guiteau,
the head of the Haitian Red Cross.
Easy wins like first-aid instruction are small-scale. Another recommendation
would be transformative and far harder to achieve: reforming Electricité
d’Haïti (EdH), the creaking national power company. Expensive and unreliable
electricity is one of the biggest obstacles to development. Consumption per
person is a paltry 2% of the level in the Dominican
Republic; the price is almost double. EdH
only manages to charge for 30% of the power it generates. The rest is either
stolen or lost to technical faults. Blackouts can last up to 15 hours. To
keep
the lights on intermittently, the government spends 10% of its budget to buy
power for EdH generated at exorbitant prices by local firms.
Mr Moïse acknowledges that “there will not be any development without energy
reform.” He wants to replace EdH’s costly contracts to buy electricity with
public-private partnerships, which would be a step in the right
direction. But
implementing reform would require confronting EdH’s powerful suppliers. Mr
Martelly tried and failed. Such obstacles highlight the limits of the CCC’s
approach: no matter how good an investment may look, making it work requires
competent government. The CCC did not calculate a payoff from developing
better
governance; its costs and benefits are hard to estimate. But its absence is
modern Haiti’s
original sin.
A sorry state
In a report published in 2015, the World Bank asked, “What makes Haiti
Haiti?” Its first answer was succinct: “a social contract is missing between
the state and its citizens.” Since the dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier was
overthrown in 1986, Haiti
has had 18 changes of leadership, of which few were peaceful, democratic and
undisputed. A small business elite has supported fragile governments in
exchange for low taxes and oligopolistic control of key industries,
keeping the
economy uncompetitive and obliging the government to finance itself through
regressive taxes on imports. Perennially short both of cash and professional
civil servants, the state has failed to provide infrastructure, the rule
of law
and services such as health and education. The earthquake made the weak
state
even weaker, killing many civil servants and destroying their records. Most
Haitians who have escaped poverty have done so by emigrating. Many of
those who
stay resort to crime. Violent protests are common, sometimes toppling
presidents and starting the vicious cycle anew.
Mr Moïse agrees that a weak state is the main explanation for Haiti’s
200-year-old poverty trap. To correct that, he says, Haiti
needs political stability first of all. He wants to leave the country’s
“democratic apprenticeship” behind by enacting constitutional reforms to
hold
more elections at the same time. Currently, presidents, senators and
lower-house deputies are elected on different cycles. Perhaps more
contentiously, Mr Moïse would replace the cumbersome semi-presidential
system,
which includes a prime minister, with a purely presidential one. He has
plans
to reform the civil service; he would replace ageing bureaucrats with
energetic
younger ones and set up a new training school. He is trying to improve the
business climate, for example with legislation to cut the number of days
needed
to start a company from 97 to 30 and to allow employers to extend the
work day
by using shift labourers.
Some enterprises, unwilling to wait for a functional state, are taking
matters into their own hands. Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the proposed
Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement provides a business
opportunity: Haiti’s
textiles will continue to enjoy privileged access to the United
States. Investors from places like Taiwan
are moving in. At Lafito, an industrial development 20km (12 miles) up
the glimmering
turquoise coast from Port-au-Prince, a consortium led by GB Group, a local
conglomerate, is building a $1bn state-within-a-state, with a 25MW power
plant,
a data centre for speedy internet access, a reservoir and desalination
plant,
and a container port. Eventually it will include housing and a teaching
hospital.
So far, one of Mr Marks’s flour mills and a cement plant are the only
operations. But Georges Sassine, who runs Lafito, says producers of
apparel and
motorcycles have more demand for factory space than he can accommodate. “The
whole idea is to have Haiti
itself not create problems,” he says, gesturing towards squatters’ homes on
hillsides nearby.
In the Artibonite valley there is a bit more faith. The dredging of the
Duclos canal has shown that the state can contribute to prosperity after
all.
Now farmers need ploughs and trowels, good seeds, access to credit and
crop-storage facilities, say the leaders of a local farmers’ association.
Banana Man still has much to do.
- - -
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Haitian-Textile-Workers-Strike-Enters-Third-Week-20170609-0026.html
Haitian Textile Workers Strike Enters Third Week Their demands include a
minimum wage boost, protections against quota
increases and access to social services.
Haitian textile workers entered their third week on strike Friday, vowing to
continue fighting for better working conditions.
Their core demands include a minimum wage increase from roughly US$5.50 to
US$12.60 per day, protections against quota increases and access to social
services for all workers.
Marxist Humanist Initiative reported that PLASIT-BO, a federation of textile
trade unions affiliated with Batay Ouvriye (Workers Fight), an independent
workers movement, has assisted the strike, which has spread to the
country's four
main cities: Port Au Prince, Carrefour, Ounaminthe and Caracol.
They also noted that production quotas are set high, that factory owners and
management mistreat workers, and that workers' salaries often amount to less
than the current minimum wage.
Apart from these malfeasances, union organizers, cognizant that their
co-workers receive the lowest wage in the Western Hemisphere,
are frequently pestered by management and arbitrarily fired simply for
demanding their legal rights.
"It's gotten to the point where I can't take care of my son. I don't
see any future in this," said Esperancia Mernavil, a garment worker who
belongs to the Gosttra union, told the AP.
Despite working hours that normally range between 12 to16 hours per day,
garment workers, according to It's Going Down, are known to live in debt,
hungry
and on the brink of homelessness.
Still, the Association of Haitian Industries claimed that lone “militants
and syndicalists” were responsible for beating workers, forcing them to join
the picket lines in favor of improved work conditions.
Since the strike began, protesters have been able to close down dozens of
textile factories in Port Au Prince and blocked the road leading to
Toussaint
Louverture International
Airport.
However, deplorable work conditions and salaries in Haiti
aren't entirely internal. According to memos obtained by WikiLeaks in
2008 and
2009, the U.S. State Department blocked a proposal for minimum wage
increase in
Haiti.
In 2008, when the Haitian Parliament started discussing doubling or tripling
the daily minimum wage of 70 Haitian gourdes to keep up with inflation,
roughly
amounting to US$1.75 a day or about 22 cents per hour, the WikiLeaks cables
showed that U.S. Embassy officials started monitoring the minimum wage
during
the same period.
"In 2009, while Bill Clinton was setting up one of the family’s shell
companies in New York, in that same year Hillary Clinton was at the State
Department working with U.S. corporations to pressure Haiti not to raise the
minimum wage to 61 cents an hour from 24 cents," Lee Camp, an activist of
RT’s Redacted Tonight told PolitiFact.
The memos show that U.S.
embassy officials in Haiti
opposed the wage hike and met multiple times with factory owners who lobbied
against it to the Haitian president.
In 2011, nearly 2,000 WikiLeaks cables made available
to The Nation and Haiti Liberte, a weekly newspaper in Port-au-Prince, also
concluded that the "U.S. Embassy in Haiti worked closely with factory
owners contracted by Levi’s, Hanes and Fruit of the Loom to aggressively
block
a paltry minimum wage increase."
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A new president, “Banana Man”, is trying out fresh ideas for a country that desperately needs them
