Haiti On The Move

On different occasions in this past week, Liberal Bob Rae and CIDA Minister Bev Oda toured Haiti in an attempt to assess the troubled nation’s recovery efforts.  They found both hope and ongoing struggle in the efforts to move the Haitians into a new future.  Perhaps the key issue, as Rae texted me from Port-au-Prince, “is the lack of land reform, no clear rules around property, whole swaths of people disenfranchised and living on the margin.”  This is indeed troubling when one considers it was the way things were before the earthquake struck in January.At the donor’s conference at the United Nations last week there remained the quiet concern over the Haitian government’s ability to oversee recovery efforts.  Helpfully, that same government has finished its assessment and concluded that perhaps the best way to move the island forward is to begin the process of decentralization.  It’s an impressive plan.Things were different in the distant past, where the population was spread out across the entire country and agriculture formed the main engine of the economy.  Numerous smaller ports aided in moving those yields to other parts of the world.  Then through a series of dubious decisions made by international occupiers and poor local political leadership, many of these smaller ports atrophied or were closed down altogether as the rush developed to enhance Port-au-Prince as a major exporting hub.  The port was deeply dredged, opening the opportunity for larger ships.  Over a relatively brief period of time, the capital doubled in population, with substandard buildings erected to handle the influx.  Frequent natural calamities hardly put a dent in that plan, despite the country’s lack of preparedness.  It was a disaster waiting to happen, and it arrived this past January.With UN estimates stating the capital will double again to six million in the next 15 years, the country was clearly headed in the wrong direction - until the hurricane a few months ago.  The devastation appears to have pushed “reset” in everyone’s mind.  Proof of that clearly emerged with the government’s own decentralization plan.  The capital city itself has a fault line running directly through its center and flooding is extreme.  Ironically, the plan to open up new regions of the country has been aided by the more than 600,000 who have already fled the capital for safer zones.Canada needs to be at the hub of decentralization plans.  Rather than putting in billions to reconstruct Port-au-Prince alone, foreign assistance on this occasion must open up the country to new opportunities for resettlement and for resourcing the smaller farmers to plow their fields again in hopes of a more equitable distribution of the island’s wealth.  This was the key request from civil society leaders at the donor’s conference itself and this time we must hearken to them if we want Haitians themselves to buy in to their own future.  It also just happens to be an area where CIDA has some real expertise.With a weak, centralized government, and with the international community’s reticence for such major renewal in the past, this could all go wrong … again.  The one key difference this time from other efforts is that most of the capital city has been destroyed, in just 37 seconds, and a large portion of its population has already left.  For the first time, natural disaster has forced the donor community to move in the proper direction.As Bob Rae put it later on in his message: “This is a project for life and not for a couple of years.”  A shrewd observer of the human condition, Rae, like so many others, including Bev Oda, realizes moving entire populations and providing them all the necessities required for productive lives will test the very will of Haitians and Canadians themselves.  But at least we now have a plan, designed by Haitians themselves.