Yasmine Sherif, Education Cannot Wait Executive Director, interacts with students at Lycée National de Petion Ville, where, thanks to ECW investments, students are benefiting from catch-up classes and accelerated education programmes. Credit: ECW

By Joyce Chimbi
PORT-AU-PRINCE & NAIROBI, Jul 26 2024 (IPS)

Haiti is witnessing unprecedented levels of lawlessness and brutality from armed gangs, which target schools and hospitals. The groups have plunged the country into a crisis and apart from the gun violence accusations, disturbing reports of ruthless sexual violence, including gang rape. Millions of children are in harm’s way; many are out of school and it is estimated that between 30 and 50 percent of armed group members are children.

“The country is facing great challenges. You have extreme gang violence, with gangs controlling big parts of the territory and committing sexual and gender-based violence. On the other hand, there are climate change disasters and their severe effects, such as hurricanes and floods, extreme poverty, and there’s been quite a bit of instability over the years,” Yasmine Sherif, Executive Director, Education Cannot Wait (ECW), the global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises within the United Nations, told IPS. 

With most of the country’s schools being private, only slightly over half of Haitians have access to preschool and much fewer manage to go on to secondary education. Over half of the country’s schools lack water or toilets, and three-quarters have no electricity. Nearly 1.2 million Haitian children need urgent life-saving education support.

René Kaëlle, 18, welcomes the Education Cannot Wait mission delegation at the Lycée National de Petion Ville, where students have access to catch-up classes and accelerated education programmes delivered by UNICEF thanks to ECW investments.
Credit: ECW

Sherif lauds ECW’s strategic partners, such as UNICEF and the World Food Programme, who, together with local organizations under the leadership of Haiti’s Minister of Education and new government, are overcoming multiple challenges and undertaking life-transforming humanitarian work targeting internally displaced children and scores of other affected children, such as the poor and vulnerable.

Against this backdrop, ECW, UNICEF and strategic partners have today announced USD 2.5 million, which is ECW First Emergency Response Grant, during a high-level UN mission to Haiti. ECW has been supporting learning opportunities across the country. The new fast-acting emergency response grant will provide life-saving access to quality education for girls and boys impacted by the rise in violence, insecurity and forced displacement.

During a high-level UN mission to Haiti, ECW announced the new grant, bringing the total ECW funding in Haiti to USD 15.8 million. The 12-month grant will be delivered by UNICEF in collaboration with WFP and other local and international partners. The innovative programme will reach close to 75,000 children and adolescents in the hard-hit Ouest (French) and Artibonite or Latibonit (Haitian Creole) Departments.

“The education crisis unfolding in Haiti is dangerously close to becoming an education tragedy. While enrollment rates were already low before the latest escalation of violence, school closures and mass displacement are robbing thousands more children of their opportunity to learn. Hence, UNICEF is grateful to Education Cannot Wait for the continued support and commitment to ensure every child in Haiti has access to quality and safe learning,” said Bruno Maes, UNICEF Representative in Haiti.

Yasmine Sherif, Education Cannot Wait Executive Director, speaks with a displaced child at the Lycée Jean Marie Vincent. The ECW-supported school currently also serves as a displacement site and benefits from hot meals and non-formal education.
Credit: ECW

The compounding effects of climate change, recurring cyclones, and the most recent earthquake are making matters even worse. In all, nearly half of Haiti’s population—some 5.5 million people—is in need of humanitarian aid, and 5 million people are facing acute food insecurity. Since the end of February, the number of displaced individuals nationwide has increased by 60 percent to nearly 580,000.

ECW’s investment includes innovative cash transfers, back-to-school incentives, school feeding programmes, early childhood education, disability inclusion, transformative gender approaches, mental health and psychosocial support, environmental sensitization activities, and other holistic education offerings designed to ensure girls and boys have access to safe and protective quality learning environments.

Nevertheless, the need is even greater and, to leave no child behind, Sherif says “more resources are needed and with speed and, urgency to close the existing funding deficit against the emergency response plan. We are very grateful to the United States, USAID, Canada and other donors that are contributing, but we call upon all donors to help meet the funding gap, and give millions of Haitian children and young people now in harm’s way, lifelong learning and earning opportunities.”

Sherif paints a picture of a country going through a very difficult phase while at the same time having strong goodwill and competence in the government. Skilled teachers and motivated students, even though internally displaced and suffering.”

As an education tragedy unfolds, OCHA estimates show the USD 30 million requirement for the education response as part of the country’s humanitarian response plan is only 27 percent funded. Bringing into perspective the magnitude of the escalating education crises, and the need for speedy, urgent responses.

Sherif told IPS that education will help address many of the challenges facing Haiti today, both in terms of addressing the urgent needs of the internally displaced and affected children and in reining in gang violence, as it will help the young generation make productive contributions to society.

“I am a firm believer that education also embeds many other SDGs. The work that we are doing in Haiti with all our partners will have far-reaching positive outcomes, as it includes school feeding, gender equality, mental health and psychosocial services, academic learning and skills training to provide livelihoods and end extreme poverty,” Sherif says.

“Without the resources required, even more teachers working under very difficult circumstances will leave and, the country could experience a significant brain drain. Let us not lose the window of opportunity that exists today to deliver the promise of a safe, inclusive, quality education for millions of children in Haiti. This includes bringing back to school children absorbed in armed groups.”

ECW is particularly concerned that schools are being closed or used as displacement centers across the country, removing the protective cover that uninterrupted, safe and inclusive, quality education systems offer to children in difficult circumstances. Already, approximately 900 schools are closed in the Ouest and in Artibonite Departments alone, meaning that 10 percent of all schools are closed.

“World leaders must not turn their backs on the girls and boys of Haiti. These children, teachers and families have seen their human rights and human dignity ripped from their hands by brutal acts of violence, disorder and chaos,” Sherif says. “With the power of education, we can protect these girls and boys from the grave risks of sexual violence, forced recruitment in armed groups and other human rights violations. With the power of education, we can lift up an entire nation from a never-ending cycle of hunger, poverty, economic uncertainty and violence.”

ECW works through the multilateral system to both increase the speed of responses in crises, for immediate relief and long-term interventions. ECW and its global strategic partners are calling on world leaders to urgently mobilize an additional USD600 million toward the Fund’s three-year strategic plan, to expand its investments in Haiti and across crisis-impacted countries worldwide, and to reach 20 million girls and boys with the safety, power and opportunity that only a quality education can provide.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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Every day, dozens of migrants from Central America, Haiti and Venezuela come early in the morning to the offices of the governmental Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid in downtown Mexico City to apply for asylum. Mexico is overwhelmed by the influx of migrants, to whom it has begun to apply harsh restrictions. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Oct 27 2021 (IPS)

In September, 31-year-old Yesenia decided to leave her home on the outskirts of the northern Honduran city of San Pedro Sula, driven out by violence and the lack of water.

“The maras (gangs) were threatening me, and it hadn’t rained, there was very little water. I had to leave, I had to go somewhere, anywhere. I want to stay wherever they let me,” the mother of a seven-year-old girl, who was a homemaker in one of the most violent cities in the world, told IPS.

It was the first time she had left her country. She reached the southern Mexican state of Chiapas (bordering Guatemala), and continued on by bus and hitchhiking. “We slept in the bushes, walked, went hungry, got rained on and sometimes froze,” she said, describing the journey she made with her daughter.

Yesenia, who is short and dark-haired with a round face, now lives in an area that she does not name for security reasons, and is applying for refugee status in the capital of Mexico, a country that has historically been a huge source of migrants to the United States as well as a transit route for people from other countries heading there as well. It has also become, over the last decade, a growing recipient of undocumented migrants.

Due to the large number of requests for asylum, which has stretched Mexico’s immigration and refugee system to the limit, it takes a long time for cases to be resolved. Although immigration advocacy organisations provide assistance in the form of money, food, lodging and clothing, these resources are limited and the aid eventually comes to an end.

Driven out by poverty, lack of basic services, violence and climate-related phenomena, millions of people leave their countries in Central America every year, heading mainly to the United States, to find work and to reunite with family.

But in the face of the increasing crackdown on immigration in the U.S. since 2016 under the administrations of Donald Trump (2016-January 2021) and current President Joe Biden, many undocumented migrants have opted to stay in places that were previously only transit points, such as Mexico.

The problem is that Mexico also tightened the screws, as part of the role it agreed with the U.S. to perform during the times of Trump, who successfully pressured the governments of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-December 2018) and current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to step up their own anti-immigration measures. And this has not changed since Biden took office.

Like the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean, Mexico and the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America (Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador) are highly vulnerable to the effects of the climate crisis. Drought and devastating hurricanes drive people from their homes to safer areas or across borders in search of better lives.

Honduras is one illustration of this phenomenon. Since 1970, more than 30 major tropical storms have hit the country, leaving a trail of deaths and billions of dollars in property damage. Hurricanes Eta and Iota struck in 2020. For this year, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) predicted 17 hurricanes on the Atlantic side before the official end of hurricane season on Nov. 30.

In early September, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández also declared a drought emergency, another increasingly recurrent and intense phenomenon in Central America.

The refugee club

Caribbean island nations such as Haiti are also suffering from the climate emergency. The country was hit by Hurricane Elsa in June and by Tropical Storm Fred and Hurricane Grace in August, on top of an Aug. 14 earthquake measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale that claimed thousands of lives.

In 2017, a particularly lethal year, hurricanes Harvey and Irma struck Haiti. As a result, Sadaam decided to leave, heading first to Chile that year and now to Mexico, where he has applied for humanitarian asylum.

“Things got very difficult. The hardware store where I worked had to close because of the rains and I couldn’t work. I can do any kind of job and that’s all I ask for: work,” the 30-year-old Haitian migrant told IPS.

Tall and lean, Sadaam, originally from Port-au-Prince, also arrived in Mexico in September, with his wife and his son, as well as his brother and sister-in-law and their daughter. They are living temporarily in a hotel, with support from humanitarian organisations.

On Oct. 6, the Mexican government deported 129 Haitians to Port-au-Prince on a chartered flight from Tapachula, a city in the southern state of Chiapas. The measure was criticised by social organisations, while the U.N. called for an evaluation of the need for protection of Haitians and the risks of returning them to their country. CREDIT: INM

Climate disaster = displacement

Recent studies and migration statistics show that the paths followed by migrants and climate disasters in the region are intertwined.

Between 2000 and 2019, Cuba, Mexico and Haiti were the hardest hit, by a total of 110 storms which caused 39 billion dollars in damage, affected 29 million people and left 5,000 dead, 85 percent of them in Haiti, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

In 2020, internal and external displacement due to disasters soared in El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti and Honduras. But the international migratory framework has not yet accepted the official category of climate refugee, despite growing clamor for its inclusion.

Armelle Gouritin, an academic at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences-Mexico, told IPS that the scientific community has linked the sudden events to the climate emergency, whose influence on internal and external migration flows is growing.

“There is evidence that they are increasing. It is quite difficult to say to what extent the volume of migration is growing, because there is little quantitative data. It is hard to compare. It tends to be invisible, especially because of slow onset processes such as drought and desertification,” she explained.

In her 2021 book “The protection of internal climate migrants; a pending task in Mexico”, the expert described scenarios linked to migration, such as gradual-onset phenomena, sudden-onset disasters (hurricanes or violence generated by water shortages), relocations decided by the authorities, sea level rise and the impact of renewable energy megaprojects.

As Mexico has become a magnet for migration, measures against immigration have been stiffened. This year, through August alone, immigration authorities detained 148,903 people, almost twice as many as in all of 2020, when the total was 82,379.

Of the current total, according to official data, 67,847 came from Honduras, 44,712 from Guatemala, 12,010 from El Salvador and 7,172 from Haiti.

Deportations are also on the rise, as up to August, Mexico removed 65,799 undocumented migrants, compared to 60,315 in the whole of 2020. Of these, 25,660 were from Honduras, 25,660 from Guatemala, 2,583 from El Salvador and 223 from Haiti.

The Haitian influx was triggered after the United States announced in August that it would halt deportations of those already in the country because of the earthquake, which drew thousands of Haitians who were in Brazil and Chile, where they had migrated earlier and where policies against them had been tightened.

In Mexico, according to official figures refugee applications increased from 70,406 in all of 2019 to 90,314 this year up to and including September, of which 26,007 were filed by Haitian migrants. Migrants from Honduras, Haiti, Cuba, El Salvador, and Venezuela account for the largest number of applications.

Despite the large rise in applications, Mexico only approved 13,100 permanent refugees in September: 5,755 from Honduras, 1,454 from El Salvador, 733 from Haiti and 524 from Guatemala.

On the night of Oct. 7, a military checkpoint found 800 migrants from Central America in three truck trailers on a highway in the state of Tamaulipas in northeastern Mexico, bordering the United States, where they were headed. CREDIT: Elefante Blanco/Pie de Página

Fleeing the climate emergency

The World Bank study “Groundswell: Acting on Internal Climate Migration” warns that Mexico must prepare for the confluence of climate disasters and migration flows, and projects 86 million internal climate migrants in the world by 2050, including 17 million in Latin America.

The report, published on Sept. 13, estimates that the number of climate migrants will grow between 2020 and 2050, when between 1.4 and 2.1 million people will migrate in Mexico and Central America. Mexico’s central valley, where the capital city is located, and the western highlands of Guatemala will receive migrants, while people will flee arid, agricultural and low-lying coastal areas.

Although several international bodies link migration and the climate crisis, the concept of climate migrant or refugee does not exist in the international legal framework.

Gouritin understands the international reluctance to address the issue. “There are three narratives for mobility: responsibility, security and human rights. States are not willing to head towards the responsibility narrative. The security narrative predominates, we have seen it with the caravans from Central America (on the way to the United States through Mexico),” she said.

Few countries are prepared to address the climate dimension of migration, as is the case of Mexico. The general laws on Climate Change, of 2012, and on Forced Internal Displacement, of 2020, mention climate impacts but do not include measures or define people internally displaced by climate phenomena.

In the United States, undocumented Mexicans are experiencing the same thing, as deportations of Mexicans could well exceed the levels of all of 2020, since 184,402 people were deported that year compared to 148,584 as of last August alone.

Yesenia and Sadaam are two migrants who are suffering the statistics in the flesh, as victims of their own governments and the Mexican response.

“I’ll stay wherever I can get a job to support and educate my daughter,” said Yesenia. With refugee status, migrants can work freely.

Sadaam said: “I was offered a job as a cleaner in a hotel, but they asked me for a refugee card. The government told me that I have to wait for the call for the appointment. If I get a job, I will stay here.”

But above and beyond the detentions, deportations and refugee applications, migration will continue, as long as droughts, floods and storms devastate their places of origin.

Haiti’s Environment Minister Joseph Jouthe says that “climate change is a very big terror in Haiti”, and without funds the Caribbean island nation is unable to adapt and mitigate against it. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
MADRID, Dec 13 2019 (IPS)

Haiti’s Environment Minister Joseph Jouthe has compared the climate emergency to a violent act and appealed to the international community for help to fight climate change.

“Climate change is a very big terror in Haiti. It’s very hard for us to deal with climate change,” Jouthe told IPS on the margins of the United Nations climate summit, the 25th Conference Of The Parties (COP25), in Madrid, Spain.

“Haiti is not responsible for what’s going on with climate change but we are suffering from it. We want better treatment from the international community.”

Jouthe said Haiti remains committed to strengthening its resilience to climate shocks and to contributing to the global effort to mitigate the phenomenon.

Haiti is pursuing a four-fold objective in relation to climate change:

• promoting, at the level of all sectors and other ministries, a climate-smart national development;
• creating a coherent response framework for country directions and actions to address the impacts of climate change;
• promoting education on the environment and climate change as a real strategic lever to promote the emergence of environmental and climatic citizenship; and
• putting in place a reliable measurement, reporting and verification system that can feed into the iterative planning processes of national climate change initiatives.

But Jouthe said the country simply cannot achieve these targets without financial help.

“In Haiti all the indicators are red. We have many projects but as you may know [The Caribbean Community] CARICOM doesn’t have enough funding to build projects,” he said.

Patrice Cineus, a young Haitian living in Quebec, said access to funding has been a perennial problem for Haiti.

But he believes Haiti is partly to blame for the seeming lack of inability to quickly receive financial help.

“Haiti, my country needs to build evidence-based policies, and this will make it easier to attract help from the international community,” Cineus told IPS.

“If we don’t have strong policies, it’s not possible. We need research within the country. We need innovative programmes within the country and then we can look for financial support and technical support.

“We cannot have access to funding because the projects we are submitting are not well done. We don’t use scientific data to build them. They are not done professionally,” Cineus added.

Cineus’ theory appears to be substantiated by the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC), which helps CARICOM member states address the issue of adaptation and climate change.

The centre’s Executive Director Dr. Kenrick Leslie said since 2016, under an Italian programme, it is required to develop projects that would help countries adapt to different areas of climate change.

“One of the areas that we have been considering, and we spoke with Haiti, is to build resilience in terms of schools and shelters that can be used in the case of a disaster.

“Funds have been approved but, unfortunately, unlike the other member states where we have already implemented at least one, and some cases two, projects, we have not been able to get the projects in Haiti off the ground,” Leslie told IPS.

“Each time they have identified an area, when we go there the site is not a suitable site and then we have to start the process again.”

While Haiti waits for funding, Dr. Kénel Délusca, current head of mission of a technical assistance project, AP3C, of the Ministry of Environment and Environment and the European Union, said the country remains one of the world’s most vulnerable to climate change.

Scientists say extreme weather events like hurricanes, floods and droughts will become worse as the planet warms, and Island nations like Haiti are expected to be among the hardest hit by those and other impacts of a changing climate, like shoreline erosion.

“The marine environment is extremely important to the Haitian people. There are more than 8 million people living in coastal communities in Haiti,” Délusca told IPS.

“There are more or less 50,000 families whose activities are based on these specific ecosystems. In other words, this is a very important ecosystem for Haiti and different levels – at the economic level, at the cultural level, at the social level.”

Haiti is divided into 10 départements, and Délusca said nine of them are coastal. Additionally, he said the big cities of Haiti are all located within the coastal zone.

“These ecosystems are very strategic to the development of Haiti. The Haitians have a lot of activities that are based on the marine resources. We also develop some cultural and social activities that are based on these environments,” Délusca said.

For poor island countries like Haiti, studies show, the economic costs, infrastructural damage and loss of human life as a result of climate change is already overwhelming. And scientists expect it will only get worse.

Though Haiti’s greenhouse gas emissions amount cumulatively to less than 0.03 per cent of global carbon emissions, it is a full participant in the 2015 Paris climate agreement and has committed to reduce its greenhouse gas emission by five percent by 2030.

In Haiti, more than half of the population of Haiti face hunger while 22 percent of children are chronically malnourished. Credit: Valeria Vilardo/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 23 2019 (IPS)

While news of political scandals and tweets may inundate social media feeds, numerous humanitarian crises have slipped under the radar, leaving victims “suffering in silence.”

In a new report, humanitarian organisation CARE shines a spotlight on global crises that have been neglected—a neglect that has led to dire consequences.

“We see more and more complex and chronic crises competing for public attention,” said CARE International’s Secretary General Caroline Kende-Robb.

“Media coverage has always been a strong driver of funding for crises as well as creating political pressure to protect those in need. With dwindling international coverage, under-reported crises are at a risk of falling completely off the radar,” she added.

In a recent survey by the Aurora Humanitarian Index, 61 percent of respondents from 12 countries said that there were too many humanitarian crises around the world to keep up with. More than half also felt they constantly heard the same stories from the same countries.

Whether the public heard about it or not, over 132 million people worldwide faced hardship as a result of natural disasters and conflict.

Among them were Haitians who have faced a severe food crisis in 2018, yet received the least media attention.

In fact, of the one million online articles monitored between January and November 2018, a little over 500 were about the Caribbean state.

With one of the highest levels of chronic food insecurity in the world, more than half of the population of Haiti face hunger while 22 percent of children are chronically malnourished.

On top of the threat of hurricanes, drought conditions in the Caribbean nation caused reductions in crop production, leaving families without food and thus almost three million people in need of humanitarian assistance.

Marie-Melia Joseph, a mother of eight children, told CARE that all they had was a small family plot and a little money to get food.

“Some days were better than others, but I can’t recall the last decent meal we had,” she said.

According to the 2019 Climate Risk Index, Haiti ranks fourth among countries most affected by extreme weather events. Additionally, a majority of the population live in poverty, earning less than two dollars per day.

In Ethiopia, the escalation of violence forced over one million people to flee their homes, the highest number seen in 2018.

Amreh recounted the evening when she heard gunshots and screams.

“We looked outside and saw people fleeing when we realised something was wrong. My husband went outside to look. That was the last time I saw him,” she told CARE.

“I would give everything to go back to the days when things were normal. I am weak and I depend on help from aid organisations now. I see no future for us,” she added.

After the death of her husband, one of her son’s committed suicide, unable to cope.

In addition to the devastating conflict, drought and food insecurity has also left families struggling to survive.

CARE urged not only international media, but also policy makers and civil society to raise awareness about the many neglected crises around the world in order to help garner funds and aid for those in need.

In 2018, 56 percent of Ethiopia’s humanitarian plan was funded while only 13 percent was funded for Haiti.

“Media outlets, politicians, states and aid agencies need to join forces to find innovative ways to draw public attention to humanitarian needs,” said Kende-Robb.

“Given the challenges the media industry faces with shrinking funds, with coming under attacks that are undermining, and with limited access to some of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, we are all responsible for raising the voices of those affected,” she added.

Salomón Henry, a painter and electrician, has lived for three years in Santiago with his family. He has a five-year residency permit, thanks to a job contract in an exclusive condominium, where he reinstalled the electrical network, among other tasks. In 2014, there were fewer than 1,800 migrants from Haiti; by April of this year there were nearly 120,000, according to official figures. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, May 16 2018 (IPS)

A wave of Haitian migrants has arrived in Chile in recent years, changing the face of low-income neighbourhoods. But this oasis has begun to dry up, thanks to measures adopted by decree by the new government against the first massive immigration of people of African descent in this South American country.

Some 120,000 Haitians were living in Chile in early April, according to official figures, most of them working in low wage jobs in sectors such as construction and cleaning.

These immigrants, with an average age of 30, came with tourist visas, almost all of them since 2014, and stayed to work and build a new life in this long and narrow country wedged between the Andes mountains and the Pacific Ocean, whose dynamic economic growth has made it one of the most attractive destinations for immigrants from the rest of the region in the last five years.

But on Apr. 8, their situation changed radically when the right-wing government of President Sebastián Piñera, in power since Mar. 11, eliminated the temporary visas that allowed them to go from tourists to regular migrants once they obtained a job, and then to be able to bring their families to this country.

Piñera seeks to curb immigration in general – which according to official figures is around one million people in a country of 17.7 million – and of Haitians in particular, with measures which analysts and activists see as discriminatory against the fifth-largest foreign community in Chile, after Peruvians, Colombians, Bolivians and Venezuelans.

From now on, Haitians will have to obtain a tourist visa at the consulate in Port-au-Prince, in order to board a plane bound for Chile. The visa will be valid for 30 days, extendable to 90, and they will not be able to exchange it for a permit allowing them to stay in the country.

By contrast Venezuelans, the other foreign community that has experienced explosive growth, will be able to obtain in Caracas a so-called “democratic visa” valid for one year.

Offsetting the new restrictions, since Apr. 16, all Haitians who arrived before Apr. 8 have begun to be able to regularise their status, in a process that will end in July 2019. Also, starting on Jul. 2, 10,000 additional family reunification visas will be issued over the following year. In total, the government estimates at 300,000 the number of undocumented immigrants in Chile, a minority of whom are Haitians.

The Migration Office on Fanor Velasco Street, near the La Moneda government palace, in Santiago, is crowded with Haitians and other foreign nationals seeking to regularise their migration status, on Apr. 17, a day after a special process was opened as part of measures decreed by the government to curb immigration, which especially affect Haitians. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

For Erik Lundi, 37, who arrived in Chile six years ago from Haiti, the plan “is a very good option. It is very reasonable to give legal status to those who are here.”

“But there is a lot of racial discrimination in the new tourist visa. Only in the case of Haitians is it granted for only 30 days, because Venezuelans have the democratic visa. That is very discriminatory. Why are only Haitians given 30 days? It should be the same for everyone,” he told IPS.

Activists for the human rights of migrants told IPS that in Chile Haitian immigrants face a special cocktail of xenophobia mixed with racism, sometimes disguised as criticism of the fact that their languages are Creole or French, not Spanish.

Salomón Henry, a painter and electrician who arrived three years ago after spending time in the Dominican Republic, the country that shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, told IPS that “I do not see anything wrong, I see the measures adopted by the government as positive,” while Congress approves a reform of the Migration Law, in force since 1975, one of Piñera’s main campaign promises.

Henry agrees that “Chile is saturated with immigrants and if more continue to arrive, it means more poverty for those who are already here. It’s not because I’m already here, but you have to take action for the greater good of all,” he said.

A history of inefficiency

José Tomás Vicuña, national director of the Jesuit Migrants Service (SJM), doubts the effectiveness of instituting the consular visa for tourism for Haitians and eliminating the temporary one, based on the experience of similar provisions adopted for Dominicans in 2012, during the previous government of Piñera (2010-2014).

“When they started requiring a consular visa, more started to arrive,” the director of Chile’s leading migrant rights organisation told IPS.

On Pingüinos Street, in the populous municipality of Estación Central, one of the two that has the largest number of migrants from Haiti in Santiago, a hairdresser from the Caribbean island nation has established a barber shop where people speak Creole and customers are fellow Haitians. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

The SJM predicts that “the influx (of Haitians) will increase across unauthorised border crossing points. And smuggling networks will also grow,” said Vicuña, who noted that “this happens in many countries when access is severely restricted.”

Luis Eduardo Thayer, a researcher at the Central University School of Social Sciences and until 2017 chair of the National Consultative Council on Migration – an autonomous civil society entity eliminated by the Piñera administration – agrees with that view.

“The Dominicans kept coming because they had family here, they had networks and job opportunities and the conditions in their country of origin were not what they hoped for,” he told IPS.

There were only 6,000 Dominicans in the country when their entrance was restricted, compared to 120,000 Haitians, Thayer said, so “the magnitude of the ‘calling effect’ by the labour market and family ties is much greater in the case of Haitians.”

The 3,000-km Chilean border is described as “porous” by migration officials, making it difficult to control irregular entry.

Thayer ventured that as the Dominicans did, Haitians will use a route known locally as “the hole” or “the gap.”

“They take a plane to Colombia and there they set out on a clandestine route to Chile, assisted by people who know the route and charge them money – in other words, a people smuggling network,” he explained.

The expert said it is “discriminatory” for Haitians to be required to obtain consular visas to come as tourists “just because they are Haitians.” “The government’s argument is that they come here using fraudulent means. But it must be acknowledged that fewer Haitians come here than Venezuelans, Bolivians, Peruvians or Colombians,” he said emphatically.

The Chilean Undersecretary of the Interior, Rodrigo Ubilla, responsible for foreign and immigration policy, denied in a meeting with foreign correspondents that the measures for Haitians are discriminatory and pointed out that they have the special benefit of family reunification visas.

“The community of Haitian citizens numbers around 120,000 and we believe that for practical purposes we have to help their children and spouses to come quickly and without obstacles to this country,” he said.

Stories of those who are already here

The immediate causes of Haitian migration lie in the 2010 earthquake and Hurricane Matthew in 2016 which added devastating effects to the chronic political, economic, social and environmental crisis in Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas.

Word of mouth is another major factor.

And José Miguel Torrico, coordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), emphasises another long-standing factor. The degradation of Haitian soil “is a major impact factor, since basically the migration we have here is unskilled workers, the rural poor,” he said.

“The immigration that Chile is receiving comes from rural sectors mainly because they have not been able to maintain their standard of living on the lands they farm,” he told IPS in an interview at his regional office in Santiago.

“I came because I saw on the Internet that there are opportunities to work in Chile, and other Haitians who had come here told me about those opportunities,” said Henry.

Every Sunday, on Pingüinos street, there is a street fair where Haitian migrants go to buy clothes, shoes and a variety of products, including some from their own country, and where they eat typical dishes from Haiti, offered at different stands. Credit: Orlando Milesi / IPS

During a break at work in a municipality in the foothills in the Chilean capital, Henry explained that he has a work contract and legal residency for five years, and was able to bring his wife and three of his four children. But his case is exceptional.

His youngest daughter was born in Santiago. “My wife was treated like a queen in the hospital and I did not pay a peso”, he said, explaining that the cost was covered by a health fund to which she pays a monthly fee. But undocumented migrants do not have the right to healthcare in Chile.

Accionel Sain Melus, 44, arrived eight years ago from the Dominican Republic (where he lived for 10 years), and works on contract at the Lo Valledor Market, the main vegetable and fruit supply centre in the Chilean capital.

“I have legal residency for five years. The problem is that my wife and daughter were given a temporary visa for one year. I applied and they rejected it. I have all the marriage papers and legalisations. I paid a visa for five years and they sent me a visa for one,” he said.

In his conversation with IPS, at the end of a mass in Creole in the Catholic parish of Santa Cruz, in the municipality of Estación Central, he confided his worries: “This is a difficult time for us…”

Pedro Labrín, the priest of that parish in one of the two municipalities with the largest Haitian communities, where some streets are like a “small Haiti”, explained to IPS that some immigrants from Haiti “have a strong educational background, language skills and technical qualifications.”

But most, he added, “come from the countryside, with very little education, and great difficulties to integrate into the new society because they have fewer social skills and suffer a language barrier.”

Lundi said that “most of them leave their country with the dream of continuing their studies. But migrants here have almost no chance to study,” he said, pointing to the high cost of Chilean universities.

Living with racism and xenophobia

For the parish priest Labrín “the main problem that Haitians face is racism: black people seem interesting as long as they are not next to us. I observe that attitude here… there is a lot of racial resistance,” he said.

In his opinion, “Haitians are stigmatised as carriers of diseases, generators of garbage and domestic violence, as noisy, child abusers, people who speak loudly and are always arguing. Chileans are also angry that they compete with Haitians in terms of access to basic services in healthcare, day care centres, kindergartens and schools.”

Lundi’s experiences have varied: “On the one hand, Chile has been a welcoming country for migrants. On the other hand, Chileans are a bit more violent, more discriminating.”

He accused some sectors of “xenophobia, I do not know if because of their culture they are not used to living with many foreigners, especially black people. They discriminate on the basis of skin colour. That is manifested directly with insults and sometimes psychologically.”

Labrín said that in Estación Central “there is an unethical business to subdivide poor houses to lease them at exorbitant prices.”

“For up to 200,000 pesos (about 333 dollars) they rent miserable rooms with no safety or sanitary conditions. During the visit by Pope Francis (in January 2018), one of these houses where a hundred people were living with just three showers, one of which was not working, and one toilet, was burned,” he complained.

Doubts about the process

For Lundi “the family reunification visa is extremely important because people cannot be happy if they are not with their families. It gives them the opportunity to live together.”

Two girls wearing fancy dresses are presented to the Lord during a special ceremony in an evangelical church, crowded as every Sunday, where the service and other activities are carried out in Creole. The church is close to Pingüinos street, in the Estación Central neighbourhood in Santiago. Credit: Orlando Milesi / IPS

But the academic Thayer said this offer “is demagogic: they are saying we are going to close the border, but we are going to allow them to be with their family… which is a basic human right.”

Meanwhile, Vicuña said it is essential to know “what will be the criteria for granting the visas, because reducing the criteria to only family reunification will fall short of demand.”

“Orderly, safe and regulated migration requires a clear information process, and many measures have been taken here on the fly,” he said.

Thayer broke down another growing social prejudice against Haitians. “The rate of unemployment of migrants is very low, like that of Chileans, from five to six percent,” he said.

“You cannot say that the labour market is overrun because of the arrival of Haitians. What there is, is a problem of integration because of a lack of public policies on housing, education and work,” he said.

Parish priest Labrín called for an emphasis to be put on the contributions made by Haitians: “culture, work, economic assets and children.” “The Chilean birth rate, which causes so much concern in the development pyramid, will be bolstered by the birth of Chilean children to migrant parents,” he said, to illustrate.

First impact: crowded migration offices

In the Migration Office on Fanor Velasco Street, three blocks from the La Moneda government palace, the air was unbreathable on Apr. 17, the day after the new regulations entered into force.

An unrelenting crowd of migrants seeking to get the process done packed the office and its surroundings from dawn, doubling the already heavy daily flow of people, before the new immigration measures adopted by decree went into effect.

Leonel Dorelus, a 32-year-old Haitian, arrived in Chile in Novembers 2017, after living in the Dominican Republic for three years. He lives with a brother-in-law, who arrived earlier, in a municipality on the south side of Santiago, where he works in an evangelical church.

“I would only like to bring my girlfriend,” he told IPS as he waited his turn.

Mark Edouard, 30, comes from the Haitian town of Artibonite. He works as a night-shift doorman, with a contract, and during the day he works at a public market, in the populated district of Puente Alto, 20 km southeast of Santiago.

“I started as an assistant at the same market. At first I lived with other people, but I was not comfortable so I moved and now I live alone,” he said.

Zilus Jeandenel, 28, came to Chile from the rural town of Comine. He lives in the municipality of San Bernardo, in the south of Greater Santiago, with two sisters. He arrived eight months ago and has no job, just like one of his sisters. “It’s hard to get work,” he said, “even though my quality of life is much better here.”

Little Haiti in Santiago

It’s Sunday, and dozens of Haitians are attending mass in the Jesuit parish church of Santa Cruz, on Pinguinos street in the neighbourhood of Nogales, in the municipality of Estación Central in Santiago, where Erik Lundi works. Kitty corner from the church, a Haitian barber attends his fellow countrymen. They all speak Creole and while they wait for their turn they watch a Formula One race on television.

In front of the barbershop is the bus stop where people catch the bus to downtown Santiago or the southern outskirts of the city. The ticket costs the equivalent of one dollar.

Also on Pingüinos, further east, a street market is held, every Sunday, with stands selling clothes and used shoes that customers try on right there. Other stands, some improvised on the sidewalk, sell vegetables, fruit, meat, typical Haitian products and the most sought-after: sacks of beans. Haitian dishes are also offered to sample on the spot.

There are some Chilean vendors, but most are Haitians. All explain, in Creole or Spanish, the prices, in a street market that, as the parishioners explain, is also a social meeting place. Women with small children, pregnant women, young people who greet each other with high fives and a couple made up of a Haitian man and a smiling Chilean woman holding hands, are part of the Sunday landscape on Pingüinos street.

Just two blocks away, there is an evangelical church which, like the Catholic church, also functions as a social centre, where the service is carried out in Creole and is accompanied by live music played on guitars, electric basses and large congo drums.

People dress up for church as an important occasion. The women wear colourful outfits and shoes and the men wear shiny shoes, some white, while almost all of them wear ties. The girls especially stand out with their tulles and elaborate braided hairstyles. This is Haitian life and culture, transplanted to Santiago, in the Andes mountains.

Tropical Storm Erika, the deadliest natural disaster in Dominica since Hurricane David in 1979, extensively damaged the island’s main airport in August 2015. Saint Lucian Prime Minister Allen Chastanet says time is running out for small states such as those in the Caribbean as they struggle to develop infrastructure capable of withstanding changes in weather conditions. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
CASTRIES, St Lucia, Aug 28 2017 (IPS)

A Caribbean Community (CARICOM) prime minister has reiterated the call for developed countries to assist Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in their quest to combat the effects of climate change.

The Saint Lucian leader, Allen Chastanet, said time is running out for small states such as those in the Caribbean as they struggle to develop infrastructure capable of withstanding changes in weather conditions.The momentum of progress on climate change has been stymied by recent decisions by the United States in relation to the Paris Agreement.

“I am going to keep pounding on the table and letting my voice be heard explaining that the SIDS cannot wait,” Chastanet said.

“There is no greater example of that than what took place in Haiti. Did we not know that Haiti was in a hurricane belt? Did we not know that there was clearly a trend of increasing storms? That all we needed was a trough? What took place last year, the world and all of us must bear responsibility for. The Haitian people were left to confront one of the strongest and most devastating hurricanes we have seen in a long time with cardboard boxes.”

On October 4 last year, Hurricane Matthew struck southwestern Haiti leaving widespread damage in the impoverished Caribbean nation. Matthew was a late-season Category 5 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale, having formed in the southeastern Caribbean on September 28.

In addition to loss of life, the economic damage to the nation was truly staggering. The Haitian aid group CARE placed the damage done by Hurricane Matthew to Haiti at 1 billion dollars.

Haiti is of the world’s poorest countries and vulnerable to such natural disasters. The United Nations proclaiming Matthew to be the greatest humanitarian crisis to affect the country since a devastating earthquake six years ago. The country was essentially cut in half as the storm destroyed transport links. After slicing through Haiti and killing more than 800 people, Matthew also pounded Cuba and The Bahamas.

Chastanet, who was speaking at a ceremony for the exchange of notes for Japanese grant aid of EC$35 million to the government of St. Lucia for the reconstruction of two major bridges, said time is of the essence.

“Time is against us. I say all of this to underscore that point and for us not to take for granted the significance of today. It is very easy for us to continue to come to these signings of agreements and almost take it for granted what we are receiving. This project has the opportunity and potential to protect the lives and the assets of many people,” he said.

“In terms of upgrading the country’s already expensive infrastructure, time is against small states like Saint Lucia in their fight to develop the road network and bridges capable of withstanding weather changes.”

St Lucia was also hit by Matthew as a tropical storm. The island experienced the most severe effects among Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) nations, with damage to homes and businesses accompanied by blocked roads and flooding.

The prime minister repeatedly thanked the Japanese for the Grant for the bridges which are expected to commence in early 2018. He also pointed to the assistance of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as SIDS position themselves to combat the effects of climate change.

“I had the opportunity to attend World Bank meetings and IMF meetings and I am very grateful that both those organisations have chosen to have a setting for the small island developing states of the world,” Chastanet noted.

“That was followed by the COP meeting that took place in Marrakech. I want to also recognize the work that was done by our predecessors in supporting the climate change agreement at COP in Paris in which we formalized the recognition that climate change is real and a roadmap for how the world intends to be able to deal with the problem.  In the roadmap, the world gave itself a challenge to raise 100 billion dollars to go towards mitigation and funding adaptation.”

The prime minister explained that the momentum had been stymied by recent decisions by the United States in relation to the Paris Agreement.

But he said some of the SIDS, inclusive of Saint Lucia are proposing alternatives to get assistance for critical infrastructural projects that help with adaption.

“One is exactly what is taking place here today where the Government of Japan, through JICA, are making a bilateral contribution to Saint Lucia in a project that is a critical infrastructural project. What we would like to see is Japan being given a credit for that contribution,” explained the Prime Minister.

Although the United States remains part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in June this year President Donald Trump ceased all implementation of the non-binding Paris accord.

That includes contributions to the UN Green Climate Fund (to help poorer countries to adapt to climate change and expand clean energy) and reporting on carbon data (though that is required in the US by domestic regulations anyway).

Permanent Secretary in the Department of Infrastructure, Ports and Energy Ivor Daniel, who gave an overview, explained that the bridge repair project is in-keeping with the National Hazard Mitigation Policy, which aims to reduce the country’s vulnerability to natural hazards and the impact of climate change.

Ambassador of Japan to Saint Lucia Mitsuhiko Okada outlined Japan’s areas of cooperation with Saint Lucia which include disaster risk reduction, sustainable management of marine life and human security.

The assistance is being channelled through the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), and that organization’s director general for Latin America and the Caribbean Hajime Takeuchi also spoke about the significant contributions made to assist not just Saint Lucia but the region.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon addresses the General Assembly during a briefing on the United Nations’ New Approach to Cholera in Haiti. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 2 2016 (IPS)

For the first time, the United Nations issued a formal apology for their role in the cholera outbreak in Haiti and announced new steps to alleviate the ongoing health crisis.

Speaking to the members of the UN General Assembly, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon made an emotional statement, expressing his deep regret for the suffering and loss of life that resulted from the cholera epidemic.

“On behalf of the United Nations, I want to say very clearly: we apologise to the Haitian people. We simply did not do enough with regard to the cholera outbreak and its spread in Haiti. We are profoundly sorry for our role,” said Secretary General Ban Ki-moon Thursday.

Ban first delivered the apology, which was broadcast live on television in Haiti, in Creole, before switching to French and English.

The cholera outbreak, which occurred soon after the earthquake in 2010, killed nearly 10,000 and has to date infected close to 800,000, roughly one in twelve, Haitians.

Numerous reports including one by the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention pinpointed the appearance of the first cholera cases to the arrival of UN peacekeepers from Nepal.

Just one month before leaving office, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon noted that the cholera outbreak has created a “blemish” on the reputation of both UN peacekeeping and the organisation as a whole.

The UN first admitted its role in the cholera crisis in August when, during a briefing, spokesman Farhan Haq said that the that international organisation became “convinced that it needs to do much more regarding its own involvement in the initial outbreak.”

Desir Jean-Clair from Boucan Care, a cholera survivor whose mother died from cholera described the apology as a “victory.”

“We sent thousands of letters and were in the street to get this victory for them to say today that they were responsible,” he told The Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti. “They said that and we thank them. But it can’t end here. Because today there is still cholera in the whole country.”

While U.S. Senator Edward Markey, who had called for the apology, stated that it was “overdue” and is an “important first step for justice” for Haitians.

“The people of Haiti have long deserved more than just acknowledgment for the pain and sacrifice they have suffered in great part due to UN negligence,” said the top Democrat on the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health Policy.

Though it does represent a shift after over six years of denial of involvement or responsibility on the part of the UN, the apology stops short of explicitly acknowledging the responsibility of the UN in introducing cholera into Haiti.

“We now recognise that we had a role in this, but to go to the extent of taking full responsibility for all is a step that would not be possible for us to take,” said Deputy Secretary General Jan Eliasson during a briefing.

He noted the major reason for the limitation is to ensure the continuation of peacekeeping and humanitarian operations.

“We have to continue to do this work, There might be tragic mistakes in the future also, but we have to keep that long-term perspective,” he said.

The apology also comes after a U.S. appeals court upheld the UN’s immunity in August from a lawsuit filed on behalf of thousands of Haitian cholera victims.

Eliasson noted that the court decision helped protect key UN peacekeeping and humanitarian operations. It was therefore a “triggering” point for the apology and roadmap, he added.

“That is the reason we can now move forward to take this position of accepting moral responsibility and go to the extent that we express an apology…that is a way for us to send a message of support,” Eliasson stated.

However, words can only go so far, both Eliasson and Ban Ki-moon said.

“For the sake of the Haitian people, but also for the sake of the United Nations itself, we have a moral responsibility to act, and we have a collective responsibility to deliver,” Ban said.

In a report, the Secretary-General lays out a new two-track approach in order to reduce and end cholera transmission and long-term development of the country’s water, sanitation and health sectors respectively. Though work on track one is already underway, including the deployment of rapid response teams and vaccination programs, track two still is yet to be determined as consultations are ongoing.

Ban proposed a community approach for track two, working directly with the most affected Haitians. Though individual reparations could still be an element, Ban noted the difficulties to carry out such a program including the identification of deceased individuals and ensuring the provision of a meaningful fixed amount per cholera death.

The organisation has requested a total of $400 million over two years for the program, and has set up a voluntary funding system for both tracks. So far, an estimated $150 million has been received.

In order for the UN to achieve its ambitious program, it requires UN member states to make voluntary contributions.

“UN action requires member state action. Without your political will and financial support, we have only good intentions and words,” Ban said.

“With their history of suffering and hardships, the people of Haiti deserve this tangible expression of our solidarity,” he concluded.

The UN is providing assistance to residents of Les Cayes in Western Haiti. Credit: Logan Abassi UN/MINUSTAH

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 23 2016 (IPS)

As Haiti reels from another disaster once again, many are questioning the humanitarian system and looking for long-term solutions with Haitians at the heart of response.

Since Hurricane Matthew made landfall in early October, over 500 Haitians have reportedly died, thousands of homes have been left destroyed, and vital farm land overturned. This devastation has affected over 19 percent, or 2.2 million, of the Caribbean nation’s 10 million citizens. More than 12 percent of the population is in need of immediate assistance, especially in the southern part of the country.

In response, the United Nations launched a flash appeal of $119 million to provide urgent life-saving aid to 750,000 people in the next three months. This appeal is in addition to $194 million for the 2016 Haiti Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) requested early this year.

Neighboring nations however did not experience such devastation, with only 4 deaths in the Dominican Republic and none in Cuba. So why did Haiti take such a hard hit?

“Fundamentally, the problem is that Haiti is very poor,” David Sanderson, a Professor at the University of New South Wales specialising in humanitarian responses told IPS.

Haiti, a nation formed following a slave rebellion, has long struggled with extreme poverty, after beginning its existence in debt to its former coloniser France. Meanwhile aid delivered to Haiti has often been criticised for being insufficient and inefficient and at times even counter-productive.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere with more than a quarter of its people living in extreme poverty. The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction found that poverty and disaster mortality often go hand in hand, reporting that the majority of the 1.35 million killed by natural disasters between 1996 and 2015 occurred in low-income countries.

Many have also noted the impacts of decades of political instability and corruption in creating a weak government that has not enacted key disaster preparedness policies such as necessary improvements to infrastructure.

According to a report from the American Institute of Architects, there is no national building code and a lack of enforcement of building construction standards. Instead, engineers often use standards from other countries that do not account for Haiti’s own context.

The government was only weakened further following the devastating magnitude 7 earthquake in 2010 which claimed over 200,000 lives and left over 1.5 million people homeless. Now over six years after the earthquake, almost 60,000 people are still displaced.

A Byproduct of the International Development System

However, many are pushing back on this narrative, pointing to the international aid regime as a major source of the country’s inability to withstand and recover from such disasters.

“The weakness of the government is a byproduct of the entire international development system,” said France Francois, a former development worker in post-earthquake reconstruction efforts, to IPS.

“It’s easy to point the finger and say well the Haitian government should have done this or should have done that, but what you have to look at is the larger structure…It’s not simply because [the government doesn’t] want to do things, it is because they don’t have the capacity and they don’t have the capacity because they only get one percent of foreign aid,” Francois continued.

Haiti-American development consultant Jocelyn McCalla echoed similar sentiments to IPS, noting that the international aid regime has lead to very few assets being provided “in order to build the capacity of Haitians themselves to own the process of rebuilding.”

According to the UN Office of the Special Envoy for Haiti, the Haitian government received less than one percent of humanitarian aid after the 2010 earthquake while humanitarian agencies and international non-governmental organisations received the other 99 percent. Provisions for long-term recovery funding to the Government of Haiti was slightly higher at approximately 15 percent.

This failure to assist and coordinate with the government creates a “vicious cycle” in which Haitians are left relying on forces “outside of their control,” said Haiti-American development consultant Jocelyn McCalla to IPS.

“Haiti has become a Republic of NGOs—so international NGOs have created this complete parallel of government that always bypasses the Haitian government,” said Francois.

She also pointed to the disconnect between donor priorities and Haitians’ needs.

As part of efforts towards reconstruction after the 2010 earthquake, the Bush-Clinton Haiti Fund, created by former U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, invested $2 million in the Royal Oasis Hotel aimed to house aid workers and foreign investors.

Though the project was meant to create jobs for Haitians, it failed to address the permanent, seismic-proof housing needs of thousands of Haitians.

“If you asked the Haitian people…they would have said that [being] safe during a hurricane is a priority for them, not hotels for foreigners,” Francois told IPS.

The Center for Global Development also found that donor concerns trumped the Haitian government’s post-earthquake priorities as funding requests for reconstruction, education and health fell significantly short.

The failure to focus on resilience and disaster preparedness is not isolated to Haiti. Sanderson, who is one of the editors of the 2016 World Disasters Report, found that only 40 cents to every $100 spent on development aid was invested in disaster risk reduction activities.

“That’s wrong—there should be way more going in advancement to stop disasters from happening in the first place,” Sanderson told IPS, adding that there is a shared responsibility towards such action.

As a result of past failures, many have said that greater transparency and accountability is “sorely needed.”

Francois particularly pointed to the American Red Cross’ alleged mismanaged funds and unfulfilled promises to build homes for Haitians. Though the group received nearly $500 million in donations following the earthquake, ProPublica and National Public Radio released an investigative report claiming the Red Cross only built six permanent homes.

In response, the Red Cross denied allegations and called the misrepresentation “disappointing.”

“Despite the most challenging conditions, including changes in government, lack of land for housing, and civil unrest, our hardworking staff—90 percent of whom are Haitians—continue to meet the long-term needs of the Haitian people. While the pace of progress is never as fast as we would like, Haiti is better off today than it was five years ago,” Red Cross said in a statement.

Francois said that beneficiaries must hold organisations and donors accountable for aid flows, and that organisations must work with and involve communities in every step of the way.

“That’s standard best practice,” she told IPS.

“What I hope will happen is that those who want to support Haiti and the Haitian government will sit down with the proper authorities and put together what the long term sustainable plan will look like for this reconstruction effort,” she continued.

McCalla highlighted the need to ensure there is no repeat of the cholera epidemic that was introduced to the waterways following the 2010 earthquake.

UN peacekeepers have been blamed for the outbreak which has so far killed over 10,000 people. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found “an exact correlation” between arrival of Nepalese peacekeepers to the appearance of first cases in the Meille river. In August, a UN spokesperson said that the UN was convinced it needed to do more regarding its own involvement in the initial outbreak, however the UN has continued to claim immunity

“Because of a number of past failures, we should respond clearly and say we are accountable…we want to work with the Haitian people to do it…and also make every effort possible to commit to remedying the situation,” McCalla told IPS. However, no effort has been made thus far, he added.

Investing in Local Institutions and People

As the three week mark approaches along with the fading interest and relief resources that often goes with it, the push for long-term solutions is underway, one that gives control to Haitians.

“Business as usual is not an option,” said Sanderson, urging for a focus on long-term recovery that puts local citizens in charge.

McCalla and Francois made similar comments, highlighting the need to invest in Haitians.

“When you cast (Haitians) aside, and say we’re going to take care of everything…that is demeaning,” McCalla told IPS.

He also stressed the need to challenge the “charity” narrative of Haiti.

Francois said that organisations should hire and train Haitians not only as a way to build trust, but also to show their investment in communities.

“You build the local capacity so that you are no longer needed…you are supposed to grow and change and show results but only in the development world, remaining stagnant is something to be proud of,” she told IPS.

Though Haiti will continued to need funds, “people are not helpless,” McCalla told IPS, noting that many are already trying to rebuild their livelihoods and country whilst asserting their position at the forefront of disaster relief and recovery.

Ambassador of Haiti to the U.S. Paul Altidor released a statement at the wake of the disaster, urging for a coordinated and strategic relief effort “to avoid mistakes from the past.”

“As the country continues to assess the extent of the damage, the state of Haiti strongly encourages all who wish to help to work with the local organisations and institutions on the ground in order to gain their input on the actual needs of the affected communities,” he said in a statement, adding that local institutions can also be good partners too and should not be bypassed.

Two women selling fruit, grains and vegetables in the Little Haiti street market in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic. They allowed their picture to be taken but preferred not to talk about their situation. Fear is part of daily life for Haitian immigrants in this country. Credit: Dionny Matos/IPS

By Ivet González
SANTO DOMINGO, Feb 5 2016 (IPS)

A middle-aged woman arranges bouquets of yellow roses in a street market in Little Haiti, a slum neighbourhood in the capital of the Dominican Republic. “I don’t want to talk, don’t take photos,” she tells IPS, standing next to a little girl who appears to be her daughter.

Other vendors at the stalls in the street market, all of them black women, also refuse to talk. “They’re afraid because they think they’ll be deported,” one woman whispers, as she stirs a pot of soup on a wood fire on the sidewalk.

That fear was heightened by the last wave of deportations, which formed part of the complicated migration relations between this country and Haiti – the poorest country in the Americas, with a black population – which share the island of Hispaniola.

According to official figures, the Dominican Republic’s migration authorities deported 15,754 undocumented Haitian immigrants from August 2015 to January 2016, while 113,320, including 23,286 minors, voluntarily returned home.

“This process has a greater impact on women because when a son or a daughter is denied their Dominican identity, the mothers are directly responsible for failing to legalise their status,” said Lilian Dolis, head of the Dominican-Haitian Women’s Movement (MUDHA), a local NGO.

“If the mother is undocumented then the validity of her children’s documents is questioned,” she told IPS.

“And in the case of Haitian immigrant women, it’s not enough to marry a Dominican man even though the constitution grants them their husband’s nationality,” said Dolis, whose movement emerged in 1983. “That right is often violated.”

The latest migration crisis broke out in 2013 when a Constitutional Court ruling set new requirements for acquiring Dominican citizenship.

The aspect that caused an international outcry was the fact that the verdict retroactively denied Dominican nationality to anyone born after 1929 who did not have at least one parent of Dominican blood, even if their births were recorded in the civil registry.

This affected not only the children of immigrants, but their grandchildren and even great-grandchildren.

Tens of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent were left in legal limbo or without any nationality, international human rights groups like Human Rights Watch complained.

In response to the international outrage, the Dominican government passed a special law on naturalisation that set a limited period – May 2014 to February 2015 – for people born to undocumented foreign parents between 1929 and 2007 to apply for citizenship.

Antonia Abreu, one of the few street vendors who agreed to talk to IPS about the harsh reality faced by Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic, at her street stall where she sells flowers in the Little Haiti neighbourhood in Santo Domingo. Credit: Dionny Matos/IPS

But only 8,755 people managed to register under this law.

At the same time, the authorities implemented a national plan for foreigners to regularise their status, from June 2014 to June 2015.

Under this plan, 288,466 undocumented immigrants, mainly of Haitian descent, applied for residency and work permits. But only about 10,000 met all the requirements, and only a few hundred were granted permits.

Since August, the police have been carrying out continuous raids, and undocumented immigrants are taken to camps along the border, to be deported to Haiti.

“Most Haitian women work outside the home; very few can afford to be homemakers,” said Antonia Abreu, a Haitian-Dominican woman who has sold floral arrangements for parties, gifts and funerals in the Little Haiti market for 40 years.

Abreu, known by her nickname “the Spider”, said “women sell clothes or food, they apply hair extensions, they’re domestic employees and some are sex workers. Many are ‘paleteras’ (street vendors selling candy and cigarettes) who suffer from police abuse – the police take their carts and merchandise when they don’t have documents.”

“Those who work as decent people have integrated in society and contribute to the country,” she told IPS.

Among the unique mix of smells – of spices, open sewers, traditional foods and garbage – many women barely eke out a living in this Haitian neighbourhood market, selling flowers, prepared foods, fruit and vegetables, clothing, household goods and second-hand appliances.

The small neighbourhood, which is close to a busy commercial street and in the middle of the Colonial City, Santo Domingo’s main tourist attraction, has been neglected by the municipal authorities, unlike its thriving neighbours.

No one knows exactly how many people live in Little Haiti, which is a slum but is virtually free of crime, according to both local residents and outsiders.

Most of the people buying at the market stalls in the neighbourhood are Haitian immigrants, who work in what are described by international rights groups as semi-slavery conditions.

The street market is also frequented by non-Haitian Dominicans with low incomes, in this country of 10.6 million people, where 36 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, according to World Bank figures from 2014.

A Haitian immigrant in the rural settlement of Mata Mamón in the Dominican Republic, where she works as a ‘bracera’ or migrant worker in agriculture. Haitian women who work on plantations in this country are invisible in the statistics as well as in programmes that provide support to rural migrants, activists complain. Credit: Dionny Matos/IPS

“Undocumented immigrants can’t work, study or have a public life,” Dolis said. “They go directly into domestic service or work in the informal sector. And even if they have documents, Haitian-Dominican women are always excluded from social programmes.”

In this country with a deeply sexist culture, women of Haitian descent are victims of exclusion due to a cocktail of xenophobia, racism and gender discrimination, different experts and studies say.

“They are made invisible,” said Dolis. “We don’t even know how many Haitian-Dominican women there are. The census data is not reliable in terms of the Dominican population of Haitian descent, and the UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) survey is out-of-date.”

The activist was referring to the last available population figures gathered by the National Survey on Immigrants carried out in 2012 by the National Statistics Office with UNFPA support.

At the time, the survey estimated the number of immigrants in the Dominican Republic at 560,000, including 458,000 born in Haiti.

The lack of up-to-date statistics hinders the work of Mudha, which defends the rights of Haitian-Dominican women in four provinces and five municipalities, with an emphasis on sexual and reproductive rights.

The movement is led by a group of 19 women and has 62 local organisers carrying out activities in urban and rural communities, which have reached more than 6,000 women.

Mudha says the Dominican authorities have never recognised the rights of women of Haitian descent. “They’ve always talked about immigration of ‘braceros’ (migrant workers), but never ‘braceras’ – that is, the women who come with their husbands, or come as migrant workers themselves,” Dolis said.

Since the mid-19th century Haitians have worked as braceros in the sugarcane industry, the main engine of the Dominican economy for centuries. But today, they are also employed in large numbers in the construction industry, commerce, manufacturing and hotels.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

A Uruguayan peacekeeper with UN Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) watches as the helicopter carrying Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, Hervé Ladsous, makes its way back toward Goma after Mrs. Ladsous’ visit in Pinga, North Kivu Province. Credit: UN Photo/Sylvain Liechti

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 17 2015 (IPS)

Back in November 2007, about 108 military personnel from an Asian country, serving with the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti, were deported home after being accused of sexual exploitation and sexual abuse of minors.

After their return, one of the expelled peacekeepers was quoted in a local newspaper as saying, rather defiantly, “What do you expect us to do when the U.N. is providing us with free condoms?”“I believe that an unstable place with a weak (or no) government may create a sensation of lack of accountability, of power over the local population and a few individuals might feel free to engage in unacceptable behaviour." -- Barbara Tavora-Jainchill

But then all those free condoms were being provided to prevent sexually-transmitted diseases and not to encourage sexual abuse.

As a result of the widespread sexual abuse with peacekeeping missions, the United Nations plans to set up an independent review panel calling for recommendations specifically to prevent these crimes and also to hold those responsible accountable for their deeds and mete out punishments.

But as a preventive measure, would it help if peacekeepers and U.N. staffers are sent on overseas missions along with their wives, partners and families?

Pursuing this line of thinking, Joe Lauria, U.N. correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, told IPS, “Perhaps the U.N. should look into making it possible for U.N. peacekeepers to have their wives and girlfriends and children live with them during their deployment.”

He said he realised it would be an added expense for the U.N. to transport them and perhaps to find suitable housing on U.N. peacekeeping bases.

“But the potential benefits of cutting down on what is an epidemic — of U.N. peacekeepers sexually abusing the people they are sworn to protect — could be immense. It is difficult to understand why the U.N. has never thought of this before.”

Lauria also said there is a longstanding tradition throughout military history of soldiers allowing their wives to accompany them– even to the front.

Two examples are in ancient Rome and in the American Civil War. And U.N. peacekeepers are rarely in combat situations, so the logistics are simpler, he said.

Today U.S. troops stationed at bases abroad, such as in Germany or South Korea, are allowed to live with their families. The wives and girlfriends of U.N. peacekeepers could be expected to live from the salaries of the peacekeepers, perhaps with an additional stipend, he argued.

“It would be troubling for the U.N. not to look into this possibility given all the negative fallout for the organisation, not to mention the serious harm done to the victims of U.N. peacekeeper’s sexual abuse,” said Lauria.

When he raised this issue at a press briefing last week, U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said that virtually all of the peacekeeping operations, with a couple of exceptions like Cyprus, are “non‑family duty stations for the civilian staff.”

“You raise a point that’s interesting, that I don’t know the answer to. I don’t believe uniformed peacekeepers or police officers are able to bring their spouses along,” he said.

Pressed further by Lauria, Dujarric said: “I think I see where… where you’re going, but I think the issue of abuse of power, of sexual abuse needs to be fought, regardless of what those rules may be.”

Since the United Nations has no political or legal authority to penalise military personnel, most of them escape punishment for their criminal activities because national governments have either refused or have been slow in meting out justice within their own court systems.

Ian Richards, president of the Coordinating Committee of International Staff Unions and Associations (CCISUA), representing 60,000 staff working at the United Nations, told IPS that as far as it concerns U.N. civilian staff, “I’m not sure you can draw a link between the two.”

“We have over 21,000 civilian colleagues in field and peacekeeping operations, doing a great job and almost all in what are called non-family duty stations. Yet reported sexual abuse by staff, while horrific, remains extremely low,” he said.

Three staff were reported, investigated and fired for sexual abuse last year.

“So these are very specific cases rather than a generalised trend. All U.N. staff are aware of the organisation’s zero-tolerance approach to sexual abuse and sign a declaration on this when they’re recruited.

“Therefore, I’m not sure that absent spouses is an issue in this sense. In any case, non-family duty stations are declared as such because they are in conflict zones or prone to rebel or terrorist activity. They’re not places to bring spouses or children,” Richards added.

A U.N. staffer, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS there were some U.N. civilian staffers, based in a virtual war zone in Iraq, who housed their families in neighbouring Kuwait, but at their own expense.

But staffers serving in these missions are well remunerated with “hazard pay allowances” (HPA) and “mission subsistence allowances” (MSA).

A senior U.N. official told IPS it is very unlikely that wives and families will be permitted in overseas missions, specifically high risk missions, because it would be difficult to ensure their security (and it will double or triple the U.N.’s current burden of protecting staffers).

Barbara Tavora-Jainchill, president of the U.N. Staff Union in New York, told IPS even though being away from the family brings stress, “I believe that an unstable place with a weak (or no) government may create a sensation of lack of accountability, of power over the local population and a few individuals might feel free to engage in unacceptable behaviour.

“Accountability should be strengthened in peacekeeping and political missions and the U.N. should adopt a serious whistleblower policy, because sometimes whistleblowers are the ones who make accountability possible,” she added.

Meanwhile a High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations, chaired by former President of Timor-Leste Ramos-Horta, has released a report with a comprehensive assessment of the state of U.N. peace operations and the emerging needs of the future.

At a press conference Tuesday, Ramos-Horta emphasised the United Nations had “zero tolerance for sexual exploitation and abuse.”

He said sexual abuse by peacekeepers “rocks and undermines the most important power the United Nations possesses: its integrity.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Haitian-Italian designer Stella Jean (right) has been working with the Ethical Fashion Initiative (EFI), using Haitian craftsmanship in areas such as embroidery and beadwork in her collections. Credit: ITC Ethical Fashion Initiative 5

By A. D. McKenzie
PARIS, Jun 4 2015 (IPS)

“Work is dignity,” says Simone Cipriani. “People want employment, not charity.”

With that in mind, Italian-born Cipriani founded a programme in 2009 called the Ethical Fashion Initiative (EFI) that links some of the world’s top fashion talents to marginalised artisans – mostly women – in East and West Africa, Haiti and the West Bank.

Now a flagship programme of the International Trade Centre, a joint agency of the United Nations and the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Geneva-based EFI works with leading designers such as Stella McCartney and Vivienne Westwood to facilitate the development and production of “high-quality, ethical fashion items” from artisans living in low-income rural and urban areas.

The EFI says its aim is also to “enable Africa’s rising generation of fashion talent to forge environmentally sound, sustainable and fulfilling creative collaborations with local artisans.” Under its slogan “not charity, just work”, the Initiative advocates for a fairer global fashion industry.“We work with women who sometimes face discrimination in their communities, but by having a job, their position in society improves. They gain independence and respect, and in many situations they become the only breadwinner in their families” – Simone Cipriani, Ethical Fashion Initiative

This year, for the first time, the EFI is collaborating with the most important international trade fair for men’s fashion, Pitti Immagine Uomo, to host designers who represent four African countries.

Taking place June 16 to 19 in Florence, Italy, the fair will present a special edition of its Guest Nation Project, in which a particular area is designated for the “rising stars” of fashion from various countries, according to Raffaello Napoleone, CEO of Pitti.

Napoleone said that the African designers in this year’s Guest Nation give priority to manufacturing in their home countries, helping to reduce poverty, and that they are already known on the international market.

The stylists will put on a runway show, highlighting their men’s collections, in a special event titled ‘Constellation Africa’. The brands – Dent de Man, MaXhosa by Laduma, Orange Culture and Projecto Mental – have designers who represent Cote d’Ivoire, South Africa, Nigeria and Angola, and were selected as part of the African Fashion Designer competition launched by the EFI last December.

“This is where our global society is going: interconnectedness. Global and local dimensions brought together through fashion,” said Cipriani.

Market analysts expect the global value of the apparel retail industry to rise about 20 percent from 2014 levels to reach some 1,500 billion dollars in 2017. With such high volumes, the various sectors of the industry could be an increasing source of employment in many regions, from design to garment-making to sales.

But over the past several years, there has been controversy about the apparent exclusion of fashion designers and models of African descent in high-profile ‘Fashion Weeks’ and other international events

Tansy E. Hoskins, author of a polemical book published last year titled Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion, has a whole chapter devoted to the question “Is Fashion Racist?”

She says that several decades after a renowned fashion magazine had its first black model on the cover, “all-white catwalks, all-white advertising campaigns and all-white fashion shoots are still the norm”.

Simone Cipriani, founder of the Ethical Fashion Initiative (EFI). Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

The Ethical Fashion Initiative is primarily concerned with poverty reduction and ethical treatment of artisans, but Cipriani acknowledges that racism is an issue and that poverty can be linked to ethnicity as well as gender.

Still, the fashion industry does have companies that try to adhere to ethical standards, including diversity, working conditions and environmental sustainability; and 30 international brands have signed on to the EFI project. But not every company is a good fit.

“We try to work almost exclusively with brands that have a clear scheme on responsible business and social engagement, otherwise there’s always the risk of being used and having to clean up after somebody else,” Cipriani told IPS in an interview, during a trip to Paris to meet with designers.

“We’ve had our troubles and have had to work through a long learning curve”, he added. “We also tried to work with big distributors and realised it wasn’t possible for what we do, so here we are.”

Groups such as the EFI and activists like Hoskins say that their major concern is how to make the fashion industry fairer, particularly with decent labour conditions for workers everywhere.

Two years ago in Bangladesh, for instance, more than 1,100 workers died and 2,500 were injured when a factory building collapsed after safety warnings were ignored. The workers made clothing for brands including Benetton, which only this year announced that it would contribute to a compensation fund for the victims.

That agreement followed a campaign in which one million people signed an online petition calling for the company to take proper action.

“What happened in Bangladesh was a horror, and there are many situations in which exactly the same horror can occur,” Cipriani said. “The first thing about responsibility should always be people. Dignified working conditions for people.”

He said that many artisans working in the fashion industry’s supply chain also do not earn enough to live on. “They don’t get the remuneration for their work that allows them to have a dignified life,” he told IPS. “Many of them are paid in such a way that they have to live at the margin.”

In Haiti, which is known for its artistry as well as its poverty, activists say that linking local artisans with international designers can and have made some impact. The Haitian-Italian designer Stella Jean has been working with EFI, using Haitian craftsmanship in areas such as embroidery and beadwork in her collections, for example. She also employs textiles made in Africa.

Jean has been an EFI “partner” since 2013 and she sources several elements of her designs through its projects, Cipriani said. The collaboration started with a visit to Burkina Faso – one of the largest producers of cotton in Africa with an important tradition of hand-weaving – where the designer saw the possibilities of “working with these ethically produced textiles”. She incorporated them as a key feature of her women’s and men’s ready-to-wear collections.

Last year, she also launched a new range of bags, produced in Kenya with fabric from Burkina Faso and Mali and vegetable-tanned leather from Kenya, “making each bag a pan-African product,” says the EFI.

In Kenya, British designers McCartney (who declined to be interviewed) and Westwood have placed several orders for fashion items, and the EFI has carried out “Impact Assessment” studies to evaluate compliance with fair labour standards “and the impact the orders had on people and the communities they live in.”

“We work with women who sometimes face discrimination in their communities, but by having a job, their position in society improves,” Cipriani told IPS. “They gain independence and respect, and in many situations they become the only breadwinner in their families.”

The Ethical Fashion Initiative has testimonials from artisans about the improvement in their lives from the income they received through the orders, with several workers detailing their new ability to pay rent and school fees, among other developments.

Hoskins says that these steps are important, but that the fashion industry cannot be fully transformed without massive, collective action. “Ethical fashion has become a catch-all phrase encompassing issues such as environmental toxicity, labour rights, air miles, animal cruelty and product sustainability,” she argues.

“After 20 or so years and despite some innovative initiatives, it holds an ‘exceptionally low market share’ at just over 1 percent of the overall apparel market.”

In an interview, she said that asking whether fashion can ever be ethical is like asking “can capitalism ever be ethical?”

“For me the answer is ‘no’ because it’s based on exploitation, it’s based on competition, and above all it’s based on profit, and that’s what in the fashion industry drives wages down, drives environmental standards down and down and down,” she told IPS.

“There are small companies doing things differently but they’re producing maybe a few thousand units every year. The fashion industry produces billions and billions of units every single year.”

Hoskins also asked the question: “Why is it not the case that all products are ethically made?”

But reform evidently takes time. With the Pitti trade fair in Italy now collaborating with EFI, the “ethical fashion” movement may get a boost. It is also up to consumers to make the right choices, activists say.

“Consumers must demand change. Consumers can’t be too docile,” says Cipriani.

Edited by Phil Harris    

The road to Baradares in north central Haiti. The aim of the new draft mining law appears to be a massive expansion of Haiti’s mining sector. Credit: Lee Cohen/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jan 13 2015 (IPS)

With Haiti’s Parliament having dissolved on Tuesday, civil society groups are worried that the Haitian president may move to unilaterally put in place a contentious revision to the country’s decades-old mining law.

Starting in 2013, that draft was written with technical assistance from the World Bank. Last week, a half-dozen Haitian groups filed a formal appeal with the bank’s complaints office, expressing concern that the legislation had been crafted without the public consultation often required under the Washington-based development funder’s own policies.“The process has been very opaque, with a small group of experts from the World Bank and Haitian government officials drafting this law.” -- Sarah Singh

The aim of the new draft mining law appears to be a massive expansion of Haiti’s mining sector, paving the way for the entry of foreign companies already interested in the country’s significant gold and other deposits.

“Community leaders … are encouraging communities to think critically about ‘development’, and to not simply accept projects defined by outsiders,” Ellie Happel, an attorney in Port-au-Prince who has been involved in the complaint, told IPS.

“These projects often fail. And, in the case with gold mining, residents learn that these projects may threaten their very way of life.”

Haiti’s extractives permitting process is currently extensive and bureaucratic. Yet the new revisions would bypass parliamentary oversight altogether, halting even a requirement that agreement terms be made public, according to a draft leaked in July.

Critics worry that this streamlining, coupled with the Haitian government’s weakness in ensuring oversight, could result in social and environmental problems, particularly damaging to a largely agrarian economy. Further, there is question as to whether exploitation of this lucrative minerals wealth would benefit the country’s vast impoverished population.

“The World Bank’s involvement in developing the Draft Mining Law lends the law credibility, which is likely to encourage investment in the Haitian mining sector,” the complaint, filed with the bank’s Inspection Panel on Wednesday, states.

“[T]his increased investment in the mining sector will result in … contamination of vital waterways, impacts on the agriculture sector, and involuntary displacement of communities. Complainants are also concerned about the exclusion of Haitian people from the law reform process, particularly when contrasted with the reported regular participation of the private sector in drafting the new law.”

An opaque process

The complaint comes five years after a devastating earthquake struck Haiti, and as political instability is threatening reconstruction and development progress made in that catastrophe’s aftermath. Elections have been repeatedly put off for more than two years, and by Tuesday so many members of Parliament are slated to have finished their terms that the body would lack a quorum.

On Sunday Haitian President Michel Martelly indicated that a deal might be near. But the leftist opposition was reportedly not part of this agreement, and has repeatedly warned that the president is planning to rule by decree.

The Inspection Panel complaint, filed by six civil society groups operating under the umbrella Kolektif Jistis Min (the Justice in Mining Collective), contextualises its concerns against this backdrop of instability. “[T]he Haitian government may be poised to adopt the Draft Mining Law by decree, outside the democratic process,” it states.

Even if the political crisis is dealt with soon, concerns with the legislation’s drafting process will remain.

The Justice in Mining Collective, which represents around 50,000 Haitians, drew up the complaint after the draft mining law was leaked in July. No formal copy of the legislation has been made public, nor has the French-language draft law been translated into Haitian Creole, the most commonly spoken language.

“The process has been very opaque, with a small group of experts from the World Bank and Haitian government officials drafting this law,” Sarah Singh, the director of strategic support with Accountability Counsel, a legal advocacy group that consulted on the complaint and is representing some Haitian communities, told IPS.

“They’ve had two meetings that, to my knowledge, were invite-only and held in French, at which the majority of attendees were private investors and some big NGOs. Yet the bank’s response to complaints of this lack of consultation has been to say this is the government’s responsibility.”

The Justice in Mining Collective is suggesting that this lack of consultation runs counter to social and environmental guidelines that undergird all World Bank investments. These policies would also call for a broad environmental assessment across the sector, something local civil society is now demanding – to be followed by a major public debate around the assessment’s findings and the potential role large-scale mining could play in Haiti’s development.

Yet the World Bank is not actually investing in the Haitian mining sector, and it is not clear that the institution’s technical assistance is required to conform to the safeguards policies. In a November letter, the bank noted that its engagement on the Haitian mining law has been confined to sharing international best practices.

Yet Singh says she and others believe the safeguards do still apply, particularly given the scope of the new legislation’s impact.

“This will change the entire legal regime,” she says. “The idea that bank could do that and not have the safeguards apply seems hugely problematic.”

A World Bank spokesperson did confirm to IPS that the Inspection Panel has received the Haitian complaint. If the panel registers the request, she said, the bank’s management would have around a month to submit a response, following which the bank’s board would decide whether the complaint should be investigated.

Parliamentary moratorium

Certainly sensitivities around the Haitian extractives sector have increased in recent years.

Minerals prospecting in Haiti has expanded significantly over the past half-decade, though no company has yet moved beyond exploration. In 2012, when the government approved its first full mining permit in years, the Parliament balked, issuing a non-binding moratorium on all extraction until a sector-wide assessment could take place.

Meanwhile, Haitians have been looking across the border at some of the mining-related problems experienced in the Dominican Republic, including water pollution. Civil society groups have also been reaching out to other countries in the Global South, trying to understand the experiences of other communities around large-scale extractives operations.

Current views are also being informed by decades of historical experience in Haiti, as well. Since the country’s independence in the early 19th century, several foreign companies have engaged many years of gold mining.

That was a “negative, even catastrophic, experience,” according to a statement from the Justice in Mining Collective released following the leak of the draft mining law in July.

“Mining exploitation has never contributed to the development of Haiti. To the contrary, the history of gold exploitation is one marked by blood and suffering since the beginning,” the statement warned.

“When we consider the importance of and the potential consequences of mineral exploitation, we note this change in the law as a sort of scandal that may facilitate further looting, without even the people aware of the consequences.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be reached at cbiron@ips.org

Aerial view of a makeshift camp in Port-au-Prince. Apart from reports of cholera being introduced into Haiti by Nepalese peacekeepers following the 2010 earthquake, environmental problems were created by the distribution of tens of thousands of non-biodegradable tarpaulin tents which needed to be replaced every few months. Credit: UN Photo/Marco Dormino

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Oct 7 2014 (IPS)

Relief work done by emergency responders during natural disasters may inadvertently exacerbate problems caused by climate change and lead to further disasters, recent reports suggest.

When heavy rains caused nearly 20 million dollars in losses in Diego Martin, western Trinidad, in 2012, emergency responders moved rapidly to provide relief to affected residents, some of whom lost their homes.An estimated 50,000 trees would be needed to offset the carbon emissions from Haiti's discarded tents if they were left in landfills.

However, just under two weeks later, Diego Martin was again inundated, this time due to a tropical storm.

A newly released report by the Trinidad and Tobago Red Cross Society (TTRCS) raises the possibility that the second flooding may have partly been due to the relief work done by the emergency responders.

The report states “after the first flooding incident water supplies were distributed in individual disposable, non-biodegradable vessels such as plastic bottles and food supplies were distributed with plastic utensils.

“In addition to the intense rainfall, one of the major contributing factors to the Diego Martin flooding was the clogging of waterways. Waste collection services immediately following the disaster were restricted… Use of [eco-friendly, biodegradable] materials could have helped negate the possibility of flooding.”

The TTRCS’ report, entitled “Green Response: A Country Study”, was presented by the head of Trinidad and Tobago’s Office of Disaster Preparedness and Management (ODPM) to a recent meeting of the Association of Caribbean States (ACS).

It was prepared following a feasibility study “on how to reduce, in a sustainable way, the environmental impact of the products and technologies used in response to and recovery from disasters.”

Trinidad and Tobago decided to undertake the study following an ACS meeting in 2011 where the issue of greening the region’s responses to natural disasters was raised for consideration.

Greening disaster relief efforts has become a major concern internationally, since as the Green Recovery and Reconstruction Toolkit notes, while “DRR (Disaster Risk Reduction) seeks to reduce the risk of harm from disasters… the implementation of activities defined by disaster risk assessments, or by interventions presumed to reduce risk, itself has a risk of doing harm if the activities do not address environmental sustainability.”

Hence, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) report notes that organisations heavily involved in such work are “considering both current and future disaster and climate change risks and including various measures to address them, in recovery programming.”

The need for such considerations was particularly evident in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake that took more than 200,000 lives.

Apart from reports of cholera being introduced into Haiti by Nepalese peacekeepers who were deployed to help in recovery efforts following the earthquake, there was also the environmental problem created by the distribution of tens of thousands of non-biodegradable tarpaulin tents which needed to be replaced every few months.

The IFRC Practice Note Report on Haiti notes that 50,000 trees would be needed to offset the carbon emissions from the discarded tents if these were left in landfills.

“The key issue,” said ACS’s director of Transport and Disaster Risk Reduction, George Nicholson, “is having to find a way to ensure that regardless of the things we do, whether work activities or specific activities for disaster response, to ensure that the things have the least impact on the environment.”

The Trinidad and Tobago government is committed to incorporating climate change and  environmental considerations into all its programmes. So when the question of a green response to disaster management came up for consideration at the ACS, the country offered to do the feasibility study for what has been dubbed the Green Response.

The ACS has worked with the ODPM, which has lead responsibility for the initiative in the country, the IFRC, and the TTRCS on the study.

Nicholson said that pursuant to the study’s findings, other ACS member countries “may look to see what was done by Trinidad and Tobago and then adapt or adopt their mechanisms.”

TTRCS’ Stephan Kishore said greening disaster relief efforts would involve activities such as locally manufacturing and pre-positioning relief supplies, so as to reduce the carbon footprint involved in shipping items from China, where most of the country’s relief supplies now come from.

It would also involve simple procedures such as using paper, cloth, or buckets rather than plastic to wrap relief supplies, and wrapping items, like soap, in bulk rather than in individual wrappings. Further, green relief efforts would encourage recycling of items and use of solar energy rather than fossil fuels.

However, a major consideration in greening disaster relief efforts is the legislative framework governing disaster relief organisations. Nicholson said the feasibility study looks at Trinidad and Tobago’s “legislative processes, its operational systems to see where you can get benefits out of being more green in your approach.”

But introducing legislation that would green disaster relief efforts will not be easy, Kishore said. “To get legislation passed for any response is very difficult. The whole process of getting legislation is very difficult,” he said.

Further complicating matters, Nicholson said, is that the ACS’ members states operate under several different legislative frameworks since the countries include Dutch, French, Spanish, and English-speaking countries with different legal traditions.

“All of them have totally different legislative environments, so you cannot write one thing and say we can establish best practices. Countries will look at that checklist of best practices [from the study] and see how best they can adopt their own environment to suit.”

With the feasibility study phase complete, the next stage of the Green Response is to identify or develop green disaster response processes and products from the region, which may include encouraging local manufacturers to begin producing recyclable items that can be used during a natural disaster.

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at jwl_42@yahoo.com

In addition to its prized value as an ingredient in high-end perfumes, the vetiver plant has important conservation benefits, preventing soil erosion and helping maintain water quality. Credit: treesftf/cc by 2.0

By Desmond Brown
PYEONGCHANG, Republic of Korea, Oct 7 2014 (IPS)

Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, is the world’s leading producer of vetiver. In the southwest of the country, vetiver production is hard to ignore.

Driving into Les Cayes, the largest town in the south, one is greeted by fields of vetiver on either side of the road. The same is true if driving from Les Cayes to Port Salut. Steep hillsides of the green grass line many of the ridges between the two towns.Synthetic biology differs from conventional genetic engineering in its technique, scale, and its use of novel and synthetic genetic sequences – raising new risks to biodiversity.

Haitian vetiver is highly regarded among perfumers, and it is a key ingredient in some of the finest and most expensive perfumes in the world.

However, struggling Haitians who farm this product could be dealt another harsh blow with the introduction of a new industry – synthetic biology. Although still undefined, synthetic biology can be described as ‘extreme genetic engineering,’ and refers broadly to the use of computer-assisted, biological engineering to design and construct new synthetic biological parts, devices and systems, and to redesign existing biological organisms.

“In countries like Haiti there are high-value agricultural exports that form a significant part of the economy, and those high-value low-volume goods are slated to be created by companies like Evolva and could replace the truly natural products,” Dana Perls, food and technology campaigner with the civil society group Friends of the Earth U.S., told IPS.

“Evolva is creating synthetic biology flavours and fragrances which could be offered at a much cheaper price and would ultimately remove the need for different farmers of flavours and fragrances.”

Haiti’s vetiver crop is processed by 10 distillers, but it provides jobs for some 27,000 farming families in the southwest. For these farmers, the vetiver plant has important conservation benefits, preventing soil erosion, and helping maintain water quality.

The global value of the synthetic biology market reached 1.6 billion dollars in 2011and it will further grow to 10.8 billion by 2016, increasing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 45.8 percent.

Haiti’s share of worldwide vetiver exports grew from 40 percent in 2001 to over 60 percent in 2007. But in the wake of the worldwide financial crisis, Haiti has seen a sharp reduction in vetiver exports. The country, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic, produces about 50 to 60 tonnes of vetiver annually, about 50 percent of the world’s supply.

An estimated 60,000 people in Haiti’s Les Cayes region depend on vetiver as their primary income source. The crop is grown on 10,000 hectares.

Before 2009, Haiti’s vetiver crop was valued at approximately 15-18 million dollars per year. In recent years, Haiti’s export earnings from vetiver have declined to around 10 million per year.

While biotechnology has been portrayed as a panacea for climate change and other societal ills, critics say these claims are largely unproven. Credit: Bigstock

Synthetic biology differs from conventional genetic engineering in its technique, scale, and its use of novel and synthetic genetic sequences – raising new risks to biodiversity.

Friends of the Earth International is urging caution and has made several recommendations to the 12th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 12) being held here from Oct. 6-17.

“We are recommending a moratorium on the environmental release and the commercial use of synthetic biology, specifically because of the lack of international regulations and virtual lack of environmental and safety assessments anywhere in the world. We are encouraging the CBD to stand behind the precautionary approach which countries have already agreed to by being signatories to the CBD,” Perls said.

“This is a new and emerging issue and needs to be treated as such. Many of the concerns have to do with the environmental, cultural, social impacts of this new technology, including what would happen if a product like ginseng here in Korea were to be produced using synthetic biology. The impact that it would have on small famers across this country could be immense.

“It would also have a large impact on countries like Brazil where the feed stock would be grown in order to produce these synthetic biology organisms, which will churn out whatever you’ve designed it to churn out,” she added.

While biotechnology has been portrayed as a panacea for climate change and other societal ills, Friends of the Earth said the claims that genetically engineered plants and microbes can sequester more carbon in the soil and produce more fuels when processed than conventional methods have yet to be proven.

The group noted that “in the wake of these unfulfilled promises” emerges synthetic biology, a more extreme form of genetic engineering, which has also been touted as the solution to the climate crisis.

But the group said synthetic biology is not a sustainable solution to the climate crisis and has the potential to create an entirely new set of problems.

The Philippines is the world’s biggest producer and exporter of coconut oil. Twenty-five million people in a population of 100 million are directly or indirectly dependent on the coconut industry for their livelihoods and domestic food security.

Neth Dano, programme manager with the ETC Group, told IPS, “There is a lot at stake for the Philippines” on this issue because synthetic biology could potentially replace coconut oil in the global market.

“In the Philippines, coconut production is not done in a plantation way, it’s small scale. And in the structure of rural economies, in most cases the coconut producers are among the poorest ones,” Dano explained.

Dano said the CBD as the United Nations body responsible for looking at potential impacts of development on biodiversity and also primarily for conservation of biodiversity can do a lot to address the concerns over synthetic biology.

“The CBD is the only body in the United Nations that had taken up synthetic biology so far and addressed the concerns on its potential impacts on biodiversity,” Dano said.

Dano noted also that most of the commercial beginnings of synthetic biology were related to climate change.

“The earlier research and development efforts were focusing on algae that actually would produce biofuels. And biofuels were seen as a solution to address this problem of massive greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. So it was actually presented as a solution to climate change as a mitigation strategy,” she said.

“The big oil companies invested so much in the development of biofuels from synthetically modified algae but the investments did not deliver, so now they’ve shifted their attention to low-volume high-value and this is where the lauric oils come in,” Dano added.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at destinydlb@gmail.com

Homes like these in the village of Madam Bernard, Ile à Vache, Haiti, might be removed to make way for tourist development or islanders removed from other areas might be relocated here. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

By Judith Scherr
ILE À VACHE, Haiti, Aug 8 2014 (IPS)

Calm waters lap the shore beneath stately coconut palms. Mango trees display their bounty alongside mangrove forests. Goats graze peacefully on hillsides.

Ile à Vache is “the Caribbean’s last treasure island,” says Haiti’s Ministry of Tourism. Just 10.5 km off Haiti’s southwest coast, the 13 by 3.2 km haven is, the ministry continues, “unpaved, unplugged, unspoiled and unlike anywhere else,” and “singular for its complete absence of roads and cars.”“After three successive demonstrations, they sent police to terrorise the people of Ile à Vache." -- Alexis Kenold

These words were written, however, before mangroves were cleared for an international airport, coconut palms were bulldozed for a road, a bay was dredged for yachts and some 40 police officers came with weapons and three all-terrain vehicles to quell protests.

Islanders, estimated at between 14,000 and 20,000, are angry at their exclusion from the government decision-making process that has opened the island for investment in an international airport, hotels, villas, a golf course, and an underwater museum — investments that place residents’ futures in limbo.

“The project came to the island by surprise,” Alexis Kenold, a 40-year-old father of five, told IPS. “The government hadn’t talked to us about it. They want to kick us out in favour of those who would profit from tourist development.”

On May 10, 2013, President Michel Martelly decreed that the island was a “public utility,” zoned for tourism.

“The decree says that no inhabitant of the island owns his land and that the state can do whatever it wants with it,” said Kenold, a member of Konbit Peyizan Ilavach, Farmers Organization of Ile à Vache, formed to oppose the project.

Minister of Tourism Stephanie Villedrouin Balmir, who declined an interview for this story, has said that no more than five percent of the islanders will be displaced, that they will be relocated, not removed from the island, and that they will be compensated for their losses.

But involuntary relocation is unacceptable to the islanders, who have held several large demonstrations since December demanding retraction of the decree.

The government reacted to the protests by beefing up police forces and throwing KOPI Vice President Jean Matulnes Lamy into the National Penitentiary, Kenold said. Officials say Lamy is detained on charges unrelated to the protests, but activists say his imprisonment is political.

“After three successive demonstrations, they sent police to terrorise the people of Ile à Vache,”
Kenold said, charging that when he was away from home police ransacked his house and took money he’d saved for his children’s school fees.

He said they’ve harassed and beat others, and now islanders live in fear of the police. Before the demonstrations, there were just three or four police on the peaceful island, he said.

A spate of planned investment projects on Ile à Vache, Haiti has placed residents’ future in limbo. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

Islanders say they don’t oppose tourism – they might benefit by getting electricity, potable water and government services. But they don’t want to be moved from their five-room homes with spacious yards for trees, gardens and animals, to crowd into two rooms up against neighbours.

And they worry about the island’s fragile ecology.

“The forest is the lungs of the island,” Kenold said. “It’s like they want to sacrifice the heart and the lungs of the island to put in an international airport.”

There’s concern as well for the waters surrounding the island. They “began dredging a pristine bay known as Madam Bernard without an assessment of the environmental impact on marine ecosystems,” Jessica Hsu of the NGO Other Worlds and radio host Jean Claudy Aristil said in a joint presentation at a July Innovators in Coastal Tourism symposium in Grenada.

The project has already impacted some islanders economically. School director Dracen Jean Louienel told IPS that people had used the mangroves that were cut down for the airport to produce charcoal.

“That was how people made their living,” he said, “This destroyed their livelihood.” And building the road removed coconut trees on which other families depended, he said.

Louienel said, moreover, promises of work have not been fulfilled. “People signed up to work on the road, but few were hired,” Louienel said.

Some islanders, however, have profited from the project and support it. Standing in the clearing where the airport is to be built, Gilbert Joseph called the project “a wonderful thing.” Joseph works as a security guard there at night and sells beverages to the construction workers during the day.

Clausel Ilmo, whose son is working as a translator for the Dominican road-building company, also likes the project. He pointed out that where it once took hours to walk to distant parts of the island, one now can go quickly on the road by motorbike.

Father Guy Carter Guerrier, a Catholic priest, did not join the militant protests. Still, he has concerns. “To me, developing the island could be a beautiful project,” he said. “The problem is, the government didn’t include the people here. They even passed over the church. They left everybody out.”

Up the hill from Guerrier’s church, Sr. Flora Blanchette, a French-Canadian Franciscan nun who’s run an orphanage on the island since 1981, shared her hopes and concerns.

New roads can help people access health care, schools and food, she said, but the fruit trees that nourish the children should be protected.

“What I’m hoping is that they bring the essentials for people living on the island,” she said, “that they truly bring development for all the social classes to benefit.”

In Costa Rica, the whole population has benefited from tourism, Elizabeth Becker, author of “Overbooked: the Global Business of Travel and Tourism” told IPS by phone. There, locals have input into development, she said.

Implemented correctly, Haiti could greatly benefit from the booming tourism market, she added.

However, “bottom-up tourism is the best way to do ecotourism,” Becker said. “People should not be losing their property rights in order to have tourism. People should instead have … a voice in what kind of tourism they want.”

Cambodia’s tourist development provides a cautionary tale, she said. The government took away people’s property rights and parks protections and did not consult locals before installing hotels and airports.

In Cambodia, “all that great money that supposedly comes from tourism doesn’t land in local hands,” she said. “It either lands with the elite or with foreigners.”

Haiti’s Ministry of Tourism emphasises environmentalism. The Ile à Vache “project objective is to develop sustainable tourism based on the practices of ecotourism,” an online ministry slideshow says. But islanders say the government hasn’t demonstrated care for the environment.

Documents also say the government will undertake a “social improvements programme.” It has recently dug new wells, built a community centre, installed outdoor solar lights, and distributed rice and fishing equipment.

But Kenold says it was only “after the population rose up, that they came with a few grains of rice to appease the anger of the people.”

“I’m not against tourist development, but it’s the way they’re going about it,” Kenold said, adding that people are open to dialogue with government officials, but only after the decree is retracted, Lamy is released from prison and police are removed from the island.

“After lifting the decree that would disposes the inhabitants,” he said, “they can come with their projects and we will come with ours.”

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at judithscherr@gmail.com

On Oct. 16, 1993, Alerte Belance was abducted from her home and taken to Titanyen, a small seaside village used by Haiti’s rulers as a mass grave for political opponents. There she received machete chops to her face, neck, and extremities. Despite her grave injuries, Belance was able to save herself by dragging her mutilated body onto the street and asking for help.

The president of Haiti - a country with no external threats, a history of military repression, and an abundance of more pressing problems - is rebuilding the once-banished Haitian military.
Belance’s survival was extraordinary, but not all were so lucky.

On Jan. 18, 1994, Wilner Elie, a member of the Papaye Peasant Movement, was knifed to death by a group of masked men in his own home. His 12 children were handcuffed by the assailants and forced to watch helplessly as their father was brutally murdered.

Elie and Belance’s tragic stories were not anomalies. Not long ago in Port-au-Prince, decapitated bodies littered the streets, warnings to would-be dissidents. Violent men sexually abused young women seemingly for sport.

People were ambushed in their homes and shot to death for attempting to escape. Thousands of Haitians fled in shoddy boats through treacherous waters to the United States, only to be sent back despite outcries from human rights groups.

Though it reads like a horror script or dystopian novel, this is not fiction. This was reality for millions of Haitians living under military rule. And now, as the Haitian government moves to rebuild its once-banished army, some Haitians are wondering whether a sequel is in the works.

A dark legacy

Haiti has a lengthy history of military and state-sanctioned violence. Shortly after coming to power in 1957, the infamous dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, feeling threatened by the regular armed forces, created a paramilitary force to protect himself.

Nicknamed the Tonton Macoutes (Uncle Gunnysacks) after an old tale about a bogeyman who abducted unruly children and placed them in gunnysacks to be eaten at breakfast, these men carried out unimaginable murders and sent tremors of fear throughout the nation.

Accountable to virtually no one, they continued their reign of terror after Papa Doc’s death and through the rule of his successor and son, Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. After Baby Doc was forced to flee in 1986, the Tonton Macoutes were officially disbanded, but other paramilitaries continued in their footsteps.

Meanwhile the military itself continued to interfere in Haiti’s politics. On Sep. 29, 1991, Jean Betrand-Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected president, was ousted by a military coup just eight months into his presidency.

The coup, led by Lieutenant General Raoul Cedras, plunged the nation into a particularly violent and turbulent period. For three years the Haitian military and its paramilitary arm, the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, ran an exceptionally brutal regime, kidnapping, torturing, and murdering supporters of the ousted Aristide. By 1994, the death toll had reached an estimated 5,000.

Haitian President François Duvalier in 1968. Credit: Public domain

Following an intervention by the United States, Aristide was restored to power in late 1994 on condition that he implement economic reforms favored by Washington. He dismantled the military the following year. The disbandment of the military did not cure Haiti of all its ills, but the dissolution was followed by three successful transitions of presidential power – in 1996, 2000, and later in 2010.

In 2004, however, a paramilitary force consisting of former soldiers with help from United States, France, and Canada organised a second successful coup against Aristide, who had been elected to a second term in 2000 after serving out his first in 1996. Even after their official disbandment, former soldiers were still able to influence political outcomes in Haiti.

A return to form

And now, after two decades in the shadows, the military is back: Haitian President Michel Martelly has followed through on a campaign promise to reconstitute the Haitian military. The new force launched its first operations this February.

This has left many Haitians wondering why a country with no external threats, a history of violent, military-led repression against its own citizens, and an abundance of more pressing problems would need—or even want—a new military. “Given the history of Haiti’s military,” warned Mark Weisbrot, its “existence alone could be considered a threat to security.”

Martelly’s personal history provides some clues about his own sympathies. Before he began his political career, Michel Martelly was a provocative konpa singer who went by the name Sweet Micky. During the Duvalier era, he ran a nightclub named Garage that was frequented by military officials and other members of Haiti’s tiny elite.

Around this time Martelly befriended Lieutenant Colonel Michel Francois, the man who would later become chief of the secret police under Raoul Cedras. Martelly remained a “favourite” of the thugs who worked for the Duvalier regime and, after its collapse, would even accompany the death squads organised by Francois to murder Aristide supporters.

While death squads hunted dissidents by night, Martelly taunted them by day. Lavalas, the massive pro-democracy movement launched by Aristide after Baby Doc was ousted, quickly became the target of Martelly’s biting lyrics. Throughout Aristide’s presidency, Martelly remained an outspoken critic of the president and his supporters, eventually emerging as a politician in his own right.

After a hotly contested and controversial election in 2011, Martelly was elected president of Haiti. Later that year, an anonymous Haitian official leaked a document to the Associated Press outlining a plan for the revival of the Haitian military.

Solving the wrong problems

The document cited several reasons why Haiti supposedly needs to spend 95 million dollars building up a new military force: to provide opportunities for young people, to rebuild Haiti’s infrastructure, to patrol its border with the Dominican Republic, and – perhaps most ominously – to “keep order” during times of chaos.

Although Haiti is well within its rights to establish an army, the purpose of a military is not to provide internal security, but to combat external threats. A Haitian official claims that it’s embarrassing to have the United Nations providing security in Haiti.

But although its mission in Haiti has been marred by scandal, the U.N. is training a national police force to provide security and keep order once the peacekeepers finally leave. It’s unclear why a military would be preferable in this regard to a civilian security force.

And it’s similarly unclear why Martelly thinks he needs to build a military to create jobs or invest in infrastructure. Haiti is in desperate need of construction workers – even before the 2010 earthquake leveled buildings and destroyed homes, Haiti’s infrastructure was already in a precarious position.

If Martelly truly wanted to provide opportunities for the young people of Haiti, he could initiate a programme that would train men and women in construction and create jobs for the multitudes of unemployed Haitians. Instead, the new military will supposedly be rebuilding the country while millions of Haitians continue to languish in poverty.

In a country with a sparse amount of cash and a government unable to provide even the most basic necessities to its own population, it seems fiscally irresponsible and morally bankrupt to spend 95 million dollars on rebuilding an army that has such an atrocious record of human rights abuses.

The cholera outbreak, food insecurity, and the 500,000 squatters lacking permanent homes are just a few of the litany of problems facing Haiti today. The lack of a military force is not high on that list of priorities.

Although Haiti’s elite and powerful seem to support the new military, a poll conducted over five years found that fully 96 percent of Haitians oppose its recreation. Defying the widespread opposition and pressing need for other development projects, Michel Martelly’s plan has finally come to fruition.

Despite assurances from officials that this military force will not have the means to imitate its predecessors, the horrors from the recent past still linger in the minds of those who remember. If history repeats itself like it is prone to do, Haiti could revert back to the days where standing on the wrong side of the ideological fence means certain death.

Nathalie Baptiste is a Haitian-American contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus who lives in the Washington, D.C. area. She holds a BA and MA in International Studies and writes about Latin America and the Caribbean. You can follow her on Twitter at @nhbaptiste. This article originally appeared on Foreign Policy in Focus.

An intersection showing mostly empty homes at the heart of the Lumane Casimir Village near Morne à Cabri on Sep. 19, 2013. Credit: HGW/Marc Schindler Saint-Val

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 20 2014 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Named after a famous Haitian singer, the Lumane Casimir Village sits in the desert-like plain at the foot of Morne à Cabri and will eventually have 3,000 rental units. About 1,300 are now ready.

The project was financed with 49 million dollars from the Petro-Caribe Fund, money that will eventually have to be paid back to the Venezuelan government.

During the May 16, 2013 inauguration, the president handed out keys to a group of families that had been assembled for the media. But they did not move in. From May to September, nobody actually lived in the apartments. Families only moved in starting in October. In the meantime, many were looted.

“Between 120 and 150 apartments were vandalised,” explained David Odnell of the Unit for the Construction of Housing and Public Buildings (UCLBP), one of three government agencies involved with housing. UCLBP is the supervisor of the site.

More than 50 toilets, and dozens of locks, windows, brackets, bulbs, electrical cables and outlets were stolen. Many apartments were also damaged by would-be thieves who used crowbars and other tools to try to wrench sinks, doors and windows from walls.

“The thieves still come,” Bélair Paulin told Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW). Paulin spends a lot of time in the area because he is waiting to see if he will be chosen as a renter.

About 200 families have already moved in and others have their keys. Some 1,100 homes remain empty.

During a visit to the site on Dec. 20, 2013, Martelly announced that 250 police officers will be getting apartments and handed over keys to 75 of them, again, in front of the cameras. Several later denounced the fact that they were asked to hand the keys back after the ceremony.

All of the apartments have water and electric systems, new trash cans, a gas stove, a container for receiving and purifying drinking water, plants growing in a garden which will benefit from a regular watering service, and the promise of round-trip transportation to the capital for 20 gourdes (about 50 cents).

Under the heavy sun, the sounds of the new residents echo though the site. Voices, doors opening and closing, cars coming and going. The village is coming to life.

According to Odnell, eventually the village will have “a waste disposal system, a police station, a health center, a drinking water reservoir, a public square, a soccer field, a connection with the electricity system, a vocational school, an elementary school and a marketplace.”

The government is also building an industrial park across the street, where – authorities hope – residents can work.

“The mini-industrial park will have all the facilities necessary to create local jobs for housing beneficiaries,” Odnell promised, noting that a Canadian company has already expressed interest.

The park is not yet finished and – as of late 2013 – has not yet been registered as a “free trade zone” industrial park.

Like other projects, the new residents of Lumane Casimir Village are not necessarily earthquake victims. (Read Part One)

“There are three criteria for being eligible: 1) You have to have been affected by the earthquake, 2) the person has to have a family of not more than three to five people, and 3) the person must have a revenue. That is the most important, so you can pay your rent, which will be between 163 and 233 dollars per month,” according to Odnell.

Christela Blaise is one of the new renters. A cosmetician, she has lived at the village with her older sister and baby since October.

“After the earthquake, we lived in Bon Repos on the main highway. We were not direct victims of the earthquake, but like everyone who was looking for a place to live, we got a temporary shelter. But that didn’t last past three months, so we moved back to our home,” she said.

Housing: An immense challenge

The Haitian government recognises that it faces an enormous challenge. Some 150,000 earthquake victims still live in about 300 camps and another 50,000 live in the new sprawling slums Canaan, Onaville and Jerusalem.

Half of the camps have no sanitation services and only eight percent are supplied with water, according to an October 2013 report from the UCLBP and the Camp Coordination and Camp Management (CCCM)/Shelter Cluster, part of the U.N.’s humanitarian presence in Haiti.

Residents of over 100 camps are in imminent danger of being evicted. In December, 126 families were forced to leave their homes and shacks in Canaan, near Village Lumane Casimir, and on Jan. 11, a camp in Delmas was consumed in flames. One woman and three young children were burned to death.

According to the government, the housing deficit will only continue to grow as people leave the countryside and smaller towns and move to cities.

“Haiti needs to meet the challenge of constructing 500,000 new homes in order to meet the current and housing deficit between now and 2020,” according to the UCLBP’s new Policy of Housing and Urban Planning (PNLH), released in October.

The new policy is ambitious but vague. The Executive Summary sketches out five “strategic axes” that will help “grow access to housing,” including “social housing” that meets construction norms, and through the promotion of “models of housing that assure access to basic services.”

The language of the document implies that the government will seek to resolve the deficit in partnership with the private sector. In the introduction to the PNLH, for example, Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe notes that “under the coordination of the UCLBP, the PNLH also makes clear the important role that the private sector is being called upon to play, side-by-side with the state.”

While this kind of orientation should not necessarily be rejected out of hand, already with the Lumane Casimir Village and the 400% and Chavez Houses projects, it appears that the government is no longer going to build social housing that is within reach of the majority of Haitians.

According to the World Bank, 80 percent of the population lives on less than two dollars per day. Even if a couple combines incomes, it would have only about 60 dollars a month. How could that family pay rent that runs from 39 dollars all the way up to 233 dollars per month?

Speaking at an event at the Lumane Casimir Village on Nov. 11, 2013, Lamothe affirmed his pride in the project, which he called “social housing.”

But, if the housing is not for the poor – such as, for example, the majority of the earthquake victims – and if, with monthly rents that reach 233 dollars, it is out of reach of 80 percent of the population, is it really correct to call it “social” or public housing?

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

Excerpt:

One of the 400% residents coming home with a bucket of water on Sep. 19, 2013. Credit: HGW/Marc Schindler Saint-Val

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 20 2014 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Four years after the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake, questions continue to haunt the four main post-disaster housing projects built by the Haitian government.

Who lives in them? Who runs them? Can the residents afford the rents or mortgages? Are the residents the actual earthquake victims?“Nobody is in control over there. People just seized the homes." -- Miaud Thys

By some estimates, the catastrophe killed 200,000 people and made 1.3 million homeless overnight by destroying or damaging 172,000 homes or apartments. But the new projects do not necessarily house earthquake victims, over 200,000 of whom still live in tents or in the three large new slums.

In total, the new projects, with homes for at least 3,588 families, cost 88 million dollars. (In contrast, international donors and private agencies spent more than five times that amount – about 500 million dollars – on “temporary shelters” or T-shelters.) See HGW #9

Three of the new housing projects are in Zoranje, a new settlement not far from downtown, on the border between Cité Soleil and Croix des Bouquets. The fourth is at the foot of Morne à Cabri, about 25 kilometres north of the capital on the highway that leads to Mirebalais. (Read Part Two)

Clinton’s pet project now home to squatters

On Jul. 21, 2011, President Michel Martelly, former U.S. president Bill Clinton and then-Prime Minister Jean Max Bellerive inaugurated the Housing Exposition, a fair featuring about 60 model homes in Zoranje.

One of the first projects approved by the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, the Expo cost over million dollars in public reconstruction money. Foreign and Haitian construction and architecture firms also spent at least two million dollars more. The objective was to provide models for the agencies and businesses engaged in post-earthquake housing construction.

Everyone agrees the Expo was a failure. Few visited the site and fewer still chose one of the model homes – many of which were very expensive by Haitian standards – for their project. See HGW #20

“There were some really odd examples,” according to David Odnell, director of the government’s Unit for the Construction of Housing and Public Buildings (UCLBP), one of three government agencies involved with housing. “Some had nothing to do with the way we Haitians live or think about housing. It was a completely imported thing.”

Today, surrounded by weeds and goats, the fading and cracked houses are home to dozens of squatter families.

“All the houses have new owners. They have been taken over,” explained a young pregnant girl who said her parents are “renters.”

“Yes, that’s possible,” Odnell, an architect, said in a Nov. 19, 2013 interview. “And you know why. There is a void… and there is no authority there. But [the project] is not exactly a waste. I could call it poor planning, because the houses can always be recuperated.”

Odnell’s counterpart at the government Fund for Social and Economic Assistance agency (FAES), a government office also involved in housing, said much the same thing.

“Aside from the inauguration week, the project has been forgotten,” Patrick Anglade explained. “It’s a problem that can be solved, but we have to figure out how to do that.”

The director of the third government housing agency, the Public Enterprise for the Promotion of Social Housing (EPPLS), had little to say. (“Social housing” is known as “subsidised” or “public” housing in English.)

“We have nothing to do with that,” director Miaud Thys told Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW).

Anarchy reigns in the House(s) of Chavez

Another new project sits across the street from the Expo: 128 apartments built by the Venezuelan government for 4.9 million dollars (according to its figures) during the Hugo Chavez presidency. They are usually called “The Chavez Houses.”

Earthquake-resistant, sporting two bedrooms, a bath, a living room and a kitchen, and painted in bright colours, today most of the homes house people who simply broke down the doors and moved in. Only 42 of the 128 have “legal” inhabitants: families invited by the Venezuelan Embassy. Empty for 15 months, some were vandalised. Fixtures, toilets, sinks and other items, including water pumps, were stolen. See HGW #12

“Nobody is in control over there. People just seized the homes,” Thys admitted to HGW. “We know that. Now we are trying to recuperate them.”

Inhabitants are already making adjustments: changing some doors, adding rooms and windows, building gates and fences.

Surrounded by neighbourhood men, Jules Jamlee sits on a broken chair across the street from a home that is being expanded. Like his friends, he is insistent about his right to “his” home.

“The president knows very well that we are revolutionaries,” he said. “He might make threats but he knows we don’t agree with them.”

Told of the residents’ insistence, Thys had a response: “Revolutionaries or not, we are not going to lose those apartments. We are going to send those people letters and invite them to leave so that we can recuperate them. Today we are starting with the carrot. We’ll use the stick later.”

The housing development still lacks water and residents complain that the lack of adequate water means that the toilets don’t work well. Many residents instead use nearby weedy areas for their physiological needs.

New Owners Not 400% Happy

Known as the 400% or “400 in 100” project because Martelly promised 400 homes in 100 days, the nearby 30-million-dollar project funded by the Inter-American Development Bank was inaugurated on Feb. 27, 2012. The development has three kilometres of paved streets, a water system (which lacked water until just recently), an electrical system, street lamps and a square with a basketball court.

“Everything was in place so that residents would have all the basic services. In that sense, we proved that in a short time and with minimal funding, we could do well,” Anglade explained in an Oct. 2, 2013 interview.

But not all of the new residents are earthquake victims. Many are public administration employees. There was a rush to fill the houses at the beginning. And there are other complications, because the houses are not gifts. Residents must pay a five-year mortgage.

“During the first phase, and because we were in a hurry… we weren’t that choosy. Some people who got housing do not actually have the means to pay for it,” Anglade admitted.

The mortgages are between 39 and 46 dollars per month. The contract says that “non-payment by the renter/beneficiary for three consecutive months will result in a 5% penalty for each unpaid month” and that “non-payment could lead to expulsion.”

The contract has caused a great deal of grumbling.

“The president did not give us a house. He is selling it to us. They are too expensive. What can a person do in this country where there is no work? How can one find 1,500 gourdes (39 dollars) each month?” asked Yves Zéphyr, an unemployed father of two who has lived in the development since November 2012.

FAES admits it faces a challenge.

“We are not achieving 100 percent payments, not even 70 percent,” Anglade said. “At least 30 percent are behind.”

A small poll by HGW gives an idea of why some people are behind. One-half of 10 residents questioned said they are unemployed.

When the project was launched, the government received financing to prepare the land, build the houses, and set up the electricity system, but not for the actual services necessary for a housing development, like water, septic system cleaning, a marketplace, schools, a clinic and affordable transportation to downtown.

“The project isn’t finished yet,” Odnell noted. “The government needs to continue working, in order to improve the lives of the people there. Normally when you plan a housing development, all of the services are supposed to be in place and the houses come at the end. But just the opposite happened with the 400% development.”

While many residents say they are happy with their new homes, HGW found problems. Some roofs leak every time it rains, and residents say electricity is rare. Some of the houses had been vandalised before residents moved in: tin roofs and toilets had disappeared.

Also, the septic systems for some of the houses are causing problems.

“They fill up in a quarter of an hour!” claimed André Paul, who has lived in “400%” since July 2013. “Some of them are completely blocked, others are just totally filled.”

EPPLS, which shares responsibility with the FAES for the site, recognises that the septic systems were “poorly built.” Director Thys promised: “We will correct them” although he was not sure how that would be funded.

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

Excerpt:

Mimose Gérard, 57, washes clothes and collects plastic bottles from the trash in order to survive. She is still living in a tent camp four years after Haiti's earthquake. Credit: Milo Milfort/IPS

By Jane Regan and Milo Milfort
Carrefour, HAITI, Jan 20 2014 (IPS)

Mimose Gérard sits in her tent at Gaston Margron camp, surrounded by large bags filled with plastic bottles. She earns just pennies for each, but that’s better than nothing.

“I’ve lived in the camp since Jan. 13, 2010, when I was set up with a tent. It’s been a painful existence,” she tells IPS. “I’m just a regular person on this piece of land. I have nowhere to go.”"It’s repugnant to see how authorities treat people because of the simple fact that they are poor." -- Sanon Renel

Collecting bottles to recycle is the livelihood of at least a dozen people in this camp that about 800 families call home, located in Carrefour, on the southern edge of Port-au-Prince. Four years after the earthquake, there are still about 300 internally displaced person (IDP) camps mostly scattered around the capital region, and in a large new slum on desertic slopes outside the city.

Gérard is 57 years old, and has 11 children. She also does laundry to earn a few more pennies. Her hands are rough and chapped.

“The conditions are inhumane, but we have nowhere to go. Those whose families helped them have gotten out. But I don’t have anything like that, so I am staying,” she says.

Gérard added that residents are also forced to consume untreated water – in a country gripped by a cholera epidemic.

“We have no toilet. This is where people drop off their bag of fecal matter,” she says, pointing to a weedy area where residents open or dispose of the little plastic bags used as “portable toilets” in the night, when it can be dangerous to leave one’s tent.

On top of thieves, camp residents have to deal with the police and armed men working for landowners.

“The police try to force us to leave the camp,” Gérard claimed. Officers appear and shoot in the air, trying to scare residents. “The owner himself has come three times.”

According to the U.N., residents in about one-third of the 300 or so remaining camps are at risk of eviction.

On Jan. 11, the eve of the fourth anniversary of the earthquake, an inferno raced through the 100 or so tents and shacks on a camp in Delmas, not far from downtown Port-au-Prince. Four people – a 38-year-old woman and three small children – were burned to death and dozens injured.

Aside from transporting some victims to the public hospital and handing out mattresses, municipal and federal authorities have not made any statements, nor have they launched an investigation into the origin of the blaze, which many suspect was arson. The land is owned by a Haitian printing company.

“Four people died in the fire, including three young children, whilst around thirty others were hospitalized with burns. All of the makeshift shelters of the 108 families who lived in the camp were completely destroyed by the flames, along with their personal belongings,” Amnesty International noted in a statement released on Jan. 17.

Sanon Renel, leader of the Front for Reflection and Action on the Housing (FRAKKA) coalition, said the murderous fire and the lack of official response do not augur well.

“It seems like the private sector is stepping up its evictions,” he told IPS. “They realise that the government practically supports their actions, so they can do whatever they want.”

“It’s repugnant to see how authorities treat people because of the simple fact that they are poor,” he continued. “They don’t consider them as human beings. I think they see them as animals.”

Four years vs. 35 seconds

Thirty-five seconds. That’s all it took the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that hit Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010 to wipe out almost a quarter of a million people, collapse almost half a million buildings – leaving 1.5 million people homeless – and trigger widespread destruction. The estimated cost of damages to the housing sector alone almost hit 2.5 billion dollars.

Four years later, some 200,000 people are still stuck in camps, like Gérard. Only 7,515 new permanent houses have been built while 27,000 have been repaired, and about 55,000 families have received one-time payments of about 500 dollars to leave the camps.

But a year later, those families “face another housing crisis as their housing subsidy runs out,” a recent study from the Washington-based Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti found.

A U.S. government plan to build 15,000 new houses has reduced its goals by over 80 percent, according to the Centre for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR). Now the plan is to build only 2,500. Although USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, has built over 900 houses in Haiti, it has decided to withdraw continuance.

Overall, of the 6.43 billion dollars disbursed by bilateral and multilateral donors to Haiti from 2010 to 2012, just nine percent went through the Haitian government while the rest went to foreign contractors.

“It’s a really profitable business for U.S. contractors to make money off of this disaster,” CEPR’s Dan Beeton told IPS. “This was an opportunity to turn a disaster into something that could benefit Haitians as they rebuild their own country, but they were just bypassed.”

“I’ll pick up pots in the street and get 20 to 25 gourdes [46 to 57 cents],” she says. “Every morning when we wake up, we pick up bags of feces and go throw them in a hole. The stench prevents us from cooking.”

Like Gérard, Ilien deplores the lack of potable water.

“When the camp was first built we had drinking water, but not anymore,” she says. “The water we drink isn’t good.”

Nor surprisingly, Ilien and other camp residents are afraid of being infected with any one of Haiti’s water-borne diseases, particularly cholera. Studies by numerous authorities, incuding the U.S. Centres for Disease Control (CDC), say the bacteria was brought to Haiti by Nepali peacekeepers who are part of the 9,500‑strong U.N. Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH).

Introduced to the country in October 2010, to date it has infected almost 700,000 people, killing almost 8,500 of them. The CDC says that approximately two people per day still die from cholera. While U.N. agencies consider it an epidemic and a humanitarian crisis, so far the body has refused demands for compensation.

“Cholera and housing are being ignored, but they do go together,” Beeton says. “There’s no clean water, so the disease will spread. Cholera eradication is also lack of political will.”

The U.N. has 18 organisations – including MINUSTAH – currently operating in Haiti. They collaborate with approximately 43 large non-governmental organsations or NGOs, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the government, and hundreds of smaller agencies.

Reduced funding, however, has caused humanitarian assistance to dwindle, although MINUSTAH’s approved budget has remained high – almost 577 million dollars for July 2013 to June 2014.

“MINUSTAH is a waste of money, in my opinion, because there is no armed conflict in Haiti, and the money could instead be spent on ending the cholera epidemic that MINUSTAH troops started,” Beeton said.

UN-Habitat notes that Haiti already had an immense deficit in adequate housing dating back before the earthquake, with many living in slum areas.

“We are clearly out of the emergency stage and we will allow Haiti to take care of itself, but that cannot go forward unless there are means,” a spokesperson for the agency told IPS.

With additional reporting by Lorraine Farquharson at the United Nations.

Rosemie Durandisse stands with one of her children in front of her temporary home. Credit: Fritznelson Fortuné/IPS

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Jan 10 2014 (IPS)

As the fourth anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti approaches on Jan. 12, development analysts are decrying an ongoing lack of transparency in U.S. foreign aid to the country, even as those assistance streams are drying up.

From what is known of U.S. post-earthquake funding to Haiti, it appears that a notably small proportion of money from USAID, the county’s main foreign aid arm, is going directly to local Haitian businesses, institutions and organisations.“Sixty percent [of USAID funds] goes to firms operating inside the beltway, disappearing in a black box.” -- Jake Johnson

“Sixty percent [of USAID funds] goes to firms operating inside the beltway, disappearing in a black box,” Jake Johnson of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a Washington think tank, told IPS. “That makes it very hard to determine how and when the funds reach the ground.”

Even though the United States offered three billion dollars in aid for Haiti after the earthquake, less than one percent of the 1.3 billion dollars in obligated USAID funds – money designated specifically for Haitian recovery efforts – has gone directly to local Haitian groups.

“When so little of the funding reaches Haitians themselves, it takes them out of the decision-making process and ensures that aid programmes are not actually responsive to the needs of people on the ground,” Johnson says.

He believes that aid money can often be better utilised in post-emergency situations if donor governments ensure a high level of transparency around those assistance flows, and if they direct as much of these funds as possible towards developing new industries.

A USAID official accounts for these apparent discrepancies by noting that “part of the challenge of making more awards directly to Haitian entities – public and private – has been that few of them have the internal financial controls in place to ensure compliance with U.S. government terms and conditions.”

The official told IPS the agency is trying to address this impediment by working directly with Haitian organisations to build their “financial control capabilities”, as well as to educate them about USAID procurement procedures and provide them with financial services.

“Many USAID-funded partners already work with numerous Haitian NGOs – more than 400 – through contractor and grantee sub-awards as well as arrangements with local vendors.”

Half of the data is missing

So if less than one percent of USAID funding has gone to Haitian groups, where has the rest of this money been directed? The lack of funding transparency makes it impossible to know for sure.

“Reports on contractors are not actually done according to the Office of Inspector General for USAID,” says Johnson.

USAID’s primary contractors are required to report on their subcontractors’ activities, and this data in turn is supposed to be made public. “But this information is nowhere to be found,” Vijaya Ramachandran, a senior fellow with the Centre for Global Development (CGD), a Washington think tank, wrote this week.

The USAID official told IPS that “all reported subcontract and sub-award information is published publicly” through a government website. But Ramachandran asserts that “almost half of the transactions data” are missing important data that identify individual vendors.

Lawmakers have noticed similar problems. Legislation passed the U.S. House of Representatives in mid-December that would require a government audit of U.S. assistance in Haiti. (That bill is currently awaiting a vote in the Senate.)

USAID gave seven of the 10 largest contracts for operations in Haiti to Chemonics International, a for-profit provider that Johnson says is the largest USAID contractor in the world. Chemonics’s two largest projects in Haiti include the WINNER Project and the Office of Transitions Initiative, which Johnson describes as “the more political arm of USAID”.

The project was designed to provide aid to countries afflicted by natural disasters or political turmoil, and following the earthquake it immediately provided disaster relief for displaced Haitians.

Nonetheless, the public is unable to ascertain how Chemonics spent the vast majority of its multi-million-dollar contracts in Haiti due to USAID’s lack of oversight reports.

“The [USAID] inspector-general found that Chemonics regularly runs short of its goals and over its budget,” CEPR’s Johnson says. “This is typical, but it’s become particularly evident in Haiti because of the earthquake.”

Trade burden

In addition to development and reconstruction aid, Washington is also seeking to assist Haitian recovery efforts by strengthening the country’s garments industry. Doing so, however, has presented a different set of challenges.

Following the earthquake, USAID partnered with the Clinton Foundation, the Inter-American Bank and Sae-A Trading, a Korean textile manufacturer, to construct the Caracol Industrial Park. Although the agency predicted that the complex would create up to 65,000 jobs, media reports suggest that as of last September the park had created fewer than 1,500 jobs.

Furthermore, although the project’s financers gave hundreds of small-scale farmers 3,200 dollars each to vacate their land for the complex, 95 percent of that land today reportedly remains inactive. Meanwhile, Haitian garment factories, including Caracol Park, are said to be openly flaunting minimum wage laws by paying their employees a mere 4.56 dollars a day, rather than the 6.85 dollars per day stipulated by the government.

Other U.S. attempts to bolster the textiles sector have started out more strongly, but been beset by pre-existing measures.

In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, the U.S. Congress passed the Haiti Economic Lift Programme (HELP) Act in the hopes of stimulating the country’s economy by boosting apparels exports, long a cornerstone of Haitian industry. Haiti’s clothing exports to the U.S. have indeed risen by 25 percent since 2009, creating 30,000 jobs, a number that is expected to double by 2016.

Because Haitian apparel imports into the United States are restricted based on a rule of origin, however, certain types of clothing imports over a certain quota must be produced using U.S. materials. These measures are designed to benefit the U.S. textile industry.

Although the HELP Act partially ameliorated these complex trade restrictions, the quotas and tariffs that the United States places on the Haitian apparel industry continue to inhibit trade-based economic growth.

The CGD’s Kimberly Elliot told IPS that U.S. red tape on Haitian imports today consists of a “complex maze of caps and rules of origins. That’s unlike the European Union, Canada and Japan, all of which have simplified restrictions on rules of origins for states that the U.N. designates as least-developed countries.”

She calls the rule of origin a “burden” for Haiti and argues that if U.S. trade restrictions were less complex, post-earthquake Haitian trade would have a greater potential for growth.

Workers stitch Hanes tee-shirts at a factory in the CODEVI free trade zone in Ouanaminthe, Haiti. Credit: Jude Stanley Roy/IPS

By Jane Regan
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Dec 3 2013 (IPS)

Haiti’s minimum wage will nudge up 12 percent on Jan. 1, from 4.65 to 5.23 dollars (or 200 to 225 gourdes) per day. Calculated hourly, it will go from 58 to 65 cents, before taxes.

But the raise will not affect Haiti’s 30,000 assembly factory workers, who are supposed to already be receiving about seven dollars for an eight-hour day – about 87 cents per hour. Recent studies have found rampant wage theft at almost two dozen of the factories that stitch clothing for companies like Gap and Walmart.“If I hear there is going to be a demonstration, I’ll be there. I cannot make it with this pocket change. The bosses know that." -- Haitian garment worker

The wage hike comes almost five years after the Haitian parliament asked for a 200-gourde minimum wage, then worth 4.96 dollars a day, but failed to overcome Washington-backed industry opposition [see sidebar].

Agreed to on Nov. 29 by a government-convened Council on Salaries (CSS) – made up of labour, business and government representatives – the raise falls far short of the minimum wage of 11.63 dollars (500 gourdes) that factory worker unions and others were demanding.

Last month, in the capital and in Haiti’s north, the Collective of Textile Factory Unions federation (KOSIT), which represents workers in three industrial parks, mobilised for the 500-gourde wage.

On Nov. 7, to chants of “500 gourdes! 500 gourdes!,” over 5,000 workers and supporters marched outside the gates of a free trade zone on the border of the Dominican Republic in Ouanaminthe. Hundreds of others marched on Nov. 26 in the capital.

The factory owners countered late last week with an open letter which pled to “keep Haiti competitive” with what they identified as their “big rivals” – Bangladesh, Cambodia and Vietnam, countries all known for harsh conditions and abuse.

Union members, other workers and their supporters demonstrate to demand a 500-gourde minimum wage in Port-au-Prince on Nov. 26, 2013. Credit: Batay Ouvriye

“We recognise that the clothing and assembly sectors are not ends in and of themselves, but they can be a very important stimulus and can serve as a motor to help Haiti open up and present itself as a country that is changing and modernising,” said the 23 Haitian, Dominican and South Korean factory owners and industrialists from the Association of Haitian Industries (ADIH).

Two days later, on Nov. 29, eight of the nine members of the CSS, including all three union representatives, approved the 225-gourde wage. (None of the union representatives were from KOSIT.)

Yannick Etienne of Batay Ouvriye (Workers Struggle), a labour group which supports KOSIT and other textile unions, said her organisation and the unions disagree with the 225-gourde salary.

“We think it is a shame that the CSS union representatives agreed to the miserable wage of 225 gourdes. At a meeting the night before, we requested that they refuse to sign any agreement that was less than 300 gourdes,” Etienne told IPS.

Rampant wage theft

The country’s 30,000 workers – almost two-thirds of them women – in Haiti’s free trade zone assembly factories stitch together clothing for Gap, Gildan Activewear, Hanes, Kohl’s, Levi’s, Russell, Target, VF, and Walmart. Haitian law stipulates that “the price paid per production unit… must be set in a way that permits a worker to earn at least 300 gourdes for an eight-hour day.”

But recent studies by three different international groups, including the U.N.’s International Labour Organisation (ILO), have documented that the vast majority of workers receive the legal minimum only rarely: about 25 percent of the time, according to the ILO.

A 29-year-old mother who works at the Multiwear factory, which makes tee-shirts for Hanes, is one of those being gypped. (Like all workers interviewed for this story, she agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity.)

“I support my four-year-old, and two sisters, and one brother,” she told IPS. “Sometimes I make the quota and get 300 gourdes, but just once in a while.”

In its October 2013 report, the ILO’s Better Work textile factory monitoring programme found all 23 factories surveyed, including Multiwear, to be “non-compliant” with the law. To be “compliant,” Better Work said that “at least 90 percent of experienced workers” should be able to make 300 gourdes in an eight-hour day.

The mother is her family’s sole support.

“I am the oldest,” she continued. “Right now, my husband is not working. We live in one room.”

She wants the minimum wage to be raised, but said “many people won’t even show up to a sit-in, because if the bosses think you support a wage hike, you’ll immediately be fired.”

Workers, KOSIT leaders, several reports and many economists agree that 225 gourdes, and even 300 gourdes, are not living wages.

A 2011 study by the U.S.-based AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Centre held that a factory worker living in the capital and supporting two children would need to earn about 29 dollars per day (1,152 gourdes), six days a week, to support his or her family.

A 54-year-old worker from One World Apparel, owned by former presidential candidate Charles Henri Baker, also rarely earns 300 gourdes, she told IPS.

“When the boss started to hear talk about the minimum wage going up, he clamped down on us,” said the mother of three, who said she has worked at One World for eight years.

“You have to do 75 dozen pieces, but not every job is the same. Sometimes you can make the quota, but sometimes you can’t. No matter what the job is, the number is the same. Once in a while, if I work really hard, I can at least make 225 gourdes,” she added.

Both Gildan and Fruit of the Loom recently released statements promising to ensure their subcontractors respected the 300-gourde minimum.

“It is our view that the clear intent of Haiti’s minimum wage law is for production rates to be set in such a manner as to allow workers to earn at least 300 gourdes for eight hours of work in a day,” Fruit of the Loom said in a statement. “Based on our independent investigation, we concur with the WRC that the garment industry in Haiti generally falls short of that standard.”

In addition to denying most workers the 300-gourde minimum, bosses were regularly cheating labourers out of overtime and making them work essentially for free, according to a report from the Washington-based Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), issued Oct. 15, 2013.

In Stealing from the Poor, based on worker interviews and pay stubs from five factories (four in the capital and SAE-A at the Caracol Industrial Park), the WRC found repeated cases of employers paying workers the incorrect amount for overtime hours. (The ILO reported only nine percent of factories cheating workers out of overtime.)

In the capital, WRC maintains that at the four factories surveyed – One World, Genesis, Premium and GMC – workers were “being cheated of an average of seven weeks’ pay per year.” Workers sometimes willingly work “off the clock” in order to make the quotas necessary to be paid 300 gourdes, the group reported.

Economist Camille Chalmers, director of the Haitian Platform Advocating an Alternative Development (PAPDA), is highly critical of the Haitian government for, among other things, not enforcing the 300-gourde minimum. He has called for a 560-gourde minimum wage.

“The government does not play the role of arbiter, as it should,” said the university professor while speaking at a Nov. 18 meeting on the wage issue. “Government authorities instead tend to listen to the embassies, to ADIH… Our government is really tied to the upper class, the oligarchy.”

The current government – whose slogan is “Haiti is Open for Business!” – has pushed Haiti’s low wages at numerous national and international conferences.

The mother of three agrees that the minimum wage needs to go up to at least 500 gourdes.

“If I hear there is going to be a demonstration, I’ll be there,” she told IPS. “I cannot make it with this pocket change. The bosses know that. They are just cruel.”

The recent ILO/Better Work report is the seventh Better Work report to document shortfalls and violations.

Additional reporting by Patrick St. Pré.

Agronomist Ludson Lafontant looking at one of the recently constructed ledges during a visit to Doucet in August 2013. It contains a young mango tree plant, a grass plant, and peanut plants. Photo: HGW/Milo Milfort

By Correspondents
Doucet, Petit-Goâve, HAITI, Nov 29 2013 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Reforestation and soil conservation programmes costing many thousands of dollars in this rural community have resulted in hundreds of small ledges built of straw or sacks of earth. In certain areas, the earthworks seem to be lasting, but in others, they are disintegrating.

The construction and destruction of the anti-erosion ledges – all made with foreign development and humanitarian money – offer an example of how at least some of Haiti’s reforestation projects turn out.No matter what promises were made, a farmer will always be concerned with the immediate need of feeding and clothing his or her family first.

In the years since the 2010 earthquake, the 11th and 12th communal sections of Petit-Goâve, located 60 kilometres southwest of the capital, have hosted several soil conservation and agricultural programmes with budgets in the tens and even hundreds of thousands.

The U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), Helvetas and Action Agro Allemande (AAA), sometimes working with a local development organisation – Mouvman Kole Zepòl (MKOZE) – oversaw projects aimed at rehabilitating the watershed of the Ladigue River.

The steep slopes around the river “are very vulnerable to water erosion and mudslides,” MKOZE explained in a report on one project that had a budget of 91,534 dollars. “During rainy season, the waters from the Ladigue River dump a lot of sediment and rocks at the river’s mouth, destroying fields and causing homes to flood. Sometimes harvests, homes, animals and even human lives are lost.”

In the Petit-Goâve region, deforestation started about a half-century ago, according to many residents. It began with the devastating 1963 Hurricane Flora, which caused great damage and over 5,000 deaths in Haiti’s western and southern regions.

Molière Jean Félix, 62, remembers. “There were a lot of mango trees at the top of this mountain. We grew corn and rice. Now you can’t even plant Congo beans there,” recalled the farmer.

Haiti has less than three percent tree cover, down from about 60 percent a century ago, and perhaps 80 percent when Christopher Columbus first disembarked. In Haiti, trees are cut down primarily for fuel.

Most energy consumed in the country for cooking, industrial bakeries and dry cleaning – in fact, 75 percent of all energy used comes from wood and charcoal, according to government figures.

Félix sees tree-cutting almost every day. “Today, young people don’t have any way to make a living. They don’t produce coffee, they don’t raise pigs. So, they cut down trees in order to send their children to school,” he said.

In Doucet, as well as other parts of Haiti, foreign organisations often fund projects where local residents overseen by technicians are paid 200 to 300 gourdes a day (4.65-6.98 dollars) to build ledges made of sacks of dirt, dried reeds and wattle. The ledges are then planted with tree seedlings.

In addition to assisting with reforestation, development organisations also see the projects – known as “Cash for Work” (CFW) in English – as a kind of post-disaster emergency income programme.

“[CFW] helps us hire a lot of families and assures that they get a minimal revenue. This provides immediate assistance and is therefore a real advantage,” AAA’s Beate Maas told Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW).

Reforestation vs. everyday needs

All around Doucet, many hills are decorated with hundreds of the new little ledges holding seedlings of fruit or eucalyptus trees. But there are many others where the ledges are disintegrating: mud is spilling out, and the saplings are dead or dying.

Farmers have planted peanuts, peas and other crops around the structures. In a few months, the hillsides will be as naked as they were before the reforestation project.

Ilomène Tataille is a mother, a landowner and a member of one of the voluntary committees set up to keep an eye on the ledges and the new plants, to assure that animals don’t eat them and to make sure the ledges are drained after each rainfall. Another task, she explained, is to make sure farmers don’t plant anything on the eroding slopes, and especially not peanuts, a popular crop in the region.

According to Tataille, even though the CFW workers and landowners all agreed at first not to disturb the hillsides, it is almost impossible to stop people from farming. Even she breaks her promise.

“Yes, I plant there also. We live in a very dry region. We can only farm peanuts. That is our profession. Sorry, but we don’t have any other job,” she said.

Tataille noted that another problem is the fact that landowners lease out their land, so even if they have made promises to AAA and MKOZE, they can’t force their tenants to follow suit.

Staff who work on the projects are aware of the vicious-circle element.

Agronomist Esther Paynis was a consultant to AAA for a project carried out with MKOZE between September 2012 and August 2013.

“We told people not to plant peanuts and other crops that involve digging into the earth, like yam and sweet potato. In the training sessions we held, everyone promised to respect those principles,” Paynis told HGW in a Sep. 30 email.

“If we give them advice that they later ignore, that’s not our fault. We told them the disadvantages of planting peanuts and how that could lead to the total degradation of the zone.”

During a visit in August 2013, journalists saw many young peanut plants on a number of hillsides near the ledges. Two months later, in October, many recently made structures on those same hillsides were in various states of disintegration. Many had been destroyed and tree saplings and other plants were dead, either drowned or buried by earth, both the result of the lack of maintenance.

One reason might be because the committees are voluntary.

“The committees don’t have any support. Some people agree to work for free, but others do not,” Junior Joseph, a member of a local peasant association, explained. “That’s when the structures deteriorate.”

In order to get an independent opinion, HGW consulted an agronomist who had not worked on the project. Agronomist Ludson Lafontant agreed with some of the criticism voiced by local farmers.

Reforestation is necessary but failure to implicate local farmers is a big problem, he said. No matter what promises were made, a farmer will always be concerned with the immediate need of feeding and clothing his or her family first.

“Lave men siyè a tè?”

During a visit in August 2013, Lafontant said he feared the reforestation project would be another example of wasted money, of the Haitian proverb “Lave men siyè a tè,” which means “wash your hands, dry them on the ground.”

But Lafontant also criticised the population and the government.

“I always say we ought to love ourselves more than others love us. In other words, the non-governmental organisations come here, they write projects, they look for the money and they do the project,” he said.

“The money has to be justified so they can be proud to say they have worked on a X number of hectares, built contours on a Y square metres of land and given Z number of people jobs. That’s how they justify their money. But whose problem is it? Whose country is it? It’s ours, here in our home. We need to become conscious of that.”

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

A sailboat passing through the southern Bahamas islands with about 150 Haitian migrants on board capsized after running aground, killing up to 30 people and leaving the rest clinging to the vessel for hours, authorities said Tuesday.

The exact death toll remained uncertain. Authorities on the scene confirmed at least 20 dead and determined the number could reach 30 based on accounts from survivors, said Lt. Origin Deleveaux, a Royal Bahamas Defence Force spokesman.

The remains of five victims had been recovered and the Bahamas military and police were working with the U.S. Coast Guard to recover additional bodies as they pulled survivors from the stranded sailboat.

“Right now, we are just trying to recover as many bodies as we possibly can,” Deleveaux said.

Authorities believe the migrants had been at sea for eight to nine days with limited food and water and no life jackets, Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Gabe Somma said. Many were severely dehydrated when the first rescue crews reached them. The boat, in addition to being overloaded, likely encountered rough weather, Deleveaux said.

“It was obviously just grossly overloaded, unbalanced, unseaworthy,” Somma said. “An incredibly dangerous voyage.”

The capsizing of overloaded vessels occurs with disturbing frequency in the area, most recently in mid-October when four Haitian women died off Miami. There have also been fatal incidents near the Turks and Caicos Islands, between Haiti and the Bahamas, and in the rough Mona Passage that divides the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.

“Unfortunately, we see these types of tragedies occur on a monthly basis,” Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Ryan Doss said. “Every year we see hundreds of migrants needlessly lose their lives at sea taking part in these dangerous and illegal voyages.”

It’s common enough that the Coast Guard recently developed a public service announcement that will run on TV and radio in Florida, Haiti, the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic urging people not to risk the deadly ocean voyages.

This latest incident occurred late Monday near Harvey Cays, about 80 miles southeast of New Providence, the island that includes the capital of Nassau, and 260 miles southeast of Miami.

Fishermen spotted the dangerously overloaded sailboat and alerted the Bahamian military, which asked the Coast Guard for assistance in locating the vessel, Somma said. By the time it was spotted, the 40-foot boat had run aground in an area dotted with tiny outcroppings and reefs and then capsized.

Photos taken by the Coast Guard showed people clinging to every available space on the overturned vessel. Some were taken to a clinic on nearby Staniel Cay for treatment for dehydration.

By late Tuesday afternoon, the Coast Guard and Bahamian authorities had rescued about 110 people, including 19 women. Deleveaux said there were no children on board. Smugglers will often seek to blend in with the migrants when they are captured and authorities did not announce any arrests.

Migrants have long traversed the Bahamian archipelago to reach the United States. Thousands have also settled in the Bahamas in recent years. Deleveaux said those rescued from the boat near Harvey Cays would be taken to a military base on New Providence, processed and then repatriated to Haiti.

Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

At the bustling border of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Credit: Dan Boarder/cc by 2.0

By Peter Richards
PORT OF SPAIN, Nov 27 2013 (IPS)

Outraged at a court ruling that would potentially render stateless thousands of Dominican people of Haitian descent, the Caribbean Community on Tuesday suspended the Dominican Republic’s bid to join the 15-member regional grouping.

Dominican President Danilo Medina had reportedly promised that his government would not actually deport any of the persons affected by the Sep. 23 ruling.“It renders an already marginalised section of the Dominican population even more vulnerable to acts of daily discrimination and abuse." -- Prof. Norman Girvan

However, Michel Martelly, Haiti’s president, said that soon after returning from Venezuela last weekend where he held talks with Dominican officials to resolve the issue, the authorities in Santo Domingo deported 300 people “who do not know the country, who do not have family in Haiti and who do not even speak the language.”

Martelly is threatening to stay away from future talks – the next round is scheduled for next week – if the Dominican Republic does not show some form of goodwill.

“We don’t have to keep meeting without them showing some action,” he told IPS, adding that the deportees included children, some “as old as one day”.

Trinidadian Prime Minister and CARICOM chair Kamla Persad-Bissessar vowed to raise the matter with the Association of Caribbean States (ACS) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). A delegation from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) is also visiting the Dominican Republic early next month.

“It is especially repugnant that the ruling ignores the 2005 recommendations made by the IACHR that the Dominican Republic adapts its immigration laws and practices in accordance with the provisions of the American Convention on Human Rights,” she said. “The ruling also violates the Dominican Republic’s international human rights obligations.”

St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, who had written two letters to President Medina on the issue, said he was also prepared to push for the suspension of the Dominican Republic from the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas and the Caribbean Forum (CARIFORUM).

He told IPS that “quiet diplomacy” has led nowhere and “clearly we have to up the ante for the government and the relevant authority to act”.

At the heart of the controversy is the stripping of citizenship from children of Haitian migrants. The decision applies to those born after 1929 — a category that overwhelmingly includes descendants of Haitians brought in to work on farms.

CARICOM had come under increasing pressure from civil society groups in the region to respond strongly. Caribbean organisations that met in Colombia last week condemned the ruling as “immoral, unjust and totally unacceptable”.

“It renders an already marginalised section of the Dominican population even more vulnerable to acts of daily discrimination and abuse based on the colour of their skin and/or the sound of their names,” former ACS secretary general Professor Norman Girvan told IPS.

Caricom has an opportunity to “prevent a humanitarian catastrophe,” he said.

But efforts to pressure the Dominican Republic to soften the ruling – only the latest salvo in decades of cultural and economic tensions between the two nations – will likely prove an uphill task.

Earlier this month, Anibal De Castro, the Dominican Republic’s ambassador to the United Sates, responding to an article published in a Trinidad and Tobago newspaper, made it clear that his country “does not grant citizenship to all those born within its jurisdiction.”

“In fact, the United States is one of the few nations that maintain this practice. In most countries, it is the norm that citizenship be obtained by origin or conferred under certain conditions. Since 1929, the Constitution of the Dominican Republic has established that the children of people in transit, a temporary legal status, are not eligible for Dominican citizenship,” he wrote.

On Nov. 6, hundreds of people rallied in Santo Domingo in support of the ruling, even suggesting the erection of a wall to ensure the division of Hispaniola that is shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Emilo Santana of the group Night Watch of San Juan claimed that many Dominicans were unable to receive health services because the resources were being used to assist Haitians and urged President Medina to prevent a “silent and massive Haitian take-over of the territory.”

“I feel humiliated and angry, but not by my president, I feel humiliated by those NGOs that negotiate with the poverty of Haitians and it is they who are destroying our country,” Santana said at the rally.

Another speaker, jurist Juan Manuel Castillo Pantaleon, said the Constitutional Court “has aroused all Dominicans to defend as one man our national sovereignty”.

He described the ruling as a landmark “because it clearly defines who we Dominicans are and reaffirms the laws and institutions, as provided in the Constitution.

“The hypocritical international community which offered aid to Haiti never kept their promises and in some cases committed robbery, and intends that we Dominicans should assume responsibility for a failed state,” said Castillo Pantaleon.

A United Nations-supported study released this year estimated that there were around 210,000 Dominican-born people of Haitian descent and another 34,000 born to parents of other nationalities.

The government of the Dominican Republic estimates that around 500,000 people born in Haiti live in the Dominican Republic.

In a statement, CARICOM said it was calling on the global community to pressure the Dominican Republic to “adopt urgent measures to ensure that the jaundiced decision of the Constitutional Court does not stand”.

“The government must show good faith by immediate credible steps as part of an overall plan to resolve the nationality and attendant issues in the shortest possible time.”

A local woman returns to her home with a new shelter kit. While the destruction is widespread, local rebuilding efforts are already underway. Credit: Simon Davis/DFID/cc by 2.0

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Nov 21 2013 (IPS)

Nearly two weeks after Typhoon Haiyan devastated parts of the central Philippines, experts and activists here are warning that post-disaster reconstruction needs to be more transparent than past such efforts, while also focusing on a long-term assistance strategy that goes beyond immediate emergency relief.

In recent days, academics and civil society experts have also urged the international community to learn from some of the mistakes made during the disaster responses following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti."When the funding dries up, the rebuilding effort still needs to be taken care of." -- Prof. Jesse Anttila-Hughes

“I think there is a big myth that emergency response is split in different stages, with emergency relief coming first, followed by reconstruction and then rebuilding,” Jake Johnston, a research associate at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a think tank here, told IPS. “But what you actually need is a more comprehensive view, from the very beginning.”

Johnston has closely followed reconstruction efforts in Haiti following the earthquake that left an estimated 316,000 people dead and 300,000 injured, and displaced almost 1.5 million people. He says there are several lessons learned from the Haitian disaster that can be applied to the current crisis in the Philippines.

Keeping locals in the loop

“One thing that, unfortunately, didn’t go very well in Haiti was that the local government and civil society were largely bypassed by foreign organisations,” he says. “For instance, you saw USAID” – the U.S. government’s primary foreign aid agency – “spending almost 1.3 billion dollars in awards to contractors and NGOs that were mostly based in the U.S., with less than one percent of that money actually going to Haitian organisations.”

In the Philippines, he notes, international organisations should keep the Manila government in the lead, making sure that it is a prominent part of the coordination of the entire reconstruction mechanism.

Transparency and accountability can also be vastly improved over past efforts. Experts say doing so would ensure that the organisations working on the ground meet local needs and are effective in doing so.

“Nongovernmental organizations and private contractors have been the intermediate recipients of most of these funds,” Vijaya Ramachandran and Owen Barder, two senior fellows at the Center for Global Development (CGD), a think tank here, wrote last week. “But despite the fact that these organizations are beneficiaries of public funds, there are few publicly available evaluations of services delivered, lives saved, or mistakes made.”

The analysts note that this lack of transparency and accountability has led to growing disillusionment among the local population in Haiti. Perhaps more important, lack of transparency can also end up affecting the relief’s efficiency itself.

“In Haiti, we saw that the groups on the ground weren’t actually communicating with each other, leading to a situation in which different groups simply duplicated the same things,” CEPR’s Johnston says. “That’s a clear indicator telling us that there wasn’t enough transparency and accountability around the aid that was being provided.”

Greater communication between groups would enable them to be more effective with their work, while also increasing their accountability to donors, he says.

Still, some NGOs currently working in the Philippines are stressing that transparency and communication are already at the core of what they do.

“We try to be very transparent about our finances, and we make sure that everyone sees where all of our money is going,” Rachel Sawyer, a member of the communications staff at All Hands Volunteers, a non-profit that works in disaster-stricken areas both in the U.S. and internationally, told IPS.

“We are also constantly communicating with other organisations. When we see one, we either partner with them or we try to meet the unmet needs somewhere else.”

She warns that “‘disaster relief’ is obviously a very broad term.”

Long-term funding

One other major issue experts point to is the problem of ensuring that the outpouring of funds raised in the immediate aftermath of a disaster is maintained over time, which is what long-term reconstruction requires.

“While media, funders and emergency responders spend a short amount of time dealing with immediate needs,” Lori Bertman, the president and CEO of the Louisiana-based Pennington Family Foundation, a grant-making institution, wrote on Monday, “this does not create the infrastructure to mitigate future risk, and leaves long-term needs such as resettlement, mental and public health, as well as fiscal viability, unfunded and unattended.”

Bertman’s article was later endorsed by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank here.

Some have suggested that this short-term response may be partially due to the cyclical nature of media coverage, which tends to shift the public’s attention quickly.

“Obviously the news cycle is a cycle, and trying to get people to give more attention is not really going to work,” Jesse Anttila-Hughes, a development economics professor at the University of San Francisco, told IPS.

He notes, however, that the current strategy can be improved.

“Funding in these situations is very much focused on shelter and food. But then when the funding dries up, the rebuilding effort still needs to be taken care of,” he said. “What really needs to be done in these situations is to ensure that funding calls are specifically tied to clear, long-term reconstruction.”

According to the latest information released by the National Disaster Risk Reduction Management Council, the Philippine government’s agency monitoring the current crisis, Typhoon Haiyan has so far killed over 4,000 people, leaving almost 4.5 million people without a home.

Earlier this week, the Washington-based World Bank announced that it would release 500 million dollars in funding to support the Philippines’ effort in recovery and rebuilding. The funds, which are a loan, came in response to a request by the government in Manila, and Bank officials are already looking to see how this money can be stretched for the long term – and how it can be used to sidestep some of the problems that have beset previous reconstructions.

“Given the scale of this disaster, the country will need a long-term reconstruction plan,” Axel van Trotsenburg, the World Bank’s vice president for East Asia said on Monday. “We can bring lessons learned from our work in reconstruction after disasters hit Aceh, Haiti and other areas that might be helpful in the Philippines.”

Cassia siamia trees (used for charcoal) planted on farm borders in Haiti. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
WARSAW, Nov 18 2013 (IPS)

Small farmers could play an important part in making Haiti – where just two percent of trees are still standing – green again.

With a population of 10 million and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of 7.8 billion dollars, Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country, has been crippled by environmental degradation for several years. “There is already a firm foundation to build on in some areas where present and past forestry and agroforestry projects had been implemented." -- Tony Rinaudo

But there is a flicker of hope for the country and its neighbour, Dominican Republic (DR), with which it shares the island of Hispaniola.

Inspired by the success of its Humbo forestry project in Ethiopia, developed under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), World Vision Australia has just completed a scoping mission to both countries, to examine the potential for natural regeneration of forests through “Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration” (FMNR).

“Healthy lives for children and their families are underpinned by a healthy environment and so more and more we’ve been looking at how we can help communities to build sustainable environments, and particularly in the face of climate change this is becoming increasingly important,” Timothy Morris, World Vision’s business unit manager, food security and climate change, told IPS on the sidelines of the United Nations climate change conference underway here at the national stadium of Poland.

The CDM allows for reforestation projects to earn carbon credits (Certified Emission Reductions – CER’s) for each tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent “sequestered” or absorbed by the forest. In the case of World Vision’s Humbo project, revenue continues to be generated for the communities who manage the forest assets under seven cooperatives, representing almost 50,000 people.

“We understood that Haiti is an area that is being heavily degraded through deforestation, a high population and the need for fuels,” Morris said.

Devastating floods and landslides have also left bare many areas previously covered with forests, he noted.

World Vision’s point person on reforestation, Tony Rinaudo, recently visited Haiti and the Dominican Republic to examine the degraded landscape in the area.

“There is already a firm foundation to build on in some areas where present and past forestry and agroforestry projects had been implemented,” Rinaudo told IPS.
“I met individuals who valued and cared for trees – fruit, timber, charcoal – successfully.”

Rinaudo stressed that FMNR is certainly not a new concept since he “saw cases of it on some farm borders, in some cases within cropland”. But he said this understanding can be built on – to improve technique, scale up activities – and create greater awareness and practice.

“There is enormous potential for FMNR – for example, with prosopis which is a very aggressive thorny species. With systematic management a sustainable charcoal, pole, timber, honey, fodder industry could be established,” he told IPS.

Indi McLymont-Lafayette, regional coordinator for Panos Caribbean, which works to give voice to poor and marginalised communities, told IPS that some grassroots groups in Haiti were already actively involved in this issue.

“We have been working over the past two and a half years implementing a project looking at the rehabilitation after the earthquake,” she said.

“We include climate change and biodiversity issues with policy making. Part of that has entailed working with areas that have reforestation initiatives and one of the organisations in Haiti, Fondation Seguin, is very crucial, I think, for collaboration because they are already doing tremendous work in reforestation so I think World Vision could bring value to what is already being done.”

World Vision has had tremendous success with a community-managed forestry project in the Humbo region of Ethiopia, 342 kilometres south of the capital Addis Ababa. Over a 30-year crediting period, it is estimated that more than 880,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent will be removed from the atmosphere, making a significant contribution to mitigating climate change.

Prior to the project, Humbo’s mountainous terrain was highly degraded and chronically drought prone. Poverty, hunger and increasing demand for agricultural land had driven local communities to overexploit forest resources.

Hurricane-ravaged Haiti and the Dominican Republic are among the countries most affected by climate change. A study by the World Bank released this week states that if the sea continues to rise at the current rate, Santo Domingo, the capital of DR, will be one of the five cities most affected at a global level by climate change in 2050.

Another report released here shows that Haiti led the list of the three countries most affected by weather-related catastrophes in 2012.

A continuously growing urban population and an increasing demand for charcoal and fuel wood have all contributed to depleting Haiti’s natural environment. But Morris said the two Caribbean nations stand to reap many benefits from a forestry regeneration project.

“When we do this kind of work there are multiple benefits that can come from it, particularly in a coastal environment and environments that are exposed to storm activity,” Morris told IPS.

“The sorts of things that we would like to do by regenerating and planting trees are to enhance soil integrity; prevent erosion; build coastal land integrity for resilience to storm surge and coastal inundation; and to re-establish the natural asset base of the area for more sustainable usage over the long term.”

He said there could also be benefits in the form of increased food production, since “often we find that once we get into this technique – particularly around the water catchment areas and steep slopes – it can improve the soil integrity” for agricultural purposes.

Climate defenders line the entrance to the National Stadium in Warsaw where the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP19 is being held. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
WARSAW, Nov 13 2013 (IPS)

For the small island developing states of the Caribbean, there is nothing more important than the United Nations Climate Change Conference taking place here at the national stadium of Poland from Nov. 11-22.

“We’re being impacted by climate change right now. We have to fight sea level rise, we are looking at increases in the frequency and severity of storm events, so it’s about survival,” Hugh Sealy, vice chair of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) Executive Board, told IPS."What we do in the next seven years will affect generations to come.” -- Hugh Sealy

“In my humble opinion, and forgive me for being melodramatic, this is the most important decade facing mankind,” said Sealy, a national of Grenada. “What we do in the next seven years will affect generations to come.”

The CDM is the largest carbon market in the world. It has so far delivered more than 315 billion dollars in assistance to developing countries. It has launched more than 7,400 projects since 2004 and has saved the developed countries about three billion dollars in cost compliance. The CDM now has a regional collaboration centre at St. George’s University in Grenada with two more centres in Lome and Kampala.

A new report released here shows that Haiti led the list of the three countries most affected by weather-related catastrophes in 2012. The others were the Philippines and Pakistan.

Germanwatch presented the ninth annual Global Climate Risk Index at the onset of the Climate Summit in Warsaw.

“The landfall of Hurricane Sandy in the U.S. dominated international news in October 2012. Yet it was Haiti – the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere – that suffered the greatest losses from the same event,” said Sönke Kreft, team leader for international climate policy at Germanwatch and co-author of the index.

In the last two decades, the 10 most affected countries have without exception been developing nations, with Honduras, Myanmar and Haiti taking the brunt during the period 1993-2012, the report noted.

The Germanwatch Climate Risk Index ranks countries according to relative and absolute number of human victims, and relative and absolute economic damage. The core data stems from the Munich Re NatCatSERVICE. The most recent available data from 2012 as well as for the 20-year-period 1993-2012 were taken into account for the preparation of this index.

“Our results are really a wake-up call to ramp up international climate policy and to better manage weather-related disasters,” said Kreft. “The year 2015 represents a major milestone, which needs to deliver a new climate agreement, and the international disaster framework is also up for renewal.”

The climate summit in Warsaw is expected to chart a road-map for an ambitious 2015 agreement. But Sealy and a very vocal Caribbean delegation at the summit are determined to leave Warsaw with some tangible benefits.

“I live in Grenada right now,” Sealy told IPS. “The cost for electricity in Grenada is 40 U.S. cents per kilowatt hour, it’s one of the highest in the world. Ten percent of our GDP is spent on importing diesel. It’s a constraint for the entire economy. We have hotels that can’t pay their electricity bills.

“If we can get something out of this conference that says that monies will pour into developing countries to help them transform their energy sectors then that’s a sustainable development benefit that will affect the entire region.”

Sealy’s role here is as the lead negotiator for work stream two for the alliance. He explained that at the 2011 climate summit in Durban, it was agreed that developing countries and developed countries have to come together to take mitigation action to reduce CO2 emissions.

“Work stream one is trying to come up with a 2015 agreement that would come into effect in 2020. Work stream two, which is what the alliance pushed for, says we cannot wait until 2020 for an agreement,” Sealy said.

“We have to take action now so we insisted that we have a work stream two and my job here is to make sure that countries move forward in the next seven years enhancing mitigation,” he explained. “So what we hope to get out of work stream two is a technical process that identifies the mitigation potential that developing countries could take and also the means of implementation – the finance, the technology transfer, the capacity building that would allow small islands to move forward.”

The Warsaw conference also negotiates how to directly address climate-related loss and damage, a topic of special interest to small island states.

On Wednesday, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) reported that this year is on course to be among the top 10 warmest years since modern records began in 1850.

The first nine months, January to September, tied with 2003 as the seventh warmest such period on record, with a global land and ocean surface temperature of about 0.48°C (0.86°F) above the 1961–1990 average, according to the report.

WMO’s provisional annual statement on the Status of the Global Climate 2013 provides a snapshot of regional and national temperatures. It also includes details on precipitation, floods, droughts, tropical cyclones, ice cover and sea-level.

“Temperatures so far this year are about the same as the average during 2001-2010, which was the warmest decade on record,” said WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud.

“All of the warmest years have been since 1998 and this year once again continues the underlying, long-term trend, the coldest years now are warmer than the hottest years before 1998,” he said.

“Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases reached new highs in 2012, and we expect them to reach unprecedented levels yet again in 2013. This means that we are committed to a warmer future,” added Jarraud.

Sealy told IPS that the key issues for the Caribbean at Warsaw include “recognising that climate change is affecting us now and we need support now to not only adapt but also to transform our economies.”

He pointed to Typhoon Haiyan that hit the Philippines with sustained winds of 300 kilometres an hour and peak winds of 380 kilometres per hour.

“How can we adapt to that type of storm in the Caribbean?  It’s totally impossible. So what the world has to do is reduce their emissions and that’s what we’re trying to do here. We are trying to bring a sense of urgency to this conference that we have to do things now, not wait until 2020,” Sealy added.

A demonstrator holds up an anti-U.N. poster during an October 2010 protest outside a MINUSTAH base in Port-au-Prince. Credit: Ansel Herz/IPS

By Thalif Deen and Patrick Saint-Pre
UNITED NATIONS/PORT-AU-PRINCE, Oct 31 2013 (IPS)

Some 2,400 kilometres from New York City, where victims of Haiti’s cholera epidemic are suing the United Nations in a U.S. federal court, the disease continues to burn through the populace with no end in sight.

In a single week between Oct. 19 and Oct. 26, the Pan-American Health Organisation reported 1,512 new cases and 31 deaths. New cases are reported in all 10 departments."It is clear that damage has been caused, the negligence of the U.N. is proven and it must assume its responsibilities." -- Mario Joseph of BAI

At the Cholera Treatment Centre run by Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders in Delmas 33, a commune in Port-au-Prince Arrondissement, nurse Viola Augustine says the clinic is so packed it cannot accept new patients.

“The centre has already handled over 20,000 cases of cholera since it opened. At the moment, the centre is full and we cannot take in the increase of patients due to the rainy season,” she told IPS. “We are forced, in this case, to transfer patients to other treatment centres when they are brought here.”

The spread of cholera in Haiti, which has killed more than 8,300 and infected over 680,000 people since October 2010, has been blamed on Nepali peacekeepers who are part of the 9,500‑strong U.N. Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH).

The United Nations has refused demands for compensation. Earlier this month, an advocacy group filed a lawsuit seeking reparations from the world body on behalf of the cholera victims.

Felicia Paul, 45, lives in Saint-Marc, about 100 kms northwest of the capital. She caught cholera in 2010, and survived it though extensive treatment with saline IV bags.

“I was infected with cholera for 12 days,” Paul told IPS. “My two daughters caught it while they were taking care of me. MINUSTAH brought cholera so we ask that they compensate me. We always drank water out of the river and it never made us ill. But that water has been contaminated due the spillage of the peacekeeper’s feces into the river.

“I still feel the effects of the disease,” she added. “It blurs my vision and weakens me every day.”

A former senior U.N. official from Nepal told IPS he strongly supports compensation.

“As a Nepali who lived in and loved Haiti, I feel special empathy for the victims of the cholera epidemic,” said former U.N. Assistant Secretary-General Kul Gautam.

In a way, he said, even the Nepali peacekeepers are victims of the kind of poverty and poor governance that afflicts both Nepal and Haiti. The two nations are categorised by the United Nations as among the 49 least developed countries (LDCs), described as the poorest of the world’s poor.

None dispute that the lack of clean water and sanitation in Haiti has been a key driver of the epidemic.

“I wish a creative solution could be found whereby the Haitian victims would get some modest amount of financial support on humanitarian grounds, without the U.N. having to give up its diplomatic immunity,” Gautam said.

“For this to happen, some enlightened governments and foundations would need to offer help, not as a matter of legal obligation, but as a matter of humanitarian consideration,” said Gautam, a former deputy executive director of the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF.

Mario Joseph has been the director of Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) since its inception in 1995. BAI, together with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, is leading the lawsuit.

“The trial is proceeding normally like any other trial,” he told IPS. “We’ve taken the first steps with the U.N. to bring them to take responsibility. To submit our claim, we sent the case to [Secretary-General] Ban Ki-moon, but unfortunately, the U.N. said it was protected by immunity.

“The U.N. experts have clearly established that it was the Nepalese peacekeepers who brought cholera to Haiti. It is clear that damage has been caused, the negligence of the U.N. is proven and it must assume its responsibilities.

“An organisation like the U.N. should not exercise a policy of double standard for evaluating itself vis-à-vis its member states. Haiti is a founding member of the U.N. In this sense the organisation must assume its responsibility concerning the cholera it brought into the country,” he said.

U.N. Spokesperson Martin Nesirky says the U.N. remains committed to do all it can to help the people of Haiti overcome the cholera epidemic.

“The United Nations is working on the ground with the government and people of Haiti both to provide immediate and practical assistance to those affected, and to put in place better infrastructure and services for all,” he told a press briefing this month.

Kanak Dixit, a veteran Nepali journalist and a civil rights activist, told IPS the fact that the epidemic has been traced to likely contamination of water sourced to the Nepali peacekeeping battalion is a matter of great consternation.

Nepal is heading into elections on Nov. 19, and the news has not received much attention there, nor has there been public discussion on the matter, he said.

“It would be extremely sad if it were true that a poor country in one hemisphere has been involved in the spread of the epidemic in an equally poor country in another part of the globe,” said Dixit, founder of the news magazine Himal SouthAsian.

He said it should be the collective duty of the United Nations to support the Haitian people in battling the epidemic, and supporting the victims’ families, rather than take a legalistic and hands‑off approach.

“Nepalis would understand the need to respond to the epidemic with humanitarian ethos and organisational efficiency,” Dixit said.

Nurse Augustine agrees. “For a disease like cholera that has led to so many victims, I think the United Nations should compensate those who have suffered because the illness is truly horrible.

“Talking about cholera and living with it are two different things,” she said. “Living with cholera is really frustrating.”

The eye of Hurricane Sandy made landfall on Oct. 25, 2012, near the Mar Verde beach west of the city of Santiago de Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Samuel Oakford
NEW YORK/HAVANA, Oct 30 2013 (IPS)

One year ago, Hurricane Sandy ravaged the Northeast United States, causing an estimated 68 billion dollars in damage and paralysing the world’s financial nerve centre.

But days before, in the Caribbean, the same storm ran roughshod over Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba and other countries, causing widespread loss of life and destruction that the region is only beginning to recover from."If you don’t start investing, for every dollar not spent on adapting, you will spend six or seven within a few years." -- UNDP's Guido Corno

The hurricane was one of several in the past decades that meteorologists had previously considered “once in a century” events.

Those predictions now appear outdated.

“The power of these storms is off the chart,” Guido Corno, chief technical advisor at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), told IPS. “Sandy was a massive storm, larger than any in the past 100 years.”

Scientists believe that by the end of the century, climate change will increase the severity of extreme weather events, making storms like Sandy more common.

For Caribbean nations with fewer resources, that spectre is daunting.

A path of destruction

On Oct. 24, Sandy strengthened into a Category One hurricane and made landfall in Jamaica, causing widespread damage in the east of the island.

Seventy percent of residents were left without power and in Portland Parish, on the northeast coast, the Red Cross reported 80 percent of houses had lost their roofs.

In Haiti, though the storm only skirted the coastline, it dropped nearly 20 inches of rain in the south of the country and came as a severe blow to hundreds of thousands still left homeless after the 2011 earthquake.

Already in 2012, Tropical Storm Isaac, which damaged parts of the north, had been followed by a drought that led up to Sandy. The combined effect of the three devastated Haiti’s farmers and left some 1.5 million Haitians at risk of malnutrition.

Residents in Santiago de Cuba, accustomed to storms that usually pass over west of Cuba, were caught unaware when the storm made landfall in the city as a Category 3 storms with winds up to 110 mph. Eleven died and half the houses in the city were either destroyed or severely damaged.

“Now I know what a hurricane is; when another comes, we won’t delay,” Rey Antonio Acosta, 12, who escaped the storm with his older brother, told IPS.

Though the hurricane was the deadliest to strike Cuba in seven years, the toll was relatively low considering its severity.

Cuba’s longstanding system of civil defence, which calls on all citizens in the event of disasters, has been able to plan well in advance of approaching hurricanes – recently with the help of climate change models – and spring into action quickly after storms pass.

The U.N. has highlighted the country’s disaster prevention initiatives that include “two-day training session in risk reduction for hurricanes, complete with simulation exercises and concrete preparation actions” as a model for the Caribbean.

Still, a year after Sandy, the government’s recovery efforts, hampered by the local economy and a U.S. embargo, have struggled to keep pace with a nationwide housing deficit that already existed well before the storm.

Vulnerability

In Haiti, like much of the region, “water is the main issue,” said Johan Peleman, head of the U.N.’s Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Haiti.

Port-au-Prince, a city of nearly 2.5 million, has no sewage system.

The hurricane worsened a cholera outbreak – alleged to have been brought by U.N. peacekeepers – that began in 2010 and has since infected more than 650,000 and led to the deaths of over 8,000 Haitians.

“Waterborne diseases were already one of the mass killers in Haiti,” Peleman told IPS.

The solution, an institutionally funded effort to build a water and sewage system from scratch, may take decades to fully complete.

What Haiti lacks in human-made infrastructure is only matched by what has been destroyed by human activity.

After years of often illegal logging, only two percent of the country is forested, leaving many areas vulnerable to mudslides that can wipe away neighbourhoods in heavy rains that pale in comparison to those seen during Sandy.

But mangroves, which serve as a natural barrier from the force of hurricanes and were lately on the verge of an ecological catastrophe in Haiti, have in recent years been included in preparedness plans and are making a slow but marked comeback.

After the earthquake and continuing in the wake of Sandy, the Haitian government, with significant outside funding began a process of disaster risk mitigation, mapping neighbourhoods by their risk assessments and marking houses with red, orange and green to indicate their habitability.

Still, as of July of this year, 279,000 internally displaced people were living in tent camps originally built after the earthquake, though it is difficult to delineate which catastrophe made them homeless.

An unpredictable future

For a region jarred by last year’s hurricane season, the third most active on record, 2013 has been eerily quiet.

Climate change could affect the already imprecise science of predicting weather, said Kathy Ann Caesar, acting chief meteorologist at the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology in Barbados.

“This hurricane season, the forecasts were for normal to above normal activity,” Caesar told IPS. “But that hasn’t manifested itself – there have been no named hurricanes.”

In September, the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted temperatures could rise by as much as 4.8C by the end of the century, increasing food insecurity and harming many developing countries.

Years like 2013 are to be expected and shouldn’t be taken as indicative of trends, the panel said.

Even in a country as small as Haiti, where the northwest is predicted to experience temperature gains that outpace the rest of the country, the effects of climate change are expected to vary greatly.

Similarly, in Jamaica, climate studies “project we will have more rainfall in the next 20 years, then less after that,” said Albert Daily, principal at the climate change division of Jamaica’s Ministry of Water, Land, Environment and Climate Change.

“There will be fewer hurricanes, but they will be stronger,” he said.

Daily said sea level rises pose a severe threat to coastal infrastructures and countries in the region are trying to head off the threat as early as they can by changing the dialogue on environmental issues.

“We are mainstreaming climate change policy in the planning of programmes and legislation,” Daily told IPS.

Part of that effort is convincing foreign donors and the treasuries of heavily indebted countries like Jamaica that the upfront costs associated with planning for climate change are about the best investment any country can make.

“It’s been shown, if you don’t start investing, for every dollar not spent on adapting, you will spend six or seven within a few years,” said Corno. “These costs will continue to skyrocket unless you have a long-term plan.”

With additional reporting by Patricia Grogg in Havana.

In the face of severe food shortages and with no relief aid, the elderly like Zeinab Wambui, from lower Mukurweini, Central Kenya, are facing very tough times. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Miriam Gathigah and George Gao
NAIROBI/NEW YORK, Oct 17 2013 (IPS)

Wambui Karunyu, 72, and her seven-year-old grandson are the only surviving members of their immediate family.  Karunyu’s husband and five children all succumbed to the hardships of living in the semi-arid area of lower Mukurweini district in central Kenya.

In 2009, a drought struck parts of central and southeast Kenya, leaving 3.8 million people in need of food aid. Four years later, conditions in the area remain dire. According to the regional Drought Management Authority, while the upper parts of Mukurweini receive an annual rainfall of 1,500 mm, lower Mukurweini only receives 200mm.

A new report by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), a U.K. based think tank, identifies Kenya as one of 11 countries most at risk for disaster-induced poverty. The report, entitled “The geography of poverty, disasters and climate extremes in 2030”, warns that the international community has yet to properly address the threats disasters pose to the poorest parts of the world.

The report includes locations where both poverty and natural disasters will likely be concentrated in 2030; and in many instances, these locations overlap.

Hazards and vulnerability to poverty in 2030
Source: Overseas Development Institute

However, the severity of disasters – such as drought, floods and hurricanes – depends on what “disaster risk management” policies the government has put in place, according to ODI.

In 2010, for example, the magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Haiti killed 11 percent of people who felt its tremors, while the Chilean earthquake – of an even higher magnitude, 8.8 – killed 0.1 percent; and in 2008, Cyclone Nargis killed 138,000 people in Myanmar, while Hurricane Gustav of similar strength killed 153 when it struck the Caribbean and the U.S.

“Slow-onset” disasters – such as the drought afflicting Karunyu and her grandson in Kenya – are often the harshest setbacks for development, especially in poor, rural areas that lack social safety nets, according to ODI.

“I plant maize and beans every season, but I harvest nothing. I never stop planting because I hope that this time will be better than the last time. But it’s always the same, loss and hunger,” Karunyu tells IPS.

Simon Mwangi, a resident of Mukurweini and a service provider with the Dairy Goats Association of Kenya, an association of small-scale goat farmers, tells IPS that Karunyu’s story is not unique.

“Life here is characterised by poverty and hunger. A great majority live in rural areas, and they are farmers. Due to prolonged dry spells, the situation is alarming, since they have no other livelihoods,” he says.

Mwangi notes that unreliable rainfall, frequent droughts and the inability of residents to adapt to harsh climatic changes has affected the growth of a variety of crops, such as maize and beans, which used to grow successfully.

“Lower Mukurweini is no longer a corn zone, but farmers continue to plant maize with no success. There are drought-resistant crops that can do well here, including fruits, such as pineapples and indigenous mangoes. But the lack of extension officers has made it difficult for people here to adapt to the dry climate,” he says.

There is also a lack of NGOs and aid workers in Mukurweini to address the residents’ plight. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) operated in Mukurweini for nine years, but left in 2011. “Things were much better when [IFAD] ran irrigation and trainings for farmers. Some sub-locations were doing much better, and there was food. But many parts of lower Mukurweini are now at risk of starvation,” says Mwangi.

Ten Worst Natural Disasters Reported in Kenya from 1980 to 2010. Source: United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction

In Kenya, each child born in a drought year is 50 percent more likely to become malnourished, according to the report. And from 1997 to 2007, less than 10 percent of Kenya’s poor escaped poverty, while 30 percent of Kenya’s non-poor entered poverty, partly due to the multiple natural disasters affecting the country.

In July 2012, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon assembled a team of 27 advisers to help him achieve the lofty goal of ending world poverty. Ten months later, the team – known as the High Level Panel of eminent persons (HLP) – produced a report that advised Ban, among other things, to “build resilience and reduce deaths from natural disasters” by a percentage to be agreed.

The HLP recommended this target on disaster-mitigation to be included in the post-2015 development agenda, a list that would replace the eight current Millennium Development Goals –which do not include the word “disaster” once.

The intensity of natural disasters is expected to increase with climate change. ODI predicts that up to 325 million impoverished people in 49 countries will be exposed to extreme weather conditions by 2030.

The regional Drought Management Authority says that Nyeri County, where Mukurweini is located, should expect more prolonged dry spells moving forward.

“During the day, you barely see anyone outside, it’s too hot. Even the earth becomes too hot, you cannot walk barefoot,” says Mwangi.

“Without food or access to water, the elderly starve and fade away quietly,” he says.

A rice delivery in Port-au-Prince on Sept. 24, 2013. Credit: HGW/Marc Schindler Saint-Val

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Oct 10 2013 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Haiti has been receiving food aid for half a century – over 1.5 million tonnes from the U.S. alone during the past two decades.

Recently, however, international aid agencies have raised a cry of alarm. Some two-thirds of all Haitians – almost seven million people – are hungry. About 1.5 million of them – twice as many as last year – face “severe” or “acute food insecurity.” Why?“They call the programme ‘Down with Hunger,’ but to me, it’s a ‘Long Live Hunger’ programme.” -- Haitian farmer Vériel Auguste

A new five-part investigative series sheds some light on the issue by considering the structural causes, as well as by taking a look at the inefficiencies and what one government official calls “the perverse effects” of food assistance.

Haiti’s agricultural sector has long languished, ignored by its governments and by foreign donors. Agriculture represents about 25 percent of the country’s GDP, and until recently it employed – directly or indirectly – up to two-thirds of the population.

Yet for several decades there has been little investment. The Ministry of Agriculture usually gets less than five percent of the government’s budget, and until recently, foreign funding for food aid far outstripped – and sometimes more than doubled – funding for agriculture.

In 2009, a mission from U.N. High Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis deplored “the abandon of agricultural sector and of national production for the past three decades” and also criticised the government and various foreign government and non-governmental agencies for “multiple strategies and programs, which are sometimes contradictory” and for the “endless conferences that do not deliver any concrete results.”

Other issues – like the land tenure system, deforestation and other environmental degradation, and lack of adequate seeds, fertiliser and roads – all play a part in declining agricultural output.

But the sector has also had to contend with an influx of more-cheaply produced, and sometimes subsidised, foreign food – especially U.S. rice – beginning in 1995 when the Haitian government slashed tariffs under pressure from Washington and the international financial institutions.

Whereas the country imported less than 20 percent of its food in the early 1980s, Haiti now gets over 55 percent from overseas, mostly the U.S. and the Dominican Republic.

Since the 2010 earthquake, the government and foreign donors have launched programmes aimed at redressing these wrongs. Roads are being built and canals dredged, and various projects aim to help farmers up their productivity.

But in Grande Anse, one of the most verdant and productive provinces, agronomists are worried.

“Grande Anse was the breadbasket for the other provinces,” Vériel Auguste said. “But not any more. We are losing that potential.”

As he stood in his demonstration garden, where he grows root crops, grains and trees in an effort to inspire members of his cooperative, Auguste said that nearby, other gardens sit empty.

“People leave their land,” he said, because of the lack of technical support and because their crops cannot compete with cheaper foreign food. “Not far from here are a series of beautiful fields with good land! They are closed. The people have left.”

Earlier this year and for most of 2012, not far from Auguste’s plot, stores advertised a food aid programme that he and many others say has helped drive people from their land and increase the woes of Haiti’s farmers.

A food aid “test” reviled by farmers

Although it only provided food to 18,000 families in this country of 10 million, a Haitian government-approved CARE programme that delivered “disaster relief” food vouchers offers a glimpse of how food aid can be a double-edged sword.

Funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the “Tikè Manje” (“Food Voucher”) programme distributed vouchers redeemable for mostly U.S. products like rice, oil and beans up through August 2013. It was supposedly meant to assist victims of Hurricane Tomas, which hit farmers’ fields in November 2010.

Instead, it did not start up until 11 months later, and only got into full swing in 2012, one year after the storm hit. It was expanded from 12,000 to almost 18,000 beneficiaries after Hurricane Sandy hit the peninsula.

Asked why it was allowed to start one year after Tomas, when U.S. and Haitian agencies deemed that hunger was abating, the director of the government “Aba Grangou” (“Down With Hunger”) programme admitted that the region had “probably already started to recuperate”.

“But since it had already been set up, the U.S. government decided to implement it,” Director Jean Robert Brutus said.

Haiti’s CARE office gave an additional reason. CARE said the programme was a “test” of a new food voucher system, which uses the Jamaica-based Digicel telephone company to transfer credit to beneficiaries. Digicel and the Haitian government both get paid every time a transfer is made.

The programme “is simply a test in certain regions to see if we can implement the programme everywhere in the country,” coordinator Tamara Shukakidze explained in a March 2013 interview, while the Tikè Manje was still running.

At the time, CARE was hoping to be a contractor for a future USAID-funded 20-million-dollar “social security net” project that would include food vouchers, according to CARE spokesman Pierre Seneq.

Farmers and agronomists like Auguste are still livid over the voucher programme because participants were given U.S. rice and vegetable oil rather than locally produced breadfruit and other traditional foods.

“They call the programme ‘Down with Hunger,’ but to me, it’s a ‘Long Live Hunger’ programme,” Auguste said.

Dejoie Dadignac, coordinator of the Network of Dame Marie Agricultural Producers, said her federation of 26 organisations was shocked.

“At every little store we visit, even ones that used to sell cement or tin sheeting, we see a sign: ‘USAID,’” Dadignac said in a September 2012 interview. “In their radio advertising, they say they are giving people plantains and breadfruit, but that’s not what we see. We see rice, spaghetti, oil, while our products are left out.”

Queried on the issue, CARE spokesman Seneq said future programmes would source local foods and thus “contribute to the economy rather than promote foreign food”.

On Sep. 27, USAID announced that CARE was awarded a contract for a new food voucher programme for 250,000 people. When asked where the vouchers would be distributed, and if the new programme would source U.S. or Haitian food, Seneq promised details but then never fulfilled that pledge.

The new programme is funded in part by a USAID food aid budget, Food For Peace, that requires most of the money be used to purchase and ship U.S. grown- and produced-goods. No other food aid programme in the world has those restrictions.

The current administration proposed changes, but because the 2013 Farm Bill – which covers food aid, farm subsidies and food stamps – has not yet been passed, those changes have not been implemented.

Merilus Derius, 71, said he thinks the younger generations are dissuaded from farming because they lack the means to prevent environmental degradation, but also because of cheaper or free foreign food, which are now more desired than products previous generations ate.

“Before, farmers grew sorghum and ground it. They grew Congo peas, planted potatoes, planted manioc. On a morning like this, a farmer would make his coffee and then – using a thing called ‘top-top,’ a little mill – he would crush sugar cane and boil the sugar cane water, and eat cassava bread, and he would have good health!” he said. “When you lived off your garden, you were independent.”

Read the entire Behind Haiti’s Hunger series and watch two videos, shot mostly in Savanette and on Grande Anse, here.

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

A woman and a girl carry water along a road near a painted portion of the Jalousie neighbourhood in September 2013. Four gallons of water weighs about 11.4 kilogrammes. Credit: HGW/Marc Schindler Saint Val

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Sep 26 2013 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Pink, green, blue, red. From a distance, the thousands of brightly coloured houses look like a painting. The observer can’t see the suffering and dangers threatening the residents of the Jalousie neighbourhood – problems that are being ignored by the government, which is spending six million dollars on a massive make-up job.

Last month, experts announced that the hillside slum, home to 45,000 to 50,000 people, sits on a secondary fault.“What we need are water and electricity.” -- A Jalousie resident who lives in a small home with 11 others

“Not only does a fault run through Jalousie, but there is also the serious danger of mudslides in the area,” geologist Claude Prépetit, co-author of a new seismological study of the capital, explained at an Aug. 2 press conference.

Many of Jalousie’s small houses are built into the side of Morne L’Hôpital, on steep inclines or in ravines that serve as canals for rainwater. Every time it rains, walls of water rush down the slopes, where officially it is illegal to build, or even to cut down trees. Due to the lack of vegetation to hold it back, the water and mud can carry away people, animals and even entire houses.

A recent Environment Ministry document notes that more than 1,300 homes should be moved because they threaten both their residents and people living in the city below. In 2012, Minister Ronald Toussaint announced plans to move residents in those homes, but when people protested, President Michel Martelly intervened, cancelling the moves and firing the minister.

Jalousie, one of many slums that ring Haiti’s capital, has no water or sanitation system. According to a recent study from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), home sizes range from eight to 30 square metres and population density “may be as high as 1,800 people per hectare”.

Jalousie’s tiny concrete homes overlook the shops, restaurants, hotels and mansions of Pétion-ville, one of the communities where Haiti’s professionals and elite live, work and play. Every day, residents, including children, have to climb narrow stairways to get fresh water – costing up to 35 cents for a five-gallon bucket – which they then carry on their heads. Five gallons of water weights about 48 pounds or 19 kilogrammes.

“Make-up job”

The Haitian government says it is in the process of spending over six million dollars on the slum, but not to deal with the double-danger or to provide services.

A page from the recent seismologic “microzonage” study showing the areas at risk of mudslides.

Instead, the administration is doing what some have called a “make-up job” – painting the houses in a project called “Jalousie en couleurs” (Jalousie in Colours), as homage to the Haitian painter Préfète Duffaut (1923-2012), who often filled his works with brightly coloured hillside houses.

Phase 1 cost the government 1.2 million dollars. Completed early this year, it coincided with the inauguration of the Hotel Occidental Royal Oasis, a five-star establishment where a simple room costs 175 dollars and a “junior suite” runs more than 350 dollars. Two nights in a suite equal more than most Haitians earn in one year.

The Oasis faces the slum. Phase 1 of the government project assured 1,000 houses were painted, making the view a little more palatable, and allegedly included the “reinforcement” of some homes, although none of the 25 beneficiaries interviewed by Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) said their home had gotten more than a paint job.

“Phase 2 will be even bigger,” Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe told a small crowd gathered by a soccer field at the Aug. 16 inauguration. Lamothe said Phase 2 would cost five million dollars.

In his speech, Lamothe said 3,000 more homes would be painted and that the soccer field would get new stands, dressing rooms and synthetic turf. The prime minister also promised a 1.2 kilometre (less than one mile) asphalted street and the improvement of 2.8 kilometres of alleyways.

But as Lamothe sang the praises of the project, two dozen protesters with signs shouted: “We want water! We have no water” and “Schools!” and “We need a clinic!”

Asking for “patience,” the prime minister said: “We’ll deal with all the problems little by little, but you know that you have many problems and we are trying to do a lot with little means.”

A new coat of paint is not the top priority for Jalousie residents, according to HGW’s mini-survey. Asked what was most needed, 24 of 25 said they wanted schools for their children and one-fourth added they wanted better access to water.

At least one resident – who, like most people questioned by HGW, said she would prefer to remain anonymous – is out of patience.

“What we need are water and electricity,” said a woman who lives in a small home with 11 others, including two children who do not attend school.

None of the beneficiaries surveyed reported being consulted even regarding the choice of colours.

Doing laundry by hand on her little porch, one resident said she was not at home when the painting took place, and that she is not satisfied.

“I can paint my own house,” she said. “When I got home, I saw a bunch of splashes of paint on my wall.”

Who benefits?

From afar the colours are striking. But for the houses not facing the hotel, the situation is different: grey cement blocks. Even the houses that benefited only got partial paint-jobs – just the outward facing walls get coloured.

One Jalousie resident, Sylvestre Telfort, has the same opinion as many: the project is meant to cover the slum with a kind of make-up or greasepaint because it sits directly in front of the Oasis and another new hotel, the Best Western Premier.

On its Internet site, the Oasis promises its clients a “magnificent views of the city”. Best Western, where rooms run 150 dollars a night, tells its future visitors that the hotel is “located in the beautiful hills of Pétion-Ville, a well-known fashionable suburb of Port-au-Prince”.

“The project to paint Jalousie is nothing more than a social appeasement carried out by the government to satisfy the bourgeoisie who for years has tried to exterminate us, in vain,” Telfort explained. “They can’t drop a bomb to eliminate people. So they have to took another tack and coloured the outsides of our houses.”

The former minister of the environment is worried. “The Morne l’Hôpital situation is chaotic. It’s a matter of public safety… The concrete constructions prevent rainwater from seeping into the soil,” Toussaint told HGW. “Painting is not the answer.”

Claude Prépetit, coordinator of the seismologic study, is also concerned.

Many residents are in danger “because of the risk of mudslides and earth movements [and] the magnification of vibrations during an earthquake,” the geologist said.

Prépetit thinks the government should “interdict all future construction in the region” and “identify the more hazardous areas and move out everyone whose lives are at risk.”

As a last step, after assuring the population has services, “they can paint the facades of the permitted houses, if they want to make them pretty,” he added.

During his visit to the slum, only 14 days after Prépetit and other experts announced the secondary fault, Prime Minister Lamothe made no mention of the seismic risks.

“You are going to see what we can do to improve people’s lives,” Lamothe promised. “You will be proud! You will be happy!”

After his speech, Lamothe and his entourage got into an SUV to drive back down the mountain. Residents went back to their daily journeys, going up and down stairs to find water, trying to survive one more day in the slum called by Best Western “a fashionable suburb”.

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

The full unabridged series in English and French can be found here.

Many Haitian women have their blood pressure taken for the first time at mobile clinics like this one staffed by a Cuban medical brigade in Salomon market in Port-au-Prince. Credit: Patricia Grogg/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Aug 28 2013 (IPS)

It’s Saturday, and the entrance hall of a police station in front of the busy market in Salomon in the Haitian capital has become an improvised health post. In a few minutes there is a long queue of people waiting to be seen by the Cuban medical brigade.

The police officer on duty said he was not authorised to speak to journalists, but the extent of police cooperation is obvious. The police stations’ tables and chairs are quickly lined up along the entrance hall to facilitate the work of La Renaissance hospital workers, who carry out preventive health work here once a week.

“We are a mobile clinic,” said Damarys Ávila, the head of La Renaissance hospital, which is staffed by the Cuban medical mission. “We check for high blood pressure, cataracts, pterygium (a benign tumour of the conjunctiva) and glaucoma,” she told IPS. “We send people with these conditions to the hospital.”

Women are the majority of those waiting in line. “Women have the highest rate of high blood pressure because they bear the greatest burden of labour. Then there are dietary factors, like eating too much hot, spicy food, refined flour and salt,” she said.

“Many people have their blood pressure taken here for the first time in their lives,” Ávila said.

On a tour of this unusual health post, where in a single morning 167 poor women and men receive attention, expressions of gratitude abound.

“We seek out the Cuban doctors because they treat people well and they don’t charge. We are poor, we cannot afford to pay,” said a resident of Port-au-Prince before she raised the heavy load she was carrying on to her head.

The first Cuban medical brigade to Haiti arrived on Dec. 4, 1998, bringing relief in the aftermath of hurricane Georges. Since then cooperation has been uninterrupted and has had a decisive effect in this impoverished country, which in 2010 suffered an earthquake that killed 316,000 people, according to government figures, along with an ongoing cholera epidemic that has also claimed thousands of lives.

During this period Cuban medical personnel have seen 18 million patients, carried out 300,000 operations, saved 300,000 lives and restored eyesight to 53,000 people. According to official reports, there are 640 Cuban health professionals in Haiti, including 357 women.

The international healthcare aid to Haiti stands out not only due to its scope – it reaches the entire country – and its humanitarian impact, but also because it is preparing the country for the future by putting in place a public health system, including the reconstruction of hospital infrastructure.

Financial contributions towards these efforts come from Cuba, and also from Australia, Germany, Namibia, Norway, South Africa, Venezuela, and to a lesser extent from other countries.

The Cuban programme involves remodelling and building 30 community hospitals to act as reference centres, more than half of which have already been completed. Some 39 Haitian health ministry units are to be fitted out as healthcare centres, with or without beds, as well as 30 comprehensive rehabilitation wards.

There are two ophthalmological missions, part of Operation Miracle, one based permanently in Port-au-Prince and the other touring the interior of the country. There is a laboratory for prosthetic and orthopaedic devices, three electromedical workshops and a network for epidemiological and environmental surveillance.

Operation Miracle got underway in 2004, and by 2011 (the latest figures released) had restored or improved vision for more than two million people in 34 countries of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa.

John M. Kirk, a professor at Dalhousie University in Canada, said that Haitian doctors who trained in Cuba have a key role to play in creating a stronger health system in Haiti.

According to his figures, 430 of the 625 Haitians who graduated from Cuba’s Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) in early 2011 are already working in their country. Another 115 Haitians graduated from the University of Santiago de Cuba in 2011.

ELAM was established in November 1999, and was proposed to the 9th Ibero-American Summit, held that year in Havana, as a project for training health personnel in the regional grouping, made up of 19 Latin American countries, Andorra, Spain and Portugal.

But although the initiative was praised, it was not taken up by the high officials present at its inauguration. Cuba went ahead with the programme, which today embraces 122 countries and trains “young people mainly from the poorest strata of society, who are ethnically, educationally and culturally diverse,” its website says.

In an essay on the topic, Kirk said that since the 1970s, Cuba has helped to found medical schools in various countries, like Yemen (1976), Guyana (1984), Ethiopia (1984), Uganda (1986), Ghana (1991), Gambia (2000), Equatorial Guinea (2000), Haiti (2001), Guinea-Bissau (2004) and East Timor (2005).

A report given by the Cuban health ministry to IPS says 39,310 health professionals, including 25,521 women, are on “missions” in 60 countries. Of these, 34,794 are in the Americas, 3,919 in Africa, 554 in Asia and Oceania and 43 in Europe.

As a result of the economic reforms initiated in 2010, free provision of Cuban cooperation is being reduced, although it will continue to be “absolutely free” in the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, and Operation Miracle will also be free in Haiti, Honduras, Paraguay and Ecuador, among other countries.

Meanwhile, the Comercializadora de Servicios Médicos Cubanos (SMC – Cuban Medical Services Marketing Company) is expanding: it offers fee-paying medical attention in Cuba and abroad to raise revenue to finance Cuba’s free public health system.

Through the SMC, Brazil has hired 4,000 Cuban doctors to work in poor areas in the north of the country.