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Haiti: Some Key Questions and Answers
Bryan Walsh, Staff Writer for Time Magazine asking questions of RADIX co-founder, Ben Wisner
16 January 2010
1. LOOTING. We’re already hearing people raising concerns and fears of looting within Haiti, after the quake. Time and again, that’s a concern that’s voiced after major disasters such as this quake, and often a great deal of energy is expended to prevent looting (as happened after Katrina). Is this a mistake? Are these fears often overstated?
One has to make a distinction between survival self provisioning and looting. During Katrina, city officials and the police broke into an abandoned Radio Shack to take radio equipment necessary to set up an ad hoc emergency command post. No one called that looting. Hungry and thirsty people will scavenge food and water from earthquake damaged shops. This is different from stealing valuables from an abandoned home or appliances or cash from retail outlets.
Haiti does have a violent history, and in some neighborhoods there are armed youth gangs. Public safety and order has been a challenge for some time, and that is why UN Peace Keepers are there. That violence did not begin with the earthquake, however and cannot be blamed on the disaster. It remains to be seen in these gangs play a negative or, perhaps, a positive role. Strange as it may seem, organized crime in Japan, the so-called Yakuza, was first on the scene after the earthquake in Kobe in 1995, distributing essentials to people in neighborhoods where these gangs are based.
With 9,000 UN troops and another 10,000 US troops on the way, there should be enough human resources both to provide public safety, keep order at distribution points, and to provide vital services like medical care and to begin to clear rubble and debris. However, it would be a mistake to see the “mission” as primarily one of keeping order.
2. HAITIAN VULNERABILITY. What made Haiti so uniquely vulnerable to this disaster, and to other disasters?
One has to look to history for the answer. Haitian slaves overthrew their French masters and became the first Black republic in the hemisphere in 1804. However, it was surrounded by slave owning societies and paid compensation to the French government until 1947. Haiti was, and to some extent remains, an outsider in the world order. During this long period a small ruling elite evolved that was terribly corrupt and controlled most of the wealth. The island people’s one great change at democratization and redistribution of wealth was ended when Jean Baptiste Asistide, the popularly elected president, was overthrown my the military and forced to leave the country. His reforms had gone too far.
The conditions that led to popular support for Aristide still exist: farmers find it hard to make a living because they are competing with cheap imported food, and many years of deforestation has caused massive erosion. Many have migrated to Port-au-Prince to find work or a way of making a living. The city’s density grew in very poor built informal settlements. This increased vulnerability to landslide, to flood, hurricane, and, indeed, to this earthquake.
The resulting situation result not only in a desperate poor people but a very weak government. For years now social welfare, health, and other functions that most people take for granted as the job of government have been carried out by charities (NGOs), the UN, or have been privatized. There has been very little investment in infrastructure. I studied the impact of hurricane Jean on Gonaives, another large city in Haiti. Violent conflict had rendered the city government and the emergency management authorities powerless to warn of flash flooding that killed more than 1,000.
Preparedness for disaster requires strong and capable government and a certain amount of resilience and redundancy in infrastructure – for example, two or three roads that lead in alternative ways to the same place, generators in hospitals to provide electricity when the central power goes out, etc. None of this existed.
3, RECOVERTY. How do we build back Haiti in a way that makes it more resistant to similar disasters in the future—and do so in a way that is affordable to a country that is desperately poor?
There are three aspects of recovery. One is physical reconstruction. Here it is easy enough to “build back better” (as the saying goes) at low cost by using designs and construction methods that have been shown to be effective in recovery experiences in India, Pakistan, Iran, and Indonesia. Many engineers in the region (in Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico, etc.) have pioneered these designs and construction methods. Schools, hospitals, other public buildings and houses can be made more resilient to impact of earthquake and wind. Location is more difficult. Land must be found for rebuilding that is not too steep or low lying and flood prone. Such an urban land question immediately becomes vexed because private interests are at stake. That is where strong government is key.
A second aspect concerns livelihoods. In the short term, what the UN calls “early recovery”, employment for large numbers of people should be provided in clearing rubble and reconstruction. Women should not be neglected in such employment schemes. Later micro-credit can be used to set people back up with enterprises, workshops, and other forms of livelihood. Small business loans can get factories going again. However, as long as Haiti remains a low wage location of sweat shops, livelihoods will never stabilize at a level that will allow people to invest in safety improvements and maintenance of their houses and neighborhoods. So part of livelihood recovery has to be charting a new role for Haiti in the global economy.
Finally, there is institutional recovery. Out of the rubble of ministry buildings a new state apparatus must arise. However, a rebuilding of the status quo ante will only set the country up for yet another disaster. Institutions need to be established that are accountable to the majority of the people. The project of democratization that has been on hold since President Aristide was ousted has to start again. With this as a pre-condition, then Haitian government institutions can began to give more than lip service to international norms and guidelines for disaster preparedness and prevention. Among these norms is what’s called “multi-hazard assessment”. Rather than limp along from disaster to disaster, fixated on hurricanes because they are so common, a thorough assessment of all hazards, including seismic risk, would provide the basis for preparedness. One has to ask why regionally agreed and known earthquake building codes were not enforced in Haiti. In such a large earthquake there still would have been some damage and loss of life, but not on the scale we have seen.
In all three aspects of recovery, a key lesson learned from the Asian tsunami and other disasters is to involve local people in at every stage of discussion, planning, and decision making. This has also been the experience of successes in New Orleans following hurricane Katrina. The master plan for rebuilding the lower 9th ward was painstakingly worked out in public with input from many stakeholders. In this way, there is eventually buy-in and commitment. Also, people have local knowledge and skill that can be mobilized. Just was a few years ago community organizers from India and Bangladesh visited their counterparts in New Orleans to share experiences, successful lay-planners and organizers from the Big Easy should visit their counterparts in Port-au-Prince in six months, or whenever such exchanges are feasible.
4. INTERNATIONAL LESSONS. What lessons can be taken from the response to similar international disasters, such as the Sichuan quake of 2008, and of course the tsunami? Is the international community getting better at responding to such catastrophes?
After the Asian tsunami in late 2004, the various U.N. organizations involved in disaster relief and recovery, bi-lateral donors, and major non-governmental organizations agreed a new, so-called “cluster approach” to relief operations that has gone a long way to improve coordination, reduce duplication and waste, and ensure good coverage across an affected areas and population. This approach has been honed and perfected many events since including earthquakes in Pakistan, Indonesia, and China, cyclone in Myanmar. The international community is certainly better at responding, despite the huge logistical difficulties and almost complete lack of host government in this case. In all the other large events must mentioned, the capital cities and government system was still functioning, and national response was also robust. In Haiti, there is much self help among survivors, but little government action. Destruction of the port and limited capacity of the airport complicate logistics. Affected towns and cities in Sichuan province of China were relatively remote, but the Chinese military rapidly opened roads, built temporary bridges and even air dropped medical teams. Recovery in China was well planned with inputs from a dozen Chinese universities as well as international expertise. In China, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Myanmar there were many national volunteers who came from unaffected parts of the country to assist. None of this is apparently happening in Haiti. So, in short, lessons have been learned. The system is working, but under much more difficult conditions than have been faced before.
5. MONEY FOR PREVENTION. Does more money, and more effort, need be channeled toward disaster prevention and preparation? Would it be a good idea to set aside a certain percentage of the aid donated for Haiti to future disaster preparation?
Yes, money should be set aside for prevention and preparedness. In fact, at a major UN sponsored review of progress in reducing disaster held in 2006, the then UK minister for overseas development proposed setting 10% of disaster response aside for precisely this purpose. A number of experts have made this suggestion including one of the pioneers in low cost earthquake design and construction, Dr. Brian Tucker, who directs the non-provide called GeoHazards International
(http://www.geohaz.org/news/index.html ).
Various economic evaluations by the World Bank and others suggest that there can be $10 of benefits in damage and loss avoided for every $1 invested in prevention and preparedness. Regional banks such as the Inter-American Development Bank have for some time promoted such investment as a kind of insurance policy taken out on development projects. Locating, designing, and building a bridge well may cost a bit more, but that is a lot less expensive than having to rebuild it every few years after it is repeated destroyed by floods.