IT WILL take a decade. At least. And huge, sustained investment by the international community. As Haiti’s immediate humanitarian crisis shows signs of being stabilised although huge problems remain, the challenge of the medium and longer-term reconstruction must begin to take centre stage. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that 10 years of hard work, at least, awaits the world in Haiti,” Canada’s prime minister Stephen Harper told a Montreal donors’ conference.
Supplies of food, water and medicine are getting through, although painfully slowly for some. Security and logistical problems continue to dog deliveries to the estimated 800,000 homeless. President René Préval has issued a further appeal for 36 million emergency rations of food and 200,000 tents just to get through the next few weeks.
But operations are now also moving into a second phase response to the crisis: the authorities hope to start this week to relocate at least 400,000 survivors currently sheltering in 400 sprawling makeshift camps across Port-au-Prince into temporary tent villages outside the wrecked city. In the medium term, as aftershocks continue to shake the city – two more yesterday – discussions have started on the possibility of rebuilding the city itself on a new site, away from geological fault lines. The cost will run to billions.
Massive resources will have to be found to create new jobs and deal with the country’s international debt. Haiti struggled with unemployment even before the disaster, with two out of three of its nine million people without formal work, and 70 per cent living on less than $2 a day. The quake is estimated to have wiped out a further fifth of the country’s jobs. And although there has already been very substantial forgiveness of the country’s debt, Haiti still owes some $440 million to the American Development Bank and $296 million to Venezuela.
Foreign ministers from 14 countries, the European Union, and aid groups met at Montreal on Monday to begin to plan the international contributions to a US-hosted donors’ conference in March. Key donor countries are meanwhile conducting a needs assessment study in Port-au-Prince.
Central to the challenge will be the issue of who leads the reconstruction effort in a country notorious for its poor governance and corruption – one of the five most corrupt in the world, according to Transparency International. There was widespread criticism from NGOs of the lack of co-ordination of rescue efforts in the first days after the quake, and now Haiti’s long-dysfunctional government, its infrastructure in rubble, is operating out of a former police office, holding many meetings in the open under a tree. At Montreal Haiti’s Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive insisted that his country itself would be able to take the lead and won public endorsement from foreign ministers. But, in truth, it will inevitably have to be more a partnership with the UN and donors, and it will be months at the earliest before the UN’s international peacekeepers or the EU’s proposed police contingent will be in a position to be withdrawn.