Help Haiti Hillary!!

WASHINGTON -- Signaling the United States' strong commitment to Haiti, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expected to visit the storm-ravaged Caribbean nation next week to meet with Haitian President René Préval.

State Department officials have not yet confirmed the visit, but Haitian officials say they have been told that Clinton plans to make a brief visit to the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince on Thursday while enroute to Trinidad and Tobago to attend the Fifth Summit of the Americas alongside President Barack Obama.

The Haiti visit would come just two days after Clinton leads the U.S. delegation at a critical Haiti donors conference in Washington and three days before Haitians head to the polls on Sunday to choose among 105 hopefuls vying for 12 Senate seats.

The elections are the first of two legislative elections Haiti is expected to hold this year and will be a critical test of the country's fledgling democracy. Like Tuesday's donors conference, which is being hosted by the Inter-American Development Bank, the elections are long overdue.

Haiti has faced a gloomy prognosis since spiking global food and fuel prices triggered days of deadly riots last April and two tropical storms and two hurricanes battered the country in less than a month last summer. The storms killed nearly 800 people and left nearly $1 billion in damages.

With the the global economic crisis, the country now faces a $125 million budget shortfall, rising double-digit inflation and a slowdown in remittances.

In February, Préval became the first head of state to meet with Clinton following her confirmation as secretary of state. During the meeting, he pleaded for urgent aid support on behalf of his cash-strapped government, which was facing a $125 million budget shortfall.

Those familiar with the bilateral talks told The Miami Herald that at the donors conference, the United States is expected to announce at least $50 million in additional aid for the poverty stricken country, including money for direct budget support.

For months, Haiti supporters have been calling on the international community to help keep the fragile nation from slipping deeper into misery and help keep instability at bay.

Among those who have come to the country's aid is former President Bill Clinton, who along with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, visited Haiti last month and pledged to help garner donor support. Both are scheduled to attend the donors meeting at which Haitian authorities are seeking at least $2 billion toward a three-year poverty reduction plan in the hemisphere's poorest nation.

Ahead of the meeting, Ban has personally written to donors telling them that the conference is ``of fundamental importance for consolidating the fragile stability of Haiti.''

But he warned that while international aid is needed, it ``alone will not provide economic security, and what's required is sustainable social and economic development to enable Haiti to move beyond recurrent crises.''

Just what Clinton's message to Préval will be remains unclear. The day before, she's scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Michèle Pierre-Louis, who will attend the donors meeting. But Pierre-Louis will first travel to New York, where powerful New York Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel is hosting a Monday meeting with textile business leaders to take advantage of the U.S. Congress-approved HOPE legislation.

The law has helped inject 11,000 new jobs into Haiti's once ailing textile industry. Nine companies have moved to the country to take advantage of the nine-year window of duty-free access to the U.S. market for textiles.

Following the meeting in New York, Pierre-Louis will be the guest of honor at a dinner hosted by Inter-American Development Bank President Luis Alberto Moreno, again aimed at fueling investments into the country.

The United States is Haiti's single largest donor, and the additional aid would bring its commitment to $287 million for the fiscal year.

Some Info On Haiti

The Trouble with Haiti: And why is it so poor?


Q. Who are the Haitians and what divides them?

A. The French first colonised Haiti in 1659, but it became an independent state in 1804 after a successful uprising by African-descended slaves, led by Pierre Dominique Toussaint-l'Ouverture. Tensions persisted between the negro population and the mulattos, those of mixed race.

Class and race go together. The vast majority of the 7 million population are descended from slaves, and are black. These are almost all impoverished. The elite, known as les blancs, are mainly coffee-coloured mulattos. Now the divisions are not quite so cut and dried. There is a black elite too. But few mulattos are poor.

Q. What are Haiti's main products / exports?

A. exports included light assembled goods and baseballs.

Q. How much of Haiti is American-owned?

A. Very little. The industry that does exist is mainly in light assembly. It is controlled by five mulatto families of Syrian and Lebanese origin.

Q. Why is Haiti so poor? Whose fault is it?

A. It used to be rich, because slaves were exploited to grow sugar. That came to an end 200 years ago. According to the most recently available World Bank data, Haiti's gross national product is less than dollars 400 per capita, and falling. Sanctions have made things worse. Three-quarters of the population is out of work. The country has no mineral wealth. It imports twice what it exports. There are also great disparities in wealth.

The poverty worsens with the high annual rate of increase (1.8 per cent) in the population, 75 per cent nominally Catholic.

Much of the natural forest has been devastated by excessive exploitation for charcoal, the main source of energy, which has contributed to soil degradation and erosion. This has further degraded the environment, leaving less and less arable land. Pollution in coastal waters has reduced the fishing catch.

Q. Why have the Americans invaded Haiti so often?

A. Actually, they haven't. Between 1849 and 1913, US warships entered Haitian waters 24 times 'to protect American lives and property'. But they invaded only in 1915, in an attempt to end tensions between the blacks and the mulattos. They left in 1934 after 40,000 died.

U.S. Congressional Representatives get a fill of Haiti

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — A group of U.S. congressional representatives have wrapped up a visit to Haiti to observe the humanitarian and political challenges facing the Western Hemisphere's poorest country.

Rep. John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, led the group of U.S. lawmakers, which reviewed operations of agencies involved in drug interdiction efforts, legal immigration and humanitarian and development issues.

Conyers praised Haiti's improving security at a brief news conference in Port-au-Prince on Tuesday.

The U.S. lawmakers said they met with President Rene Preval and conducted site visits to an orphanage, hospital, and shelter during their trip.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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U.N. urges generosity

By Patrick Worsnip

UNITED NATIONS, April 6 (Reuters) - The United Nations pressed rich nations on Monday to aid impoverished Haiti at a donor conference next week, and won a pledge from the United States that it would be generous.

The Caribbean state is the western Hemisphere's poorest nation, but U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon believes it is poised to grow rapidly if it makes internal reforms and receives help from the outside world.

In a letter last week to donor countries, released by the United Nations on Monday, Ban said the April 14 Inter-American Development Bank conference in Washington was of "fundamental importance for consolidating the fragile stability of Haiti."

"I wish to enlist your assistance in making a special effort to support Haiti through renewed technical and financial engagement so that Haiti is firmly on the path to lasting stability and sustainable development," he added.

Ban, who visited Haiti last month along with former U.S. President Bill Clinton, appealed for high-level attendance at the conference.

In a report to the Security Council on Monday, U.N. envoy to Haiti Hedi Annabi said international assistance was vital for Haiti to build up its infrastructure and meet a $125 million requirement for budget support in this fiscal year.

U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice told the council Washington was encouraged by progress Haiti had made despite devastating hurricanes last year, adding, "We look forward to participating actively and generously" in the April 14 conference.

The hurricanes caused an estimated $1 billion of damage, while the global financial crisis brought a 14 percent reduction in February in remittances vital to many Haitian families.

Ban has been influenced by a report by British academic Paul Collier which said that if Haiti could improve its roads and ports it was well-placed to benefit from low labor costs and duty-free access it currently enjoys to the U.S. market.

Haiti has a troubled history of dictatorship and political violence. But Annabi's report said the country "now has its best chance in decades to break from the destructive cycles of the past, and to move toward a brighter future."

He said, however, that Haiti needed to move further on moves begun by President Rene Preval to resolve political differences through dialogue if it was to advance in other areas. A key test of stability would be Senate elections due just five days after the Washington conference.

"At this critical time, Haiti cannot afford the kind of discord that paralyzed the country for almost five months last year," Annabi said.

He also noted that despite improvements in Haitian security forces, the 9,000 U.N. peacekeeping troops and police there remained "indispensable when a real crisis erupts."

Rice, who went on a Security Council trip to Haiti last month, said much more needed to be done in key economic areas. "Desperate poverty, malnutrition, lack of education, and other socioeconomic problems continue to bedevil Haiti," she said. (Editing by Jackie Frank)

Pregnant and Poor

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti For all the American and international efforts to fight global poverty, one thing is clear: Those efforts won’t get far as long as women like Nahomie Nercure continue to have 10 children.

Global family-planning efforts have stalled over the last couple of decades, and Nahomie is emblematic both of the lost momentum and of the poverty that results. She is an intelligent 30-year-old woman who wanted only two children, yet now she is eight months pregnant with her 10th.

As we walked through Cité Soleil, the Haitian slum where she lives, her elementary-school-age children ran stark naked around her. The $6-a-month rental shack that they live in — four sleep on the bed, six on the floor beside it — has no food of any kind in it. The family has difficulty paying the fees to keep the children in school.

There’s simply no way to elevate Nahomie’s family, and millions like it around the world, unless we help such women have fewer children. And yet family-planning programs have been shorn of resources and glamour for a generation now.

Nahomie is one of 200 million womenworldwide who, according to United Nations estimates, have what demographers call an “unmet need” for safe and effective contraception. That is, they don’t want to get pregnant but don’t use a modern form of family planning.

This “unmet need” results in 70 million to 80 million unwanted pregnanciesannually, the United Nations says, along with 19 million abortions and 150,000 maternal deaths.

The push for contraception was at the center of development efforts in the 1960s and 1970s, but then waned. In part, it was tarnished by its own zealotry, including coercion in China and India. Another reason was abortion politics, which led to a cutoff in American financing for the United Nations Population Fund — even though the upshot was more unwanted pregnancies and more abortions.

In addition, family planning turned out to be harder than many enthusiasts had expected, for it requires far more than condoms or the pill. Haiti has family-planning clinics, spending on contraception is fairly high, and women say they want fewer children — yet only one-quarter of Haitian women use contraceptives.

Nahomie’s story helps explain the enigma. She tried injectables, but she says they caused excess bleeding that frightened her. The clinic had little counseling to explain and reassure her, so she stopped after nine months.

A sexually transmitted infection at the time meant that she couldn’t use an IUD just then, and a doctor told her that the pill would be inappropriate because she has vascular problems. Reluctant to return to a clinic that seemed scornful of poor women, she drifted along with nothing.

A couple of babies later, her first husband left her, and her next husband wanted to have children with her, so she acquiesced. A few children later, she began to push back, but in Haiti’s social structure she felt she had to accede to her husband’s whims. “I asked to use condoms,” Nahomie said, “but he refused.” Last fall, shortly after she became pregnant with her 10th child, her husband ran off.

A book published a few years ago, “Reproducing Inequities,” notes that we are, painstakingly, learning what does work. The effective strategies go beyond the contraceptive devices themselves to include better counseling, more dignity for women in clinics, a greater choice of methods that are completely free — and a broad effort to raise the status of women.

The best way to elevate women, by far, is to educate girls and to give them opportunities to earn income through micro-loans, factory jobs or vocational training. It is sometimes said that the best contraceptive isn’t the pill or the IUD, but education for girls.

(A side note: Whenever I write about efforts to save children from malaria or diarrhea, I get cynical letters from neo-Malthusians who argue that saving children’s lives is pointless until birthrates drop. That’s incorrect. There’s abundant evidence that when parents are confident that their children will live, they will have fewer and invest more in each of them.)

In any case, the mounting academic evidence underscores what is intuitively obvious in Haiti: unless family planning is more successful in poor countries, they won’t be able to overcome poverty. “There’s no other way,” says Tania Patriota, the representative of the United Nations Population Fund in Haiti. “It’s indispensable.”

President Obama has already lifted the ban on aid for the Population Fund, and we now have an opportunity to lead a global effort to regain lost momentum for family planning. And while Nahomie’s story shows that this won’t be easy, it also underscores that there’s simply no alternative.

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AIG BONUSES WOULD HAVE WENT FAR!

What the G-20 Can Do for Haiti




While President Obama and the other most powerful leaders in the world meet at the Group of 20 summit this week in part to decide the roles of new players such as China and Brazil, they should remember that Haiti, which is the poorest and least developed country in the Western Hemisphere and lies just 500 miles from the United States, remains teetering between failure and the possibility of development and progress.

I hope this opportunity at the G-20 summit to make a real difference to Haiti is not lost. Cancellation of Haiti's roughly $1.5 billion in foreign debt would strengthen the elected government, allowing it to improve health care, education and other essential services, thereby allowing for greater economic development, which would bring jobs and reduce poverty. Further, the United States would benefit through a reduction in illegal immigration, greater regional stability and homeland security, and reduced importation of illegal drugs.

U.S. taxpayers have given $180 billion to bail out American International Group (AIG), but AIG will give $1.2 billion in bonuses company-wide this year. The money spent by AIG to pay bonuses would nearly wipe out Haiti's debt. Similarly, U.S. taxpayers have spent $45 billion on the bailout of Citigroup, with a further debt guarantee up to $306 billion.



In light of the relatively small amount of money needed to relieve Haiti's debt, and with the benefits that Americans, Haitians and the world would receive, Mr. Obama should make cancellation of Haiti's debt a top priority at the G-20 summit.

LINNEA NILSEN CAPSHAW

Washington

Temporary Protected status

MIAMI - Miami Mayor Manny Diaz sent a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano yesterday March 31, 2009, urging Temporary Protected status for Haitians in the wake of the multiple hurricanes that devastated the island during the Fall of 2008

Mayor Diaz has been a long standing advocate and supporter of equitable treatment for the Haitian community. In 2003 and 2004 he cosponsored policy resolutions at the U.S. Conference of Mayors calling for equal treatment and due process for Haitian immigrants. More recently, Operation: Hope for Haiti was launched in September of 2008 to support the Haitian people following the devastation of several hurricanes in the country last year. Over $70,000 was raised and through a World Vision grant from USAID’s Food for Peace program. Each of those dollars was leveraged to more than $200,000. This donation drive is still in effect and gifts can be online at www.worldvision.org.