Along with so many emigrant members of Koridò (Corridor), a rural community in Léogane at the epicenter of the earthquake, I anxiously endured the prolonged silence between the Outside and Inside of the transnational community. Until January 12, we had become accustomed to virtually instantaneous transnational communication, thanks to the proliferation of cell phones. The first good news came two days after the earthquake through a phone call lasting only a few seconds, long enough for a son to tell his mother that he and the rest of the family were alive.  Each treasured piece of news spreads quickly to other families in the diaspora.  By day four, the joyous news had confirmed that residents of Koridò and surrounding hamlets of Ti Rivyè were la, meaning “okay, alive.” There was mention of only one life lost.  Ironically, the name of the one man who died is Koridò.

Why did the people of Koridò survive?  And, in the aftermath, why are their lives hanging in the balance? My immigrant friends didn’t explain how their relatives had managed to survive.  The reasons are readily apparent to them but not obvious to those unfamiliar with their way of life. The ordinary habits of everyday rural life in the residential compounds of Koridò and beyond no doubt contributed to their survival.  Most residents live outside—preparing meals, eating, washing, braiding hair, talking, playing, and laughing.  People only stay indoors to sleep, when it rains, or if they are sick.  Indeed a healthy person who stays inside during the day is assumed to be hiding something, or doing sorcery.  At 5:00 PM on Tuesday, therefore, when their homes crumbled, most people would have been safely outdoors.  As for the relative few who might have been indoors when the earth quaked, the modest style and scale of homes probably proved beneficial: most dwellings are small and there are multiple exits.  Each room typically has its own door—a potential escape—to the outside.  The older houses are made of wattle and daub with thatch or corrugated zinc roofs.  The homes built since 1983 (virtually all financed by migrants) are made of cinder block.  Pressure to keep up with the migrant-funded housing boom has accelerated the building of larger homes and even two-story structures.  Many of these homes were damaged or destroyed by the January 12th earthquake.  Subsequent  quakes and tremors have forced many residents to stay outdoors.

Thus it is the quotidian practices of these rural poor families that, I believe, pulled them through the earthquake relatively unscathed.  With tragic irony, the same adaptations to marginality are now threatening their survival. Kouri pou lapli, tonbe larivyè.  Run to get out of the rain; fall into the river.  This pèp lamizè (“people of poverty”) did not store much food. They do not have cabinets, closets, or refrigerators to preserve food and to protect it from pests.  People instead tend to buy food daily, usually in small quantities because that is what they can afford: a spoonful of tomato paste, one bouillon cube, a cupful of beans, rice or cornmeal.

Why do the humble residents of this lush coastal hamlet need to buy food?  Its rich soil is cultivated, but produces little food.  The main crop planted is not a source of nourishment but what Sidney Mintz has termed a “drug food”: sugar cane.  The violent conquest of the island and labor of African slaves in Léogane and other plains of the colony once known as Saint Domingue advanced the production of sugar cane, to be transformed into sugar, molasses and rum.  These “proletarian hunger killers” managed to reproduce the burgeoning working classes of Europe.  But, the increasingly desperate situation the people of Koridò now face is in part a legacy of that past.  The empty calories survivors suck out of the sugar cane help to keep them alive for a while, but the cane harvest was nearly over when the earthquake hit, leaving little, if any sugar cane for local residents.

Why do the owners of these tiny plots interspersed between the large fields owned by outsiders continue planting sugar cane on their own tiny plots rather than food?  Very few gardens are planted with beans, plantains, squash, sweet potatoes and peanuts.  The labor to produce them exceeds the return on their sale.   Sugar cane proliferates because it is a hardy plant, requiring little labor after the initial work to prepare the field and to conduct periodic weeding.  It practically grows by itself.  This pattern reproduces an economic system that has insufficient manual labor to cultivate more labor-intensive crops or to dig and maintain irrigation canals, where there is water.   The abysmal return these sugar cane producers receive for their crop, despite the high price of refined sugar in Haiti, keeps them mired in poverty.  This cycle just pushes their children to disdain farming, to prepare for an exit from their family plots of land.  This contradictory process has transformed this society from producers of food to producers of migrants for export that generate wage remittances and channel imported food.  Nature violently interrupted that fragile reciprocity on January 12th.  There is no way to send money to those at home and no food for them to buy.

As I write, the people of Koridò are camped out in an expansive sugar cane field.   In yet another irony, they are squatting on land they once controlled. Joseph Lacombe, a powerful elite businessman from Port-au-Prince, took the land from them in the early twentieth century in a series of “legal” swindles.  Some of the wealth Lacombe siphoned from this rural section went toward building a chateau in the Pyrenees with the romantic name, Villa à Léogane.  According to my godson Charlie’s last harrowing report on January 20, he and the other “squatters” were staving off their hunger with breadfruit and sugar cane.  Seven days after the quake, no one has yet offered them food or potable water. The near unilateral focus on “la République de Port-au-Prince” by foreign aid agencies and the media has exacerbated the neglect of people whose everyday practices got them out of the way of the earthquake but who now flounder perilously at the edge of the abyss.

Haiti is in ruins today.  The earthquake of Tuesday January 12 has laid bare the nightmare reality of the misery of the Haitian people: few hospitals, inadequate infrastructure, weak state institutions, and the illiterate urban poor huddled in shanty towns or perched precariously on hillsides. What the harrowing images in the media have dramatized is nothing new for the vast majority of the Haitian nation. They have lived this way for more than two centuries. We should not forget Haiti was in ruins on the morning after the declaration of independence on January 1, 1804. For the past two centuries Haiti has stood still. We cannot grasp this immobility unless we understand that independence meant the beginning of a neocolonial relationship with the outside world. Haiti’s territorial waters were constantly violated in the nineteenth century. Recognition of Haiti by its former colonial masters meant only further dependence with the massive indemnity paid to France.  By 1915, an American Occupation, which was to last nineteen-years, meant that Haiti had entered the U.S. sphere of influence. It has not left it. The U.S. led intervention of 1994 under President Clinton may have been called “Operation Uphold Democracy” but it was primarily driven by the need to stanch the outflow of refugees and not to restore democracy. Under President George Bush, the bicentenary of Haiti independence was marked by U.S. complicity in a coup that ousted President Aristide. Now that everyone laments the weakness of the Haitian state, no one remembers the extent to which lawlessness was encouraged in February 2004 when it suited the powers that be.

If Haiti’s present ruin is as much historical as it is natural, we must also take into account those forces within Haiti that have traditionally resisted change and immobilized the country. Haiti may be unique in the Caribbean in that its society cannot be fully understood without addressing the terrible asymmetry of economic power that exists in the country. If Haitian society cannot move forward and cannot realize the dream of modernity that sparked its revolution at the end of the 18th century, it is in part because it had an elite that lived by siphoning off the country’s productivity to support its personal consumption, an elite whose power was consolidated during the U.S. Occupation. It is not the Haitian masses who are resistant to progress. Rather it is often the Haitian ruling classes who are impervious to change. Neocolonialist isolation, we should remember, suited the Haitian elites perfectly as they secured local control of the country as importers and exporters living off the ever-dwindling resources of the nation. The elites formed the state that lived off the peasantry who formed the nation.  The idea of the nation from which the elites drew their legitimacy had nothing to do with the majority of Haitians who were never consulted or included in any institutionalized way and had no leverage against the state.

The story of post independent Haiti is one of increasing ruin from this unequal social and economic order. The eventual collapse of Jean Claude Duvalier’s ostentatious presidency in 1986 was directly linked to the consequences of this exploitative structure. The normally passive peasantry was roused by the message of social justice spread by the grassroots Catholic Church or ti-legliz. The forces that brought down the dictatorship did not originate in political organizations that the regime had successfully crushed, but the Catholic Church. By 1990 a return to the former status quo could only be thwarted by a populist savior like Jean Bertrand Aristide. His Lavalas movement was more of a metaphor for sweeping away the old order than an organized political institution and Aristide represented everything that the ruling classes hated and feared. They struck back and ousted Aristide who was returned to power only after a flood of refugees pushed a reluctant President Clinton to use force to reinstate Haiti’s first freely elected head of state.

Ever since the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986, there has been an endemic crisis in Haiti’s political culture. The popular anti-Duvalier movement put the ideal of democratic reform within the reach of the previously dispossessed masses but it also ushered in an economic model that linked democracy with free-trade.  Consequently, the central paradox that frustrates the post-Duvalier transition to stable democracy derives from an explosive combination of laissez-faire capitalism, which favors an elite that dominates the local economy, and democratic elections, which give power to the underprivileged. The mass of the population has been energized since 1986 by issues like constitutional reform in 1987 and the electoral process that resulted in the overwhelming vote for Jean Bertrand Aristide in December 1990.  The problem posed to the wealthy minority has been how best to thwart these demands and to profit from a free-market model. Both sides are by now keenly aware of the stakes of the bloody contradictions of a free-market democracy in post -Duvalier Haiti.

Such a contest for power has produced two kinds of leadership: either politicians who are aligned with the wealthy few and are viewed with suspicion by the population or demagogic populists who try to hold on to power by constantly inveighing against the machinations of the business class and its foreign backers. Recent events in Haiti bear this out. On one hand, Jean Bertrand Aristide created his “Lavalas Family” in the name of the dispossessed masses and to frustrate the free-market expectations of Haiti’s wealthy minority.  Eventually state business became family business as the incompetent and corrupt rose to positions of power because of family loyalties. The anti-Aristide opposition had as its ultimate goal the dismantling of the Lavalas family.  Their hope was that, once the populist demagogue was safely in exile, their access to state power and a free market economy could be guaranteed by those murderous elements of the discredited Haitian army who had deposed the Lavalas leader.

In post-Duvalierist Haiti, no presidential candidate can be successful unless he or she represents the mass of the Haitian population. The victory of Rene Preval is a clear demonstration of the importance of a popular mandate in governing Haiti. Unfortunately, Preval inherits the fallout from the crisis that removed President Aristide from power, a crisis resolved not by constitutional means, not by international mediation but by brute force.  An abrupt and violent change in government and not a constitutional transition had unleashed in Haiti elements of the disbanded Duvalier army.  It has also given renewed confidence to those in the market dominant elite who wish to govern the old-fashioned way – by force. Preval’s ineffectiveness in the present crisis should not obscure the kind of leadership he has provided since being elected. He has tried to build bridges in the wake of Aristide’s polarizing politics, neutralize the armed, predatory elements in Haiti, walk the tightrope between market-based economic reform and social justice as well as attract aid from an easily distracted international community.

The image of the collapsed national palace constantly replayed in the media is a dangerously misleading symbol. Preval’s government is certainly in crisis at present as he and his Prime Minister have been unable to assert themselves in the face of overwhelming calamity. Yet, he and his government must be central to rebuilding Haiti. A strong Haitian state does not mean enlightened dictatorship nor some benevolent strongman as some desperate commentators have suggested. Obviously, legislative and presidential elections scheduled for later this year and next cannot be held in the present circumstances. Haiti cannot be rebuilt unless respect for state authority and the rule of law be reinstated. Preval has his work cut out for him but whether he succeeds or fails is not strictly an internal matter. The international community has a key role in Haiti’s reconstruction but this must not be “the helping hand” of humanitarian assistance that we keep hearing about.  The United Nations must take the lead on this question but it cannot be just another U.S. led effort. Canada, Brazil and the CARICOM states must play a decisive role in Haiti’s future. In the beginning of the 19th century, Haitians attempted to create a modern state from the ruins of the plantation.  Their will was thwarted by a hostile international community. That job still remains to be done. We can only hope that the international community is prepared to end Haiti’s historical nightmare.

If all natural disasters are simultaneously social and political, Haiti’s current earthquake crisis drives the point home with tragic force.  As we are reminded of Haiti’s dire poverty and misery—the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, literacy rates below fifty percent, deteriorated infrastructure, inadequate health services, and the egregious inequality between rich and  poor—we can only wonder where Haiti lies on the Richter scale of sociopolitical cataclysms.  The combined natural and political debacle has proven to be a double indemnity as Haiti’s hapless leadership flounders in the chaos, scarcely visible or audible in its desperate appeals for international assistance.  And even with help and resources at the gates, Haiti remains paralyzed by its limited capabilities; unable to free survivors from rubble, disinter the dead, distribute supplies, or sustain basic transport and communications systems.

It is too easy to blame the victims, and that is not my intention here despite the serious culpability of Haiti’s political class.  Haiti’s chronic poverty and political violence, careening between oppressive dictatorships, states of emergency, bloody elections and military coups are rooted in the logic of a particular system, historically determined to be sure, subject to change and variation, but locked into a self-destructive cycle that seems impossible to break.  If ever there was a leader up to the task it was Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whose lavalas movement “from the parish of the poor” built its momentum from a truly popular base.

But as Aristide would discover, the system he set out to transform got the better part of him, culminating in political assassinations, nepotistic plundering and domination by decree.  Not that the “system” acted on its own, since Haiti is a nexus of regional circuits and global forces including transnational capital controlled by elites, Haiti’s “tenth department” living abroad, the manifold forms of US occupation (including the detention and deportation of “illegal” immigrants, the war on drugs, even the rise and fall of Aristide himself) and fluctuating flows of international aid.  However, what I would like to bring out in this brief rumination is the structural logic of the earthquake disaster—not of geological fault lines and tectonic plates, but of elite control over the means of distribution.  Haiti’s inability to manage international relief is not merely a logistical problem, but a political problem with a long economic history.

Today, Haiti is paradoxically a “low wage” and “high cost” producer because if labor is cheap, doing business is expensive.  Like many entrepôt countries that impose duties on commodities flowing through their gates, Haiti’s gross domestic product is largely extractive, siphoning off cuts by licensing agents when money and commodities cross boundaries and trade hands.  What does Haiti actually produce and export?  Major agricultural exports include mangos and coffee, whereas manufacturing exports include textiles and apparel.  These industries are concentrated in the hands of an oligopoly that preys on foreign capital through tightly controlled channels of distribution.  If Haiti is the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, it has the highest port fees in the Western hemisphere, discouraging outside capital investment.  Furthermore, the profits that do accrue within Haiti remain with the elites, who indulge in luxury spending and shopping sprees abroad while supporting a patronage system that keeps them protected within gated communities.  The “trickle down” of such wealth to the masses is minimal, maintaining drivers, gardeners, bodyguards and domestic servants on the merest margins of subsistence, while leaving the rest to fend for themselves.  Thanks to the 1991-4 embargo which devastated Haiti’s agricultural sector, and the dumping of US agricultural surpluses tied to humanitarian aid, Haiti must import flour and rice to meet its subsistence needs.  Moreover, rural poverty has led to massive deforestation as desperate Haitians cut trees to make charcoal, further eroding the agricultural base by destroying the ecosystem.  To be sure, the informal sector of recycled cast-offs, religious goods and services, and narco-trafficking keeps families alive and makes some people rich, as has the growing flow of remittances from Haitians living abroad.  The bustling commerce of local markets keeps people afloat on precariously narrow profit margins. But here again, distribution trumps production in the political economy of daily survival.

One of the ironies of Haiti’s earthquake is the leveling effect it has had on the nation, bringing together rich and poor within a common community of death and destruction.  When the elite’s control of the channels of distribution collapsed into rubble , the state virtually withered away, having lost its raison d’être as a mechanism of extraction and domination.  But if in this chaos lies a window of opportunity to rebuild Haiti along more viable lines, and thus break the cycle of crises generated by the politics of distribution, the moment will quickly pass.  On January 16, 2010, Hilary Clinton flew into Port-au-Prince on a military plane to meet with president René Préval, and announced:  “We are here at the invitation of your government to help you.  As President Obama has said, we will be here today, tomorrow and for the time ahead.”  The reporter of this meeting noted that “the sound of helicopters and airplanes coming and going was heard in the background,” as if setting the stage for the next US occupation and the restoration of the status quo ante.

As Haiti rebuilds with international assistance, all partners in the effort should work toward a productive and progressive transformation, one that decreases Haiti’s dependence on imports and handouts, builds a sustainable infrastructure within Port-au-Prince and throughout the nation, restores agricultural productivity, and rebuilds the environment.  A tall order to be sure, but necessary for Haiti to break the vicious cycle of political, economic and ecological devastation.  Clearly the solution must be collective, inclusive, multi-national and multi-pronged, with Haitians intimately involved in the process.  I would recommend a green agenda, starting with the construction of a solar power grid and solar cookers that would bring clean energy to all communities and households, improve self-reliance, offset the need for charcoal, and put Haiti at the forefront of sustainable “third world” development.  As the money for rebuilding comes in, the politics of distribution count more than ever before.

Natural disasters follow the fault-lines of inequality, and Haiti is a clear example of how disaster and extreme vulnerability combine to produce catastrophe. The earthquake that struck the country on January 12 has been devastating. It is easily the worst disaster Haiti has ever faced, and it will be counted among the world’s worst humanitarian crises. A 7.0 magnitude earthquake, with an extremely shallow presence and dozens of aftershocks, would be devastating in any context. In Haiti, the quake hit a dense urban area with three million people living in precarious conditions. The country had only minimal and fragile infrastructure before the quake. Now, it has virtually none. The capital city of Port-au-Prince was the seat of government and the base of a UN stabilization mission as well as the base of most aid organizations and NGOs. All have been affected. The country has been decapitated, with all of the symbolic and material representations of the state now in ruins. Relief and rescue is the most pressing concern in the days and weeks ahead, but we will soon need to turn to the issues of resettlement and reconstruction. How can we move beyond humanitarianism and disaster response to a comprehensive plan to build the foundations for a durable future?

Crisis, disaster, and insecurity are foundational concepts in contemporary global politics. They are all key concepts in a dominant paradigm that takes emergency as a central feature of social and political life. A country’s ability to respond to natural hazards and disasters is now a key benchmark for determining the capacity of state institutions. Global norms envision states prepared to deal rapidly and effectively with all manner of disasters, from hurricanes and floods to earthquakes or tsunamis. Capacity and preparedness are crucial aspects of good governance. But there is an unintended (or intended?) consequence of the overwhelming focus on emergency today—the normalization of crisis.

What does it mean to think of crisis as a normal condition of social life? What are the implications of framing disaster response as a normative condition of statehood, rather than, perhaps, making development or sustainability foundational concepts? To adequately answer such questions, it is worth briefly considering the origins of the notion of crisis. The word crisis comes from an Ancient Greek term that named the decisive turning point in the course of a disease, when the patient lived or died. Crisis is strongly related to critique and judgement, and to a moment of decision. It is also conceptually rooted in the exclusive disjuncture—the moment in which the future is undecided, but only one of a range of possible outcomes (life or death) will finally be possible. In global politics, the decisive moment becomes a moral obligation to intervene, often through humanitarian missions. Such interventions are often short-term, punctuated responses that treat disasters and crises as sudden but anticipated ruptures. Preparedness and response become moments for the state to perform and enact its capacity to govern. What results are systems of crisis management, rather than bold attempts to resolve the underlying conditions—such as extreme poverty and social vulnerability—that contribute to the extent and scope of disasters. Under the banner of crisis response, the old paradigm of development has been displaced by humanitarianism, emergency response, and policing.

The normalization of crisis has had particular consequences in Haiti. The country has so frequently been designated as being “in crisis” that many speak of Haiti’s chronic crisis. As paradoxical as that sounds, it is rather telling. By treating crisis as a normative feature of social life, as a routine rupture, meaningful development and democratization projects have been limited, if not abandoned. This has been the case among all three primary actors involved in intervention and response in Haiti: NGOs and grassroots organizations; the state; and the international community.

Non-government organizations have focused on small-scale projects, with no comprehensive plan and no overarching integration. The Haitian state lacks the capacity to engage in an ambitious national development plan, and has been hampered by political insecurity, lack of funds, and corruption. The international community has a long, strained history of intervention, but these so far have not yielded concrete results beyond the level of (often short-lived) political stability and security. For decades, these actors have been unable or unwilling to transform immediate and urgent response into projects designed to build the capacity of social, political, and economic institutions. As a result, the underlying structural problems of Haitian society persist, creating a long emergency that periodically erupts symptomatically into a crisis that garners the world’s attention for a short time.

There are a number of factors that might explain the inability to move from humanitarianism to reconstruction. These include funding issues, lack of political will, and Haiti’s lack of wealth or strategic importance. But there is a particular factor that is especially important in this case. Rapid response to political crises or humanitarian disasters have been handled by the United States and the United Nations, often with support from global actors like the International Committee of the Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, OxFam, and others. These interventions are invariably imagined as temporary, though some have lasted a considerable amount of time (e.g., the US Occupation of 1915-1934). On the other hand, development in Haiti has been run through a staggering array of non-government actors (see William O’Neill’s piece). As a result, the Haitian state remains aid-dependent and incapable of responding to emergencies. Bypassing the state may have made sense under the Duvalier dictatorship, but for the past twenty years this tendency has significantly weakened the state.

Haiti needs an ambitious national development plan. It needed such a plan before the recent earthquake, and it needs it now more than ever. International intervention has always been short-sighted, since it responds to particular emergencies. Grassroots development has remained intensely regional, and has had marginal impact on the country as a whole. What is required now is a bold, comprehensive plan of national reconstruction that seeks to address extreme vulnerability, persistent poverty, and social exclusion.

The only actor that can legitimately make the transition from emergency response to national reconstruction is the Haitian state. The current relief mission cannot be allowed to devolve into yet another US military occupation. Foreign assistance must be multilateral, and must work in partnership with the Haitian government, which persists despite the widespread destruction of its central offices. Given the scale and scope of the destruction wrought by the earthquake, the Haitian state will require significant foreign assistance in order to recuperate.

In the short-term, foreign assistance will need to focus on humanitarian intervention. But the only meaningful response to the Haitian catastrophe will be a long-term commitment to work with the Haitian state, and to provide the necessary conditions to build and strengthen national institutions that are legitimate, transparent, and democratic. Reconstruction cannot focus on Port-au-Prince alone. The entire country must be rebuilt. This entails a genuine commitment to rural development, reforestation, poverty reduction, education, health, and food security. Without these, the country as a whole will remain chronically weak, fragile, and vulnerable.

The Haitian earthquake is a disaster requiring a committed global humanitarian response. But it is also a critical moment for regional and global governance. The disaster is a challenge to the world, a moment of decision: Do we leave Haiti as it was, a weak state, a fragile economy, and a vulnerable population? Or do we embrace this disaster as a moment for real change and seek to build a resilient country with a durable future? If we chose the latter, we will need to think much more ambitiously about development and democratization in Haiti then we have in the past. Given the promises that have so far been made by the international community, we may be on the cusp of a turning point. If, after all is said and done, we merely “rebuild” Haiti as the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, it will be a great failure of imagination and a wholesale indictment of global political institutions.

When the devastating earthquake hit, Haiti was already facing two other major crises. One was the massive destructions from the four major hurricanes that hit Haiti in 2008. At the time, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, John Holmes, described the four hurricanes of 2008 as the “worst disaster in the last 100 years” to strike Haiti; but by early 2009 the United Nations reports that only 40% of the $107 million it requested from member governments had been pledged. Even less had actually been delivered.

The other crisis was the long-term drain on the government’s treasury from paying off debts to the international system. Much of this debt came from loans to the Duvalier regimes, and mostly appropriated by them and their cronies rather than for economic and social development of the country. This has meant that in the post-Duvalier period, much government revenue has gone to the international financial system rather than into education, infrastructure, health, the building of housing.

Haiti is one of 49 countries that have been subjected over the last 20 or 30 years, depending on the country, to an extreme debt-repayment schedule by the international financial system, particularly the World Bank and the IMF. Generally, the IMF asks these countries to pay 20% to 25% of their export earnings toward debt service.

In sharp contrast, after WWII the Allies only insisted on 3% to 5% of Germany’s export earnings for debt service, as well as cancelling 80% of Germany’s war debt. And they asked 8% from Central European countries when communism fell after 1989.

Thus today’s debt-service burdens of 20 to 25% on poor countries are extreme. Indeed, they are so extreme that Jubilee’s forceful debt cancellation campaign actually succeeded, in part because creditors (i.e., rich country governments) recognized that the conditions of these loans meant that most of the poor country borrowers would never be able to pay up the principal; further, most had already paid several times the original debt in interests. (I develop all of this at length in Globalizations. Special Issue on the Financial Crisis. Vol. 7, February 2010.)

The Debt

The debt of poor countries in the South had grown from US $507 billion in 1980 to US $1.4 trillion in 1992. Debt service payments alone had increased to $1.6 trillion, more than the actual debt. From 1982 to 1998, indebted countries paid four times their original debts, and at the same time, their debt stocks went up. (For easy to access and understand data on poor-countries debts go to www.Jubilee.org)

In 2006, before debt cancellations set in, the poorest 49 countries had debts to the international system totaling US $375 billion, and paid over $34 billion in debt service (payments of interest and principal). This comes to $94 million a day. If we include the so-called developing countries, for a total of 144 countries, this debt stood at over US $2.9 trillion in 2006, and $573 billion paid just to service debts in 2006.

These countries had to use a significant share of their total revenues to service these debts. Debt-to GNP ratios were especially high in Africa, at 123% in the late 1990s, compared with 42% in Latin America and 28% in Asia. For instance, Africa’s interest payments reached $5 billion in 1998, which means that for every $1 in aid, African countries paid $1.40 in interest in 1998. By 2003, debt service as a share of exports revenues was well over 20% in several countries, notably in Zambia (29.6%) and Mauritania (27.7%).

Haiti, with 76 per cent of its population below the poverty line, paid $60 to $80 million a year in debt service over the last decade. In addition, it was subjected to an aid embargo from 2001 to 2004 in an effort to topple the government, perhaps seen as left-leaning. Haiti was still paying off its debt of US $1.7 bn when the devastating 2008 hurricanes hit, with budgeted debt service payments of over $1 million every week. This underlines how serious is the failure to fulfill the pledges for the 2008 post-hurricane reconstruction, which has also further aggravated the current situation.

Generally, IMF debt management policies from the 1980s onwards can be shown to have worsened the situation for the unemployed and poor (UNDP, 2005, 2008). The so-called adjustment programs of the 1980s and 1990s destroyed many traditional economies, leaving many countries only with major debts. They also at times furthered sharp concentrations of wealth and advantage, mostly via corruption by governments and elites. Much research on poor countries documents the link between hyper-indebted governments and cuts in social programs. These cuts tend to affect women and children in particular through cuts in education and health care, both investments necessary to ensuring a better future (for overviews of the data, see various annual issues of the UNDP and of the World Bank).

For instance, at the height of these programs in the early to mid-1990s, Zambia’s government paid $1.3 billion in debt but only $37 million for primary education; Ghana’s social expenses, at $75 million, represented 20% of its debt service; and Uganda paid $9 per capita on its debt and only $1 for health care. In 1994 alone, these three countries remitted $2.7 billion to bankers in the North.

Out of this mix of conditions emerge alternative survival economies; some of these have long existed in poor countries but now have expanded and often operate at larger scales — regional and even global scales. Emigration is one of these survival economies, both through employment overseas and via remittances sent back home. Criminality both minor and major offers yet other survival strategies.

Debt Cancellation Becomes the Only Way Out

This is the larger landscape within which Haiti did what it took to qualify for debt cancellation by the end of 2008. But the World Bank decided to postpone debt cancellation — this amidst the devastations of the 2008 hurricanes. To do this to a poor country, with inherited debts going back to the dictatorships of the Duvaliers, and unfulfilled pledges for post-hurricane reconstruction, which in spite of all had managed to meet the criteria for debt cancellation, is almost inconceivable. In fact, so much so, that Robert Zoellick, then recently appointed president of the World Bank, asserted in a public press conference that a good part of Haiti’s debt had been cancelled. The World Bank had to retract this promptly. It was not till July 2009 that 1.2 billion of Haiti’s debt was cancelled. Even so, Haiti has to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars every week on the remaining debt, mostly to the Inter-American Development Bank and IMF . But as I write on January 21, the World Bank announced that as of today it only holds 4% of Haiti’s external debt.

Corruption in many debt-ridden, weak and mostly ineffective governments could undermine the positive effects of debt cancellation. But the evidence shows that the 2006 debt cancellations made a difference (IAEG 2009). For instance, in 1997 Zambia used 18.3% of its income on exports of goods and services on debt service; by 2007 it was 1.3%. For Ghana these figures are 27.1% and 3.1% respectively. For Uganda they are 19.7% and 1.2%.

There are two aspects of this debt regime that have not received sufficient attention. One is the push by large banks with an excess of money in the 1960s and 70s to get global south governments to borrow. Rising oil prices and the decision of oil exporters to deposit profits in the international banking system are one source of these bank riches. At the time, highly regulated national economies in the global north offered far fewer profit options than were to come with the new post-1980s global era. Lending to poor country governments was one profit option, especially with diverse protections and earnings enhancements, such as the Export-Import Bank set up by the US government. Whether it made sense for those poor countries is dubious.

Further, the cold war promoted the search for allies, no matter how corrupt. Thus Haiti, at the time under Duvalier, was given loans it was unlikely to pay back. And the US did not do much to prevent much of the money being appropriated by the Duvalier family and their cronies rather than for economic development.

Today we see the long term effects of draconian debt repayment for Haiti: the already devastated infrastructure of Port-au-Prince — drained of adequate public investment over decades of excessive debt repayment — simply and cruelly collapsed.

As the international community now helps Haitians dig out of the rubble, we must also redouble efforts to help them dig out—and stay out—of debilitating debt.

An earlier version of this posting appeared on The Huffington Post.

I spent the better part of this past year researching a book project—Country, City, Service—that was in part a case study of a Haitian American family and also partly a response to the phrase “Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere,” a phrase that has become so commonplace that one friend recently referred to it as Haiti’s prevailing suffix.

Country

Unyielding proclamations of Haiti as the poorest country in our hemisphere arguably have made indices supporting this designation secondary, if not altogether negligible, and risked becoming self-fulfilling prophecy. Even though Haiti regularly ranks at the bottom of the Americas in the annual Human Development Index (HDI) put out by the United Nations Development Programme, the presence of three of Haiti’s Caribbean counterparts—Barbados, Cuba, and the Bahamas—in the top ten of HDI rankings for the Western Hemisphere suggests that a transformation is not impossible for Haiti. That these small islands have been able to maintain socio-economic development is often an afterthought in mainstream accounts of a shifting global order, which tend to be infatuated with burgeoning superpowers Brazil, China, and India. Ironically, this quest to forecast twenty-first-century superpowers is taking place alongside conversations extolling the virtues of a smaller planet and the resurgence of traditional practices, such as urban farming, in American cities like Detroit and New York where residents are craving a return to a simpler, pastoral, nineteenth-century way of life. It was my contention that this broader embrace of a new ethos would prove immensely helpful in Haiti’s attempts at becoming a twenty-first-century success story in the Americas. And then came the earthquake.

City

On January 12, Haiti’s capital city, Port-au-Prince, was hit by an earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale. Writing in the New York Times two days later, columnist David Brooks offered an apt contrast:

On Oct. 17, 1989, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck the Bay Area in Northern California. Sixty-three people were killed. This week, a major earthquake, also measuring a magnitude of 7.0, struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Red Cross estimates that between 45,000 and 50,000 people have died.

This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story.

To put Brooks’ declaration in further context, Hurricane Katrina, widely regarded as one of this nation’s largest natural disasters, resulted in a comparatively few 1,836 deaths, even with an emergency management response that was widely criticized for overwhelming failures. Like Katrina, the megadisaster in Port-au-Prince was unforeseen but not unexpected. Just as experts had warned New Orleans and federal officials for decades that the city’s levees would eventually succumb to a category 4 hurricane, Haitian leaders had been summarily briefed about what would happen if an earthquake hit Port-au-Prince, a city precariously residing on a fault line. In spite of these warnings, leadership in New Orleans and Port-au-Prince were unable to marshal the necessary resources to prepare for these impending disasters.

Brooks’ statement also echoes economist Paul Collier’s declaration that Haitians are disproportionately impacted by their involuntary enrollment among the “bottom billion”—residents of countries failing to keep pace with an “increasingly sophisticated world economy,” countries that are “falling behind and often falling apart.” In spite of his inclusion of Haiti among the sixty countries that make up the bottom billion in his 2007 book of the same name, Collier spent most of 2009 lauding Haiti’s potential to extricate itself from that list. According to his January 2009 report to the United Nations, Haiti possesses a number of characteristics that bode well for its future development, including:

• Haiti does not have the intractable structural socio-political problems that beset most other fragile states.
• The Haitian diaspora in North America is proportionately one of the largest in the world. It provides Haiti with a massive flow of remittances, a reservoir of skills, and a powerful political lobby.

Collier’s UN report was widely praised by Haiti supporters for reiterating what many had been saying for decades: “Haiti is not hopeless.” And when former U.S. President Bill Clinton was named as the United Nations special envoy to Haiti and charged with the implementation of Collier’s recommendations, it appeared this hope was on the cusp of realization.

Service

In Katrina’s aftermath, New Orleans became a virtual laboratory for a broad array of social service initiatives, resulting in unparalleled reforms of the city’s educational and housing infrastructures. It is not clear what the future holds for Haiti. Haiti has long been ahead of New Orleans as far as the number of non-governmental organizations operating locally, and after the earthquake this number will increase exponentially. However, what cannot be understated is that the desire of Haitian Americans and international allies to get “on the ground” is second only to the desire of Haitians to rescue their relatives and neighbors from the rubble and figure out ways to survive this latest catastrophe.

As William O’Neil asserted in the first essay appearing in this series, “Once the emergency phase is over, Haitians, with strong support from the international donor community, must finally strive to build a state worthy of its people.” Haiti has a diaspora within close proximity that has skills comparable to those of the Peace Corps units deployed across the globe in the 1960s, and on the island there are countless citizens with a bevy of vocational and administrative skills who are desperately in need of work, akin to the Americans who revamped the infrastructure of the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. If leveraged appropriately, this human capital could alter Haiti’s prospects for the good and lead its people out of the bottom billion.

Long before the powerful 7.0 magnitude earthquake (and several aftershocks) struck Haiti on January 12 and leveled the metropolitan capital city of Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas, that city was already a disaster waiting to happen.  With a population of more than 2 million in a city whose infrastructure could at best sustain a population of 100,000, the local and national public administrations simply abandoned the city to itself.  Neither provided meaningful services of any kind—schools, healthcare,  electricity, potable water, sanitation, zoning and construction regulations—and what they did provide was poorly administered, or primarily served the needs of the wealthier or better off sectors of the population who could afford to pay for them.  Consider, for example, that only about 28 percent of Haitians have access to health care, 50 percent have access to potable water, and 10 percent have electrical services.  In short, the Haitian state—i.e., the government—long ago abdicated its responsibilities to the majority of Haitian citizens, and at least since the Duvalier era, deferred to bilateral and multilateral aid donors, non-governmental agencies (NGOs) to provide services to the population.  More NGOs per capita operate in Haiti than in any other country in the world, and they provide 70 percent of healthcare in rural areas and 80 percent of public services.  This, in turn, has led to an extreme laissez aller and the near total privatization of all basic services.  Except for a brief seven month attempt in 1991 that ended in a bloody coup d’état against the democratically elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the turn to democratic governance has not changed that basic reality.  It is therefore no accident that while the earthquake caused death and destruction among all social classes, the high death toll—estimates run from as low as 10,000 to a high of 200,000 so far, which means no one really knows—is also a direct consequence of the poor infrastructure, inferior housing construction, and the long-standing disregard for the basic needs and rights of the population.

What’s more, geologists had warned the government of the probability of a seismic eruption for years, but as with previous massive destructions and loss of lives caused by hurricanes and tropical storms, the government took no measures to prepare for that possibility.  It comes as no surprise, then, that the Haitian people have to rely entirely on the international community to come to its rescue.  This would have been the case even if the symbols of government authority—the National Palace, the Parliament, the headquarters of the National Police, and other ministries—had not been destroyed for the simple reason that the capacity of the Haitian state to respond to a crisis of this magnitude—or even to less severe ones—is non existent due primarily to shortsighted practices and policies—political, economic, and social—that prioritized the interests of the few—the 4 percent of the population who hold 66 percent of total assets and the 1 percent who appropriate 55 percent of the national income—at the expense of the 75 percent of the population who live on less than $2/day and the more than half who live on less than $1/day.

There is no doubt that the dominant economic and political classes of Haiti bear great responsibility for the abysmal conditions in the country that exacerbated the impact of the earthquake (or of hurricanes or tropical storms).  However, these local actors did not create these conditions alone but did so in close partnership with foreign governments and economic actors with long-standing interests in Haiti, principally those of the advanced countries—the United States, Canada, and France—and their international financial institutions (IFIs)—the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank.  Since the 1970s and under various free market mantras, these international actors and institutions sought to and succeeded in transforming Haiti into a supplier of the cheapest labor in this hemisphere for foreign and domestic investors in the export assembly industry; in dismantling all obstacles to free trade; in privatizing public enterprises; and in weakening further the institutions of the state through policies that reinforced Haiti’s dependence on foreign aid organizations—governmental and non-governmental.

These policies had drastic consequences for the Haitian economy.  Locating the assembly industries primarily in Port-au-Prince encouraged migration from the rural areas to the capital city, contributed to its bloated population and sprawling squalor, and provided a never ending supply of cheap labor for those industries.  At the same time, removing tariffs on food imports were detrimental to Haitian agriculture.  Whereas in the 1970s Haiti produced most of the rice it consumed and imported only 10 percent of its food needs, by the end of the 1990s it was importing more than 42 percent of its food needs, had become the highest per capita consumer of subsidized US imported rice in the Western Hemisphere, and the largest importer of foodstuffs from the US in the Caribbean.  Thus, US farmers benefitted at the expense of Haitian producers. These policies, too, propelled rural-to-urban migration, with Port-au-Prince as the primary destination, as well as emigration to the neighboring Dominican Republic, the Caribbean, and North America.  Haiti is becoming increasingly dependent on remittances from its immigrants, which now represent 35 percent of Haiti’s GDP.

What, then, is to be done?  The response of the international community—from governments, the UN, and NGOs around the world—for medical treatment, food, water, temporary shelter, and road and communication repairs—has been immediate and massive, but will need to be sustained for a longer time span if it is to help Haiti recover economically in the short and medium term.  Pressure is also mounting on bilateral and multilateral aid donors to cancel Haiti’s debt of some $1.15 billion.

But to be effective and long lasting, future aid must be unconditional and be given more in the form of grants than loans.  To that end, the Haitian people need to rethink how the country relates to the international community, in particular the major powers and the IFIs.  Basically, I would argue, Haiti needs to break with the policies advocated by the major powers and IFIs that have proved disastrous for the Haitian economy.  These policies are predicated on the belief that Haiti can develop only if it remains open to the world market, relies on its comparative advantage of low-cost labor to attract foreign investments in the export assembly industry, and prioritizes the production of selected agricultural goods, such as mangoes, for export.   Despite the failure of these policies to generate sustainable development, reduce unemployment and improve the standard of living of the majority of Haitians, the major powers and IFIs continue to advocate them as the solution to Haiti’s chronic underdevelopment and poverty.  This is shown, for example, by the report written by former World Bank economist Paul Collier for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in 2008, and the latter’s appointment of former US President Bill Clinton to spearhead that strategy in Haiti.  Ignoring the evidence of the last 38 years, Collier’s report calls for establishing a cluster of free trade zones for garment production beyond the two that currently exist in Port-au-Prince and Ouanaminthe, and creating such zones for the production and export of mangoes.

It is time for the Haitian people to mobilize as they did in 1990 to change the status quo, but this time by learning from the mistakes of the past and avoiding placing their faith in false prophets.  As it did in 1990, an agenda for change would need to include the following:

1.  Reject all the different versions of the structural adjustment policies of the IFIs that require that Haiti remove tariffs on food and other imports, privatize public enterprises, exempt foreign investors from taxes on their profits in the assembly industries, and curb social spending.  Haiti could instead negotiate bilateral or multilateral agreements with those countries that are willing to provide aid without tying them to the implementation of specific economic or social policies.

2.  Launch an immediate large-scale and national public works project to rebuild or expand Haiti’s infrastructure, communication, transportation, public schools, public health facilities, and public housing.  Here, too, Haiti could rely on bilateral or multilateral agreements to sustain this effort beyond the immediate post-crisis reconstruction now underway with foreign assistance that will focus primarily on the quake-ravaged areas.

3.  Prioritize Haiti’s food security and sovereignty by launching an agrarian reform, and subsidizing production for the local market as well as for export.

4.  Promote the development of local and national agro-industries that use domestic inputs to produce consumer and durable goods; and support the national handicraft industry and promote its expansion on the international market.

5.  Protect workers’ rights, such as the right to form trade unions and the right to strike, and provide a living wage to all workers, especially in the export assembly industries.

It is obvious that these goals cannot be implemented all at once or immediately.  But they must serve as the basis for a large scale popular mobilization to hold the elected representatives of the people to account and to renegotiate Haiti’s relations with the international community.

The devastating earthquake that has destroyed Haiti’s capital has aggravated the already catastrophic economic and political conditions that have characterized the island’s recent history.  As a Haitian put it: “tout ayiti kraze”—the whole country is no more.  Beyond the utter terror, pain, and loss that is overtaking the population, and the horrifying cries for help from under piles of rubble, the country is in ruin.  While it is hard not to be overwhelmed by the hellish pictures of lifeless bodies—young and old—Haitians and all people of good will must immediately contribute to the country’s rebuilding lest famine, disease, and chaos set in.  In spite of their strong sense of nationalism, Haitians will have to accept the reality that at this time, it is only the international community, and the United States in particular, that has the means to rescue the country from catastrophe.  The government is an empty shell, the United Nations virtually decapitated, and local non-governmental organizations basically impotent.

This immense tragedy portends the danger of a Hobbesian war of all against all, but it may paradoxically be an opportunity to create a new and more democratic society in which all Haitians treat each other as equal citizens.  In fact, the earthquake has become the cruelest equalizer; while it is clear that the small, well-off minority will extricate itself more easily from this crisis than the poor majority, death and devastation are affecting all irrespective of class or color.  In the midst of this cataclysm, Haitians may well acquire a new sense of solidarity and citizenship to supplant the zero-sum game politics that have characterized the country’s history.  Facing disaster, Haitians may finally understand that a better future requires the demise of the old ways of governing and producing.  A more inclusive social pact between the privileged few and the poor majority may well rise from the ghastly dust of the earthquake.  While the travail of past history does not bode well for such an outcome, the earthquake is compelling Haiti to enter unchartered territory.  Hope may not be completely dead.

If Haiti is to recover and extricate itself from its past predicament, it will need the massive help of the international community.  But once the rescue and relief operations are done and once the immediate shock has subsided, the international community will have to change its traditional methods of assistance.  It will have to concentrate its resources on helping Haitians build a coherent and functioning state.  Such a strategy entails both facilitating the development of an effective public bureaucracy and channelling most foreign assistance through governmental institutions.  In fact, Haitians should call on the foreign community to use this moment of reconstruction to expand state capacity and create a competent public service.  For instance, the future rebuilding of the capital city, whether in its current site or elsewhere, should be an opportunity to create governmental cadres of urban planners and engineers.  The objective is therefore the building of state capacity instead of continuing to favor the development of what is known in Haiti as “La République des ONGs,” the NGO Republic.

More than 10,000 NGOs have been doing “development work” for the past three or four decades.  They have been the privileged partner of international financial institutions channeling assistance to the country.  While they may be well meaning, they are not the engine that will generate self-sustained growth in Haiti.  Uncoordinated among themselves and having no national coherence, they are a palliative agent in the struggle against poverty.  The earthquake has demonstrated their obdurate limitations.  Thus, instead of pumping its resources into NGOs, the international community must shift its priorities and concentrate on helping Haitians build durable state institutions.  While the earthquake had cataclysmic consequences for the Port-au-Prince area and the southern town of Jacmel, it left the rest of the country relatively unscathed but strikingly incapable of offering any relief to the capital.  The utter lack of a national emergency system even after the devastating hurricanes of two years ago symbolizes the absence of a responsible state.  In fact, government officials have tended to abdicate their responsibilities to NGOs and the UN; not surprisingly, Interior Minister Paul Antoine Bien-Aime confessed that it was the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) that had “traditionally coordinated relief efforts.”

The emasculation of the state is no accident, however; it is partly the consequence of the neo-liberal regime implanted in the country by the major international financial institutions (IFIs).  By advocating the withdrawal of the state from its social and regulating obligations, and by promoting the supremacy of the market, this regime has contributed to an economic, political, and social disaster.  The emasculated state has left the population unprotected from the harsh realities of poverty, unemployment and the vagaries of nature.  Moreover, the IFIs’ economic plans stressing the development of export-oriented urban enclaves dependent on ultra cheap labor, have contributed to the utter neglect of agricultural production as well as the inevitable population exodus to the cities.  Port-au-Prince, built for 250,000 people, has now about 3 million inhabitants most living in poverty and squalor.  The earthquake’s massive destruction has brought to light the dangers of such a development strategy.  In the medium and long term the international community should promote an alternative model based on the protection and reinvigoration of domestic production that satisfies basic needs, a model that privileges the development of the rural areas.  The earthquake has paradoxically accelerated this process by generating a reverse exodus; masses of Port-au-Princians are now marching back to their villages to escape from the disaster.  This spontaneous evacuation is an opportunity to create the necessary incentives and infrastructure for permanent and viable settlements of productive peasants.  Such a strategy would stop obscene class and regional inequalities from growing further and provide a sense of national cohesion.

It is difficult, however, to contemplate an increase in domestic food production without a major policy-shift from the neo-liberal regime imposed on Haiti by the major international financial institutions. The country cannot afford to continue its disastrous economic liberalization lest its domestic economic base disintegrate completely.  Indeed, the collapse of domestic food production—particularly rice—can be traced back to the policies of trade liberalization introduced in the mid-1980s and 1990s under the guidance of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.  These policies have resulted in the massive reliance on imported food and the total neglect of the rural agricultural sector.  In fact, in 2006/07 the entire budget of the Ministry of Agriculture was a measly US $1.5 million, a figure that contrasts sharply with the US $69 million spent on the UN World Food Program (WFP).  Instead of reconstructing its rural sector and promoting domestic food production, Haiti has remained a country of malnourished and hungry people alarmingly dependent on external assistance and charity.

If Haiti is to avoid an unending dependence on the international community for its very survival, it must place the state at the center of any strategy of reconstruction.  The state plays a fundamental role in organizing social life and is the cornerstone of public as well as private production.  What Haiti requires is not nation-building, but state-building.  This is especially the case if the country is to build the infrastructure and enhance the life chances of those whose very existence has been threatened by the earthquake and other recent natural disasters.  While NGOs and other forms of private assistance might offer some immediate and needed relief to those without shelter and food, only the state can provide collective protection and create the conditions for self-sustaining growth.  The creation of a new and responsible state does not imply massive centralization nor the crushing of spontaneous forms of citizens’ organizations, but rather harnessing this spontaneity and giving it the coherence and means to succeed.  In fact, the state must nurture and institutionalize the peaceful resilience and dignified strength that the overwhelming majority of the population has shown throughout this catastrophe.  This behaviour in the face of utter adversity is a hopeful sign that Haitians can learn to live in solidarity and that the extreme divide across class, color, and gender can be bridged.  This task, however, requires a responsible state with the capacity to generate more equitable life-chances, more civil relationships among citizens, and more stable politics.  If a viable, accountable state were to emerge, the earthquake’s senseless destruction may in fact become the cruel birth pangs of a new and resilient Haiti.

The earthquake that hit Haiti on 12 January 2010, while unprecedented in scale, underscores what the 2008 hurricanes revealed about the state’s incapacity to protect its people. An earthquake of 7.0 on the Richter scale would cause damage in California or Japan, so a much poorer country like Haiti was bound to suffer dearly. Yet the utter devastation of huge swathes of the capital could have been mitigated, even in Haiti.

First, barely one year before the earthquake, a geologist at the University of Havana noted that a large earthquake on the fault line running near Port-au-Prince was highly likely. He urged the government and population of Haiti to take precautionary measures to prepare for a large quake. Second, right after the La Promesse school collapse in November 2008, the mayor of Port-au-Prince stated that over half of Haiti’s buildings “were shoddily built and unsafe.” Once again it was noted that Haiti has no national building code; no inspectors visit construction sites or punish contractors for diluting cement or other shortcuts to increase profits at the expense of safety.

Yet on my most recent trip to Port-au-Prince last December I noted that on the hillside across the valley from the Hotel Montana, now in ruins, the steady march of squat, gray cement houses across and up the mountain had continued since my previous visit in 2007. These buildings, perched on a steep slope with no electricity, roads, sewers or any type of city service, defy any rational land use or urban planning. Yet no one was stopping them.

So the deadly mix of lax enforcement, no planning and scant prevention that led to thousands dying in the 2008 hurricanes and 98 kids being crushed to death in one school in 2008, has meant that tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of people, have been killed. While it would be grossly unfair to blame the Haitian state for all of these deaths, surely with some preparation, some heeding of the warning last year that a quake was imminent and preventing on-going construction in precarious zones, some, even many lives, could have been saved. This was a disaster waiting to happen.

What to do? Once the emergency phase is over, Haitians, with strong support from the international donor community, must finally strive to build a state worthy of its people. Politicians will have to end their selfish “winner-take-all” approach. Citizens will have to demand that their public servants actually serve the public interest and deliver the necessities that are their right like clean water, food, adequate shelter, education.

Donors must work with the state and not rely so heavily on non-governmental organizations. This is real “nation-building” and we cannot shy away from the task. Haiti has been called a “Republic of NGOs” with more NGOs per capita than any country on earth. Some are excellent, many not so wonderful; some perform functions that should primarily be the state’s responsibility. This cannot continue.

Finally, as the devastated capital smolders, attention to rural Haiti must become a top priority. Haiti remains essentially an agricultural country with potential to produce much of the food it needs plus tropical fruit and coffee for export. Port-au-Prince became bloated since the Duvalier era, holding 10 times as many people as it was designed to accommodate. The countryside held no possibilities, denuded hillsides where tropical rains washed away topsoil, made farming even more difficult. So people flocked into shantytowns that filled those hillsides and port-side slums with those fragile structures. Tragically, many of their inhabitants are now dead and more will surely die in the coming days. The past must not be repeated, however, so the Government and donors must focus on rural development that would give people choices and a future outside the capital.

A government accountable to its citizens, public officials ready, willing and able to serve the public, politicians working for the public good and open to compromise, and a better balance between the capital and the rest of the country—all would constitute a revolution in Haiti. The Haiti that emerged from the first revolution in 1804 was badly warped over the ensuing 200 years. The best way to honor those who have died in this latest disaster would be a new revolution creating a new Haiti worthy of their sacrifice.