Saturday, February 27, 2010

Helping Haiti

Anthropologist Timothy Schwartz documents the disastrous impact of the NGOs in his book Travesty in Haiti. In particular, he shows how CARE International -- which claimed its mission in Haiti was to provide food aid to the "poorest of the poor" -- not only failed in its mission, but also actually exacerbated the food crisis.

[…]

While some NGOs like Partners in Health have done and are doing amazing work to provide services for quake victims, overall, the catastrophe in Haiti revealed the worst aspects of the U.S. government and the NGO aid industry.

As many analysts have noted, the U.S. in fact used its "relief" operation to disguise a military occupation of Haiti, intended to prevent a flood of refugees reaching the U.S., impose even greater sweatshop development on Haiti, and signal to the rest of Latin America, the Caribbean and the world's most powerful governments that U.S. aims to reassert its power in the region.

[…]

[NGOs] play a role very similar to the one that missionary religious institutions played in the earlier history of empire. They provide moral cover -- a civilizing mission of helping the hapless heathens -- for the powers that are plundering the society.

[…]

Nowhere is this pattern more clear than in Haiti. The U.S. convinced the dictator Baby Doc Duvalier in the 1980s to implement a neoliberal development plan which Haitians call "the plan of death," which dropped tariffs on American agriculture, encouraged sweatshop development in Port-au-Prince and opened tourist resorts for the international elite.

   Counterpunch

Indeed, that is the pattern for all ‘third world’ countries we – and the IMF - ‘help’. Add to that the backbreaking interest on the loans that these countries are forced to pay for their 'aid'.

Peasants were no longer able to find a market for their produce, and were therefore thrust into poverty, often unable to meet their own food needs because of their collapsed standard of living. They then became dependent on food aid.

USAID, in turn, funded CARE International to feed the impoverished peasants. The NGO began to distribute U.S. crops as food aid, during both bad and good harvests, further undermining Haitian peasants ability to compete for the market.

[…]

Predictably, the plan produced a social catastrophe; it increased absolute poverty by 60 percent. But the Haitian poor, workers and peasants rose up to build a mass movement, Lavalas, that eventually elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide president in 1990 on a platform of anti-neoliberal reform.

The U.S. saw Aristide's mild reformism as a threat, backed a coup in 1991 and used the coup regime's reign of terror to crush the Lavalas social movement. It also convinced Aristide to implement the "plan of death" as the condition of his restoration in 1994.

[…]

The U.S. used yet another coup against Aristide in 2004 and another coup regime to force through the rest of the plan. Now, Haiti has the most neoliberal economy in Latin American and the Caribbean.

And let us not forget that Barack Obama -- the progressive, Peace Prize-winning humanitarian in the White House -- appointed the man whose administration orchestrated that 2004 coup (and whose father orchestrated the 1991 coup) as the public face of America's "humanitarian mission" to Haiti ... along with the man who, in 1994, re-imposed the "Plan of Death" on the Haitian people. Yes, it's hard to beat your progressive humanitarians when it comes to brutal, blatant cynicism.

   Chris Floyd



....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

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