Inequity case study: Haiti

I read something in The New York Times about a week ago that very succinctly explained what I couldn't in my last Haiti post or my mini-lecture at the GSS meeting last week. Aggravatingly I now can't find it online; it was called "Some Straight Talk About Haiti" or something to that effect and ran last Thursday on the editorial page. It did a pretty good job of providing historical reasons for Haiti's poverty (apparently, it wasn't because of a deal with the devil). As we have established, Haiti is one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world. The nation ranks 149 (of 182) on the Human Development Index, 80% live below the poverty line, 50% are illiterate, and there's a major brain drain: 80% of college graduates emigrate. The Haitian gourde exchange rate with the United States dollar is less than 40 to 1. Child slavery is a punishing reality-- shocking for a North American country-- and the top 1% own 50% of the wealth. And like any similarly poor nation, it is incredibly corrupt. OK, got it-- Haiti is an "economic basket case" and has been since long before January 12. What happened??

According to the phantom NYT piece, a lot of it has to do with the French. Haiti was a French colony from 1697 until 1804, when a slave uprising defeated the French army and claimed sovereignty. (Yes: an uprising consisting of a bunch of malnourished, disease-ridden slaves managed to drive out Napoleon's forces. Insert your own French military jokes here.) In 1825, France decided it wanted some compensation for recognizing Haitian independence and thus giving up a slave colony. Upon threat of war, France demanded 150 million francs ($21 billion USD, ca. 2006) in what I will call "reverse reparations." Haiti negotiated them down to 90M and then 60M, which when you think about it is pretty slick, but was still way more than they could afford. The new Haitian government took out loans from the U.S., Germany, and France itself, and finally managed to pay off the 1825 demand and enormous interest in 1947. Unfortunately during that time it wound up mired in a lot more debt of various types, and thanks to a series of dictatorships it had not developed at all since the French were forced out. Debt remains its central problem, or it did until the earthquake hit and shifted everyone's attention to the humanitarian crisis.

U.S. groups have been calling for the cancellation of Haiti's debt for years, and the World Bank relieved it of $1.2B worth in September '09. This left $800M, which many are calling for the alleviation of in light of the earthquake. My guess is that it will happen.

Haiti is a case study is how countries get to be poor, and I think it's safe to extrapolate its story to at least several other very poor nations. Colonialism is a major part of why countries are poor today, and I expect it to be a recurring theme in both the books I report on and the individual countries I study. And yes, there will be more, though given its topicality, my main focus will be Haiti, at least for the time being. I will next look into what kept it from organizing after gaining independence and establishing a functional government that actually had a plan for development. After all, the U.S. was a bunch of colonies once too.