KB: You mentioned Clinton, now UN special envoy to Haiti, who intends to woo foreign investors and continue on a low-wage textile focus for Haitian economic development. The lens of neoliberal economist Paul Collier, special adviser to the UN in 2009, dominates the UN perspective of Haiti. An advocate of sweatshop-led growth himself, he’s lavished praise on the much-resented MINUSTAH occupation force there, and has even said that the Dominican Republic "is not engaged in the sort of activities, such as clandestine support for guerrilla groups, that beset many other fragile states.” Can a true humanitarian like Paul Farmer—representing a different development model based on fair wages, public health, strengthening the Haitian state—influence the UN as deputy special envoy?NC: It's a hard choice. I don't blame him for trying. We live in this world, not another one that we'd prefer, and sometimes it's necessary to follow painful paths if we hope to provide at least a little help for suffering people. Like Father Jean-Juste and the marines.
Further information can be found on a piece by David L. Wilson, who makes a compelling point regarding the very viability of such a plan:
The garment export industry in the Caribbean Basin has been in a sharp decline for the past five years. The current round of jobs losses in the region's apparel maquiladoras -- the Spanish name for the assembly plants -- started with the growth of competition from industrial powers like China and has intensified with the economic crisis in the United States, the main market for the industry's products.
The Dominican Republic, Haiti's closest neighbor, lost 73,000 garment jobs from 2005 through 2007, according to an informative article by Marion Weber and Jennifer Blair in the July/August 2009 NACLA Report on the Americas. The six countries that signed on to the 2005 Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) -- in addition to the Dominican Republic, the U.S.-sponsored trade zone includes Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua -- saw their combined exports fall from a 13.3% share of the U.S. import market in 2004 to 9.8% in 2008.7
The job situation continues to deteriorate. Garment jobs in the Dominican "free trade zones" (FTZs) -- the special areas where the maquilas are clustered -- fell another 15.05% in 2008, from 58,546 to 49,735.8 In Honduras, site of Latin America's most recent coup d'état, textile and apparel production for the first six months of 2009 was down by 17.9% compared to the same period the year before. The Honduran maquiladora sector lost 15,000 jobs in 2008 and about 8,000 in the first eight months of 2009, leaving it with some 114,000 employees.
After all, the common thread in current, post-earthquake decisions is that which is missing from all the leading development plans, concocted in Montreal, or in Davos, or at a G7 meeting, and now recently in New York. What's missing is the input of the Haitian people.
As acclaimed aid organization Oxfam bluntly states, "this month, international leaders will make sweeping decisions about Haiti's reconstruction at a meeting in New York – and Haitian community leaders haven't been invited."
If we don't act now, the inequality and poverty that plagued this country for so long could be built into the very fabric of Haiti's reconstruction process.
The banks and governments planning Haiti's recovery need to listen...
...to the local leaders who know what camp residents need as the rainy season approaches,
...to the poor farmers who need help overcoming already-low crop yields,
...to community groups fighting for thousands of people about to be resettled to new areas.
Chomsky agrees:
[T]he aid ought to be going to Haitian popular organizations. Not to contractors, not to NGOs—to Haitian popular organizations, and they’re the ones that should be deciding what to do with it. Well you know, that’s not the agenda of G7.
Wilson again:
Anti-sweatshop activists Barbara Briggs and Charlie Kernaghan used to warn back in the 1990s that this type of "economic development" would create a "race to the bottom" in which workers in different countries would have to compete by accepting lower and lower wages. And that's exactly what happened.
Haitians have learned not to listen to people like Prof. Collier and Special Envoy Clinton. In August 2009 thousands of Haitian sweatshop workers went on strike to demand a higher minimum wage. They ignored arguments that they needed to keep their wages competitive -- it took tear gas and UN troops to get them back into the factories.13 Grassroots organizations meeting in Port-au-Prince since the earthquake have been working on proposals for rebuilding Haiti through a sustainable development plan rooted in Haitian reality.
Links:
1. the Oxfam petition demanding participation of Haitian civil society in development of the country
2. "Haiti--The Politics of Rebuilding", a video feature by Avi Lewis [transcript here]
Note: Both Avi Lewis and David L. Wilson's pieces suffer from the unfortunate reliance on Camille Chalmers, who's reasonable in his micro-economic commentary and stance against neoliberal practices. However, his role in legitimizing the anti-Lavalas forces and hence the 2004 coup d'etat which overthrew the democratically-elected Aristide is something that one suspects is not questioned by well-meaning but uninformed foreign reporters.
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