As Deoliver47, Robert Naimann and other Daily Kos diarists have pointed out, Haiti's problems did not begin with the January 12 earthquake. Impaled by French demands to pay slave-owners for lands that were taken in the revolution, Haiti got off to a bad start. Subsequent U.S. intervention on the island followed a pattern, or perhaps it could be said, set the pattern for interventions throughout the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
After all these years of exploitation, in addition to providing immediate humanitarian aid to earthquake victims, the U.S., together with other nations, could reverse course and promote a national civic service corps that might help give Haiti what it had for one brief moment in its distant past: a healthy future. The country theoretically commits all citizens to national service under Article 52 of its constitution. But this has never never been implemented. Not only could a Haitian civic service corps empower vast numbers of people in a population that is skewed young, it could also build new pride, provide hope and something tangible to go along with it. Such a corps might be one crucial piece for boosting Haiti from its spot as the Western Hemisphere's poorest and most environmentally devastated country into a model of self-directed, sustainable development.
Funding such a program would be far less expensive than past programs that have failed as a consequence of local corruption and colonial or neo-colonial hubris and greed.
The idea, as outlined by Robert Muggah and Robert Maguire in an Op-Ed in Sunday's Los Angeles Times, is to mobilize these under-30s into a 700-000-strong corps that would not merely restore Haiti to its pre-earthquake status, but help recreate it:
A civic service corps would get the young and able out of the tent cities in and around Port-au-Prince and into work. They could start with the once-iconic center of the capital, but also could begin planting trees, working the fields and providing services in Haiti's countryside. At a minimum, this would reverse generations of unfair stigmatizing of the youth there.
This plan would also harness untapped labor rapidly. Before the Jan. 12 earthquake, 50% of youth in their 20s were out of work. Putting them in service toward rebuilding the capital and outlying areas would be a first step to restoring their and their country's pride and dignity.
A civic service corps would also multiply international efforts to promote recovery after the world moves on to the next crisis. Hundreds of humanitarian agencies, donor governments and nongovernmental organizations are facing monumental challenges in coordinating relief assistance. Although everyone involved is committed to rapid disbursement, transaction costs are monumental. A civic service corps would allow for a more rapid form of transferring capital.
Direct support to such a corps would inject serious liquidity into the Haitian economy and stimulate recovery from the bottom up. Rather than food-for-work schemes, international best practice recommends proposals that promote direct monetary transfers to beneficiaries. Haitian youth and their families have urgent needs and don't need paternalistic programs that curb their choices. With proper oversight and financial safeguards, a civic service corps would circumvent unnecessary administrative costs.
One of Haiti's key problems is the deforestation and the accompanying loss of topsoil that began more two centuries ago. It ramped up in the 1920s, worsened even more in the 1950s and continues today thanks to the vast impoverishment of the islanders caused by foreign intervention and Haiti's class structure. Attempts at reforestation have failed, with many more trees being cut than planted, because Haitians have no readily available substitute for the wood and the charcoal cooking fuel they make from much of it. A corrective was enacted in 1999, the 15-year Environment Action Plan. The problem: no money. The results: not good.
Seventy-five years ago, one of the initiatives of the Roosevelt administration was the Civilian Conservation Corps, which, over its 10-year life, planted an estimated 3 billion trees. The legacy of that effort - which was not the CCC's only project - can be still be seen throughout the United States. The men who planted those trees got jobs when those were hard to come by and rescued their families from circumstances of despair.
Though it would be no small matter, planting hundreds of millions of trees isn't, of course, the only thing Haiti needs to move forward. And the country especially doesn't need more top-down meddling from people who don't understand the culture, the history, the people or their needs. So any civic service corps in Haiti must be Haitian through and through. As The Nation points out in an article not yet online:
This principle of self-determination ought to drive the economic aid Haiti receives as well, not just now but through its long recovery. Here it's important to recall that for much of Haiti's existence, foreign powers like the United States, France and Britain have used debt not just to control but to plunder it. In the nineteenth century the French forced Haiti into paying reparations of some 150 million francs to French slave owners [later reduced to 60 million francs]. It took Haitians 122 years, but in 1947 they were finally able to pay off what remained of this debt. Yet this came at the enormous cost of its development: at one point the Haitian government was spending 80 percent of its national budget on repayments. In the 1990s the Clinton administration and international lenders ... pressured Haiti into structural adjustment policies that opened the country up to imports and to the privatization of state-run industries and public infrastructure like the telephone, education and healthcare systems. This dire state of affairs that preceded the earthquake - poverty, deforestation, food shortages, broken schools and malnutrition - is this history's legacy. It's a kind of hell, perhaps, but a man-made one.
Last year, much of Haiti's debt was forgiven, but some $1 billion remains. The biggest loan holders - the World Bank, the IMF, the Inter-American Development Bank, Venezuela and Taiwan - should forgive Haiti's outstanding debt, and any new aid should be dispersed as grants, not loans.
The CCC obviously would not be a perfect fit for Haiti, even if it weren't a 75-year-old idea from the United States, which has long considered the Caribbean its private lake. But whatever the exact model Haiti might adopt, outsiders who don't take the know-it-all approach could serve the civic service corps best with grants, provision of appropriate technology - such as solar cookers - and, most of all, technical expertise.
As Muggah and Maguire suggest, any final plan on how to set up the corps could benefit from experiences of those who have already worked with Haitian youth, such as the Brazilian nongovernmental organization Viva Rio. "Before the earthquake," the two men wrote, "Viva Rio and Brazilian peacekeepers had recruited and trained hundreds of Haitian youth, including former gang members, to provide relief services in Haiti's slums. This program could be reactivated and scaled up quickly."
Scaled-up quickly is a lesson to be learned from the CCC. So often, such programs take forever to get going. The CCC's first operations were up and running less than three months from the time the legislation was signed.
Over the next few months, as the earthquake fades from public view outside of Haiti, there will be calls for mini-Marshall Plans and other programs that probably will never get rolling. A Haitian new deal, one that puts Haitians to work in appropriately scaled projects, would need adequate but not lavish international funding. It would benefit from a teaching of skills by NGOs and other private organizations, without the heavy hand of the IMF imposing austerity in an already beyond-austere land. Combine a vibrant, grant-funded civic service corps with debt relief and Haiti could emerge renewed and with a spirit of hope it hasn't seen since the remnants of Napoleon's troops fled back to France more than 200 years ago.