EU-Digest / Weekly Standard: Haiti - Crushing poverty and despair - by Nicholas Eberstadt

Poverty stricken Haitian cooking food for family

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Haiti: Crushing poverty and despair - by Nicholas Eberstadt

Haiti--the beautiful, perpetually tormented tropical purgatory that occupies the western third of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola--cannot help but focus the comfortable and well-fed foreign visitor's attention on two profound issues of the modern era: the reasons for the persistence of so much misery in an ever more affluent world, and the practical measures that might permit our world's poorest countries to escape from the heart-rending deprivation that they continue to suffer. With an area comparable to the state of Maryland and a population (at about eight and a half million) roughly the size of New York City's, Haiti is closer to Florida--just an hour and a half from Miami by jet--than is Washington, D.C. But in a very real sense, the distance between the United States and Haiti is almost unimaginable. By the yardstick of income, Haiti is by far the poorest spot in the Western Hemisphere, and in fact one of the very poorest places on the planet. State Department and CIA guesses put the country's per capita income at about $550 a year, or about a dollar and a half per day--but these formal, exchange-rate based estimates are highly misleading, if not meaningless. (Could anyone in the United States today survive for a year consuming no more than $1.50 worth of goods and services a day?) A better sense of Haiti's plight comes from comparisons of purchasing power. Perhaps the most authoritative global estimates of this sort have been done by Angus Maddison,the eminent economic historian. At the start of this decade, according to Maddison, Haiti's per capita output was thirty-five times lower than that of the United States. To get a sense of what this means: Think how things would go for your family if you had to get by for the entire year on just ten days of your current earnings. Many Haitians have to eat dirt "cookies," a mixture of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening, just to survive

Note EU-Digest: Adding to the misery in the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation are hurricanes -- Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike this year left 790 people dead and hundreds more injured, and now facing life-threatening food shortages. Haiti’s development has also been fettered by an ongoing cycle of corrupt regimes, debilitating natural disasters, lack of institutional planning and organization and the non-regulation of the use and distribution of natural resources. It is amazing to realize that a country which is so close to the US homeland and a part of the US controlled Organization of American States is being allowed to slip so deep into despair and poverty while it could be a showcase of US ingenuity and support.