Editorial from today's New York Times by Nicholas Kristof

[GS...@aol.com]

A-men!

Who will invest in Haiti and help their economy?  This is why we need to be giving money to the Episcopal Relief and Development fund which finances microloans to women in particular.

 

Galen

 

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Haiti, Nearly Year Later

 

MIREBALAIS, Haiti
An emergency cholera hospital is the grimmest kind of medical center, and it’s a symbol of the succession of horrors that have battered Haiti over the past year.
Here in Haiti’s central plateau, I visited a cholera treatment center run by an excellent aid group, Partners in Health, in collaboration with the Ministry of Health. Nobody goes in or out without being thoroughly disinfected; to try to control the epidemic, bodies are buried rather than released to families.
Already, more than 1,700 people have died of cholera in less than a month, and the Pan American Health Organization estimates that 400,000 Haitians may get cholera over the next year.
The earthquake in January caused some 250,000 deaths. The death toll was a result not only of seismic activity but also of poverty: shoddy construction and slow rescue efforts meant many more deaths than if the same quake had occurred in, say, California. Then came cholera, which is a disease of poverty — abysmal sanitation and lack of potable water can create an epidemic.
After the earthquake, Bill O’Reilly suggested that humanitarians were romanticizing aid as a solution for Haiti: “One year from today, Haiti will be just as bad as it is right now.” I criticized him at the time, but he wasn’t far off. Haiti has certainly improved since the immediate aftermath of the quake, and aid kept alive many who would otherwise have died. But reconstruction has barely started. Most of the rubble is still waiting to be cleared off, and more than one million people are still living in tents.
Part of the problem is that the government, crippled by the quake, has done little. Another is that aid groups created a parallel state that further diminishes the government — and a country needs a central authority to make decisions.
Ultimately what Haiti most needs isn’t so much aid, but trade. Aid accounts for half of Haiti’s economy, and remittances for another quarter — and that’s a path to nowhere.
The United States has approved trade preferences that have already created 6,000 jobs in the garment sector in Haiti, and several big South Korean companies are now planning to open their own factories, creating perhaps another 130,000 jobs.
“Sweatshops,” Americans may be thinking. “Jobs,” Haitians are thinking, and nothing would be more transformative for the country.
Let’s send in doctors to save people from cholera. Let’s send in aid workers to build sustainable sanitation and water systems to help people help themselves. Let’s help educate Haitian children and improve the port so that it can become an exporter. But, above all, let’s send in business investors to create jobs.
Otherwise, there will always be more needs, more crises, more tragedies, more victims.