Good News From Haiti

Since my last post the relief effort in Haiti has increased and expanded. The UN is now able to deliver food and water to 100,000 people a day. This is mainly centred around the capital, Port-au-Prince although the USAF are carrying out airdrops to a large, secure distribution point at Mirebalais which is further inland. There are now also 18 hospitals and emergency medical centres operating in Port-au-Prince. The best way for Haitians to find out exactly where these aid and medical centres are and what assistance they are offering is to listen to the emergency broadcasts on Haitian radio which are far more reliable then this blog.

The US Navy medical ship, Comfort has arrived off the coast of Haiti. It brings the total US Navy medical capacity to 1000 fully equipped hospital beds along with over 1000 medical professionals who can treat casualties at sea and come ashore to treat patients in the local hospitals. The Canadian military have opened a second airport near Jacmel. It's a tiny airport with even less capacity then the Port-au-Prince but as airport that has been built in just four days it is nothing short of miraculous and it will certainly help to clear the back log of some 14,000 aid flights that are waiting to land in Haiti.

The big news though is that the sea-port has re-opened, just. Engineers there have managed to get 1 pier open allowing the port to operate at just over 10% of it's usual capacity. That means that it is unlikely to be able to bring ashore much aid from large container ships in the foreseeable future. Crucially though it will be able to start bring fuel ashore allowing the aid agencies to get their trucks moving and start distributing aid.

In Port-au-Prince something resembling normal life has started to return. Some shops, banks and food markets have begun to re-open. This is great news because the relief effort wants to avoid the Haitian people becoming too dependent on foreign aid. This is not because they don't want to give aid but because in past disaster relief efforts dependency has done more harm then good in the long term. So the fact that the Haitian economy is starting recover before the international aid effort has got fully up and running means that Haiti has already gone a long way to avoiding the problems of the past. It has though brought with it something that could potentially become a very big problem. Some local business owners have started to profiteer from the shortages of food and water. This pushed the local inflation rate up to 300% and some business owners are paying Haitian police officers to desert the force and protect their businesses instead. As the rogue officers are starting to randomly shoot people this needs to be stopped and if the Haitian police can't maintain discipline the government seriously needs to start thinking about pulling the officers off the streets. Also I think the business owners need to start contacting their insurance companies because I'm pretty sure pissing off the US Marine Corp invalidates their policies. Although this is only a small problem at the moment it could could go on to undermine the security situation and more violence will only slow down the relief effort even further.

Taken together these developments are really good news. Although it does not look like it and most certainly doesn't feel like it it means that the emergency phase of the relief effort is complete. Apart from the sea-port that could be more open everything that is needed to deliver emergency aid is in place and over the coming days and weeks that aid will slowly be delivered throughout the country just as quickly as supplies can be brought into the country. No-one can promise that life in Haiti will soon be better then it was before the earthquake struck. They can't even promise that it will be the same as it was before the earthquake struck but they can most certainly promise that life will be better then it has been over the last 11 days.

Now that the emergency relief effort is up, running and expanding the people planning the operation including the Haitian President, who believe or not is working very hard to get Haiti back on its feet, can concentrate on medium and long term objectives. In the medium term they are paying for people to leave the capital and are planning to move 400,000 of the people who have been made homeless in Port-au-Prince into properly organised temporary, tented camps. Apart from providing shelter this will reduce the risk of illness amongst the survivors and help speed up the distribution of food and water. If it begins with the people in the Cite Solei area it will also help mitigate the problems created by the criminals that escaped from jail as these organised camps will be easier to secure. In the longer term the government intend to make these camps more sturdy in order to survive the upcoming rainy and hurricane seasons. As with everything else I advise the Haitian people to listen to the emergency broadcasts to find out the details of when and how the government will start moving people.

There is also a meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) taking place on Monday to explore what can be done to help alleviate Haiti's debt problems. The World Bank no less are recommending a 100% cancellation of Haiti's national debt but I will be watching to see what will actually be achieved at this meeting.