More From Haiti

Over the last two days there has not been much new to report from Haiti. The relief effort is continuing to expand with the UN now claiming to be able to provide 1 million people a day with emergency food and water. The death toll reached a grim milestone with the government putting the number of people killed at 150,000 in Port-au-Prince alone.

The big development though is that the government have announced that the rescue phase of the operation is over. This has led many people to think that relief workers will no longer be searching for and trying to rescue people who are still trapped, alive under the rubble. This is not the case. In situations like this the first priority of the people co-ordinating the relief effort is search and rescue meaning that this task takes up the majority of their time. When they announced that the rescue phase was over the Haitian government were simply announcing, to their own staff mainly, that search and rescue would now be given a lower priority then say delivering food and finding shelter for the homeless. They will continue to search through the rubble even if it is only to recover the dead bodies and they will continue to rescue people as they find them. If I am being brutally honest though 13 days after the earthquake the chances of finding anybody alive are very small.

Also many of the teams carrying out the search and rescue operations come from a wide array of countries many of who don't actually like each other and wouldn't normally work alongside each other. This creates diplomatic tensions which can slow down the relief effort. Therefore now the worst is over it would probably be better for Haiti and its independence if many of these foreign teams left allowing what remains of the task to be completed under a single coordinator like the Haitian government or for a short time the US Military.

Away from Haiti itself the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is making some very positive noises about cancelling the debt it is owed by Haiti. A cynic might suggest that this is because most Haiti's debt is owed to individual national governments rather then the IMF. I will be watching the IMF meeting that is scheduled for January 28th closely though to see if they can produce action to back up their words.