Some years ago I met a 31-year-old Bulgarian policeman whose main claim to fame was that he had been the Chief of Police for the Republic of Haiti for 20 minutes, or in other words until someone more senior arrived from Port-au-Prince airport. This was in 2010, shortly after Haiti had been prostrated by a magnitude 7 earthquake.
Nobody knows how many casualties there were in that disaster: perhaps 240,000 dead and 300,000 injured. As bodies piled up on street corners and in courtyards there was no time to count them all. Some 1.6 million people were displaced from their homes, but the earthquake destroyed more than people and their homes: it dealt a near fatal blow to government.
The 2010 earthquake occurred after yet another period of instability, which the United Nations Peacekeeping mission (MINUSTAH) had striven to bring to an end. Stabilisation was due to give way to peacekeeping and development when the earthquake struck the country and abruptly reversed the gains achieved.[i]
The international aid caravan
As 130 countries brought in personnel, materials and supplies, it was a useful moment to take stock of whether the international disaster relief community was applying the lessons it was supposed to have learned in decades of dealing with disasters. In 2010, much good work was done in Haiti by dedicated, selfless emergency responders, particularly in medical assistance and search and rescue. Nevertheless, there were some spectacular failures.
In six months only two thirds of the money requested in the UN's flash appeal had been pledged, and some of that was never paid. Rumours eventually circulated that 80% of the monetary aid supplied to Haiti found its way back to the donor countries. This is impossible to substantiate, but goods manufactured in a donor country, brought to Haiti by transport from that country and distributed by personnel from the same country would do little to stimulate the Haitian economy. In his book about the earthquake, the eminent Harvard medical doctor Paul Farmer[ii] noted that only 3.8% of monetary relief went to the Haitian Government, and yet that is exactly where responsibility for public services and safety lay.
This was particularly true for donor-supplied shelter.[iii] A field in Port-au-Prince became the exhibition site for examples of this, some of them priced at over $50,000 per unit. Shelter may be 'innovative' or 'inspiring' to an architect from a highly developed country, but it could equally be detestable and impractical to the potential user. In 1978 the architect Ian Davis published a small book entitled Shelter After Disaster,[iv] which included a number of well-chosen exposés of post-disaster housing as architectural fantasy rather than useful dwelling place. Professor Davis has continued his work on this theme ever since[v] and eventually won the most prestigious UN award in his field, but is the aid community really listening?
A massive earthquake affects Haiti roughly once every 60 years. Four such events have occurred since the country attained independence from France in 1804. It is as well to remember that some of them have caused tsunamis. The 14th August 2021 magnitude 7.2 earthquake did so, but fortunately the waves were small and their effect was limited. That is not invariably the case with large Caribbean earthquakes. Neglect of seismic safety is bound to be fatal, but Haiti has no building codes and certainly no means of enforcing them if they existed.
Meteorological disasters
Named tropical storms and hurricanes make landfall in Haiti on average once every 18 months, but the incidence is irregular, and so is the power of each storm. Moreover, a strong La Niña resurgence during the North Atlantic Oscillation can accentuate the Spring and Autumn rainfall peaks and increase the likelihood of hurricanes. For example, in the 2008 hurricane season, four named storms arrived.
Both flooding and accelerated soil erosion are worsened by decades of deforestation that have denuded slopes of the kind of vegetation that would retain moisture and soil cover. In Haiti, a third of the population lacks secure access to food. In mid-2021, 40 districts are currently enduring a crisis of food availability, and 130,000 children are suffering from acute malnutrition. The intensification of storms, floods and erosion, and accompanying damage to agriculture are much to be feared as climate change intensifies.
Either storm-related disruption or the presence of infected Nepali UN peacekeepers brought cholera to Haiti the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake and made it endemic. The outbreak killed 9,000 Haitians and infected 800,000. Fortunately, despite continual disruption of healthcare, the effect of Covid-19 has so far been limited (600 deaths in a population of 11.5 million), but in mid-August 2021 only 0.1% of the population has been vaccinated.
A changing situation
The eminent anthropologist Anthony Oliver-Smith argued[vi] that in Haiti colonialism has left an enduring legacy of vulnerability to disasters. In his words, "the colonial institutions’ assiduous extraction of surpluses left the population both destitute and vulnerable to hazards for centuries to come." Nowhere more than in Haiti has disaster been made inevitable by the nexus of poverty and vulnerability.
It remains to be seen whether the usual mistakes are repeated by the international disaster aid community after the August 2021 earthquake. The intervening years have produced conflicting signals. Consider, for example, the role of the Internet and social media. It has greatly increased the politicisation of aid, which has generally been a negative factor because it distorts the relationship between needs and supply.
On the other hand, it has also provided a ready channel for assistance. Haiti is one of the three countries (with the Philippines and Pakistan) that are most dependent on remittances by their diaspora. As they lend a sense of immediacy and connection, social media have strengthened that relationship, and never more than in times of disaster. This is practical solidarity in its most direct form.
The devastation to the bidonvilles of Port-au-Prince in the 2010 earthquake was one factor that sparked a new interest in the the effect of disasters on informal settlements. In many large developing country cities, these are vast–and highly vulnerable, not least because they are usually situated on the least safe and stable land. Researchers have identified four goals[vii]: secure land occupation, sufficient and resilient livelihoods, robust and resilient ecosystems, and adequate disaster risk and emergency management.
Stability, good governance and democratic participation are essential ingredients of disaster risk reduction. Haiti has long had a shortage of all three. For example, it ranks 170th out of 180 in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index 2020. Nevertheless, battered by earthquakes, storms, floods and landslides it has by necessity proved to be country full of remarkably resilient people. That is an important strength, but time will tell whether it is enough to get by on.
[i] Muggah, R. 2010. The effects of stabilisation on humanitarian action in Haiti. Disasters 34(S3): S444-S463.
[ii] Farmer, Paul 2012. Haiti After the Earthquake. Public Affairs, New York, 443 pp.
[iii] Abrahams, D. 2014. The barriers to environmental sustainability in post-disaster settings: a case study of transitional shelter implementation in Haiti. Disasters 38(S1): S25-S49.
[iv] Davis, Ian 1978. Shelter After Disaster. Oxford Polytechnic Press, Oxford, 127 pp.
[v] Davis, I., P. Thompson and F. Krimgold (eds) 2015. Shelter After Disaster (2nd edition). UNOCHA and International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Geneva, 252 pp.
[vi] Oliver-Smith, Anthony 2010. Haiti and the historical construction of disasters. NACLA Report on the Americas 43(4): 32-36, doi: 10.1080/10714839.2010.11725505
[vii] Sarmiento, Juan Pablo, Suzanne Polak and Vicente Sandoval 2019. An evidence-based urban DRR strategy for informal settlements. Disaster Prevention and Management 28(3): 371-385. doi: 10.1108/DPM-08-2018-0263
