It seems the country’s entire history has involved consistently getting screwed over by one civil war, natural disaster, foreign intervention or kleptocratic dictator after another. Even the poorest countries will have some bright spots in their history that the populace can look back upon as “the good ol’ days.” But that doesn’t appear to be the case here.
So can this country be fixed, and if so what will it take? Is it possible that it can one day become a stable, somewhat prosperous place like its neighbor the Dominican Republic?
Sure it could be fixed if someone would take it over that could invest and make it a tourist and cruise stop, say Disney. Also could grow exotic things, and someone smart might set up a copyright free zone and invite producing knock off items, and oh yes no silly pollution laws. You could easily get a great economy going that way. Invite all the peer to peer bit-torrent folks to set up high tech internet and make knock offs of Apple and MS PC’s and OS’s and you could have wonderful employment, while saving the rest of us big bucks too.
That is called thinking outside the box, and just what is needed.
Unless the corrupt leaders are removed it is pointless to put money there, by the way no one says how did the leaders come out? Are they alive?
Just prior to the revolution, Haiti was a lot better off than its neighbour. In fact, due to the extraction of renewable resources, sugar, coffee and indigo, Hiaiti was France’s most prized colony in the New World, more so than even Quebec.
So yes, there is hope.
If you’d read the fucking news you’d see that the fucking president is still fucking alive.
Fuck.
ETA: Fuck.
Haiti’s economy has traditionally been built around the unskilled but labor-intensive cultivation of commodity crops, for the lowest possible production cost, on large plantations. It would require a socioeconomic and political miracle for such a system NOT to produce poverty and corruption. It’s been said, perhaps only half in jest, that the civil rights movement in the southern US could never have succeeded until after the mechanical cotton-picking machine was perfected. The best hope for Haiti would be a blight that wiped out the cultivation of sugarcane.
Or in other words, invade it, stripmine it, ruin it and dump it.
Why would Disney want to take people on cruises to a copyright-free zone? That sort of thing is very much against their interests.
No pollution laws isn’t going to help the tourist industry, either. Would you want to take your vacation on a beach full of trash, where the air smells bad and makes you cough?
They were alternate ways to get the economy going, not both together, although people DO tour China. By the way since sugar grows so well there, what about MaryJane? I mean officially and sell to anyone anywhere and tax that for support of roads and infrastructure to do the anti-copyright stuff? That would work.
Yeah, that would be a great way to get our government to ban all travel and business there.
Just the opposite, we would give them money to try and stop it, we are doing this with opium farming in the middle east now, we give them more free money. I sure would not, but that is the fact. It would work, one way or the other.
What religion do you claim to belong to, again??
Er - it was “better off” in the sense that it produced more wealth - but the overwhelming majority of the population were slaves. Remarkably ill-treated slaves, at that. Not exactly a golden era.
China has historical and cultural attractions that Haiti doesn’t. China, unlike Haiti, has the option of putting the worst of the polluting industries far away from the tourist attractions.
As it’s worked so well for Colombia with cocaine.
Institute a 1 child per woman policy. Eventually the number of people will approach what the ecosystem can support. Once the country can feed itself the other problems will be easier to solve.
WHY IS HAITI SO POOR?.
An essay written in 1986 with the author’s 1999 note
Let’s use this crisis to take some time and brush up on our Haitian history and learn some new things.
If it were just pot cafes and tourist traps, I don’t see why it would be worse than Amsterdam or something. Unfortunately, murderous drug-czars would turn it into an even worse mess.
However, that extraction was of non-renewable resources. That is, intensive agriculture of that kind in the Haitian terrain is environmentally destructive and non-sustainable, causing deforestation and soil erosion. (See this article by Jared Diamond.) Sugar, in particular, uses up the land on which it is grown. Haiti produces almost no sugar today, and not for lack of cheap labor.
You need a pretty vigorous and effective government to enforce that – something Haiti is not likely to have in the foreseeable future.
In reading the previous article I linked, it looks like the French were using Haiti as some sort of “cash cow” for most of it’s history.
Maybe Haiti would have developed differently if it didn’t have France viciously extorting it with threats of re-enslavement/colonization for ~100 years. I’d also advise people to read Jared Diamond’s book “Collapse.” It has a very interesting (if downright pessimistic) summation of the natural/political forces that came into play against/for Haiti after independence.
The Heritage Foundation wrote this;
In addition to immediate humanitarian aid, the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti ,offers opportunities to reshape Haiti’s long dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the public image of the United States in the region.
I guess no disaster should be passed up if money can be made. Then, it is an opportunity to steer the government into something that would benefit us. Like in Naomi Klein’s "Disaster Capitalism’, we can take advantage of a bad circumstance and make a boatload of money.