Your Government at Work, Give Until It Hurts Them Edition

This is something I wanted to get into earlier but it's a pretty long article so I needed time to look through it and digest it properly.

Reuters has posted an excellent piece about the disastrous consequences of aid to Haiti. And aid has been, in terms of the Haitian private sector and the middle class, without any hyperbole, largely disastrous.

The premier private hospital in Haiti:

Those walls stood firm when the earth shook on January 12, and for three months after that devastating quake the CDTI du Sacre Coeur Hospital threw open its doors, treating thousands of victims free of charge.

American and French doctors, flown in by their respective governments, worked non-stop in CDTI's operating rooms together with their Haitian counterparts seeing more than 12,000 patients and performing more than 700 major surgeries.

Today, the hospital stands empty, its consulting and operating rooms abandoned, its beds unused, its scanners gathering dust, its two brand new ambulances sitting under tarpaulins in the yard. On April 1, owner Reynold Savain was forced to close CDTI because neither the Haitian nor U.S. governments, nor the United Nations, would agree to help pay his bills.

The echoing corridors of the hospital are a monument to the failure of the Haitian government and the international community to work with the private sector to rebuild. The risk is that billions of dollars of aid will once again fail to leave any lasting legacies in the Western Hemisphere's poorest country.

A cholera outbreak in recent days only underlines the vulnerabilities of Haiti's dysfunctional systems.

Savain said when he asked the World Health Organization to help cover his doctors' salaries, they offered to pay in food and blankets, of no use to professionals who needed cash to pay rent and school fees.

The point of this is that in an ideal world private organizations in Haiti shouldn't have to ask for help in paying fees. They should be self-sufficient. But again and again, the generosity of the international community screws the private sector.

Consider agrigulture: Haiti is an exporter of rice. However, American laws dictate that any food aid provided to other countries has to be supplied by American farmers. So, we use tax dollars to buy rice from tax subsidized growers in California to ship it to a country that relies on sales of it to support its economy and give it away for free.

And then we sit back and wonder about why Haiti has so much rural poverty.

Or consider trying to run a functional government when a vast array of services are provided by NGOs over which you have no control?

Haiti is and always has been a failure. I've said (tongue in cheek but quite sadly), that they should consider disbanding as a country. Because it's never worked out for them. Because the world is just too damned helpful.