January 29, 2010

In the wake of the earthquake that has killed more than 100,000 people
in Haiti, the foreign ministers of several countries calling
themselves the "Friends of Haiti" met on Monday in Montreal to discuss
plans for "building a new Haiti." Participants in the Ministerial
Preparatory Conference on Haiti, who included Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton; representatives of international financial
institutions including the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund; and Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive came to what
Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon, the conference
chair, referred to as a "road map towards Haiti's reconstruction and
development."

However, the Latin American countries of ALBA--the Bolivarian Alliance
for the Americas--who held a counter-conference, and several
grassroots Haiti solidarity organizations, who organized protests
outside the conference, expressed skepticism that the "Friends of
Haiti" and the international financial institutions would work to
further the interests of ordinary Haitians.

One of the groups protesting the conference, Haiti Action Montreal,
issued a statement warning that "There is a danger that these major
powers will try to exploit the earthquake to further narrow
pro-corporate ends, if reconstruction of New Orleans after Katrina and
in Asia following the tsunami are any indication."

As Naomi Klein has observed, this process is already underway. The
Heritage Foundation think tank's initial response to the earthquake
clearly followed the pattern she documented in her book The Shock
Doctrine, by which neoliberal reformers seek to impose an agenda of
privatization in times of crisis. It was less than twenty-four hours
after Haiti was hit by an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude that the
Heritage Foundation issued a release recommending that "In addition to
providing immediate humanitarian assistance, the U.S. response to the
tragic earthquake in Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape
Haiti's long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to
improve the public image of the United States in the region."

That sentiment was echoed by James Dobbins, former special envoy to
Haiti under President Bill Clinton and director of the International
Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation, who stated
in a recent op-ed in the New York Times, "This disaster is an
opportunity to accelerate oft-delayed reforms," including "breaking up
or at least reorganizing the government-controlled telephone monopoly"
and restructuring the ports, which also represent two of Haiti's few
remaining state enterprises.

The World Bank also observed an upside to the catastrophe in Haiti; in
a January 18 blog post titled "Haiti earthquake: Out of great
disasters comes great opportunity," a World Bank disaster management
analyst recently stated that "there is a silver lining to this great
tragedy. Looking back in history, great natural disasters are often a
catalyst for huge, positive change." Even calls for the expansion of
Haiti's sweatshop industry are being made in the media.

The possibility of a repeat of the kinds of corrupt corporate
profiteering that Klein documented in Iraq in the initial months of
the 2003 US occupation have not been lost on Dan Senor, an adviser to
the Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003 and 2004. In a
January 17 op-ed in the New York Times, Senor recommended the adoption
in Haiti of the same fund used under the Coalition Provisional
Authority--"a discretionary fund that American officers can dip into
for development projects and crisis response without constantly
looking over their shoulders at monitors in Washington."

As one financial analyst observed in a particularly frank article
titled "An Opportunity to Heal Haiti," published a day after the
earthquake in The Street, "Here are some companies that could
potentially benefit: General Electric (GE), Caterpillar (CAT), Deere
(DE), Fluor (FLR), Jacobs Engineering (JEC)." And that's not to
mention the mercenary companies that, as The Nation's Jeremy Scahill
has observed, are now setting their sights on Haiti.

The chair's opening remarks at the conference Monday suggest that
corporate interests are being well represented in the planning stages
for the "new Haiti." In his introductory speech at the ministerial
conference on Haiti, Cannon stated, "We also have with us today some
members from the private sector who have given generously to the
humanitarian appeal but will also play an important role in Haiti's
future." Singling out several sectors of the Haitian economy
(including the ports, electricity and telecommunications) that have
historically been state-owned, he added that "They [members from the
private sector] will be accompanying and supporting us in rebuilding
the national infrastructure of ports, roads and power generation and
in re-establishing essential services from electricity, to banking and
communications."

When I asked the World Bank's vice president for Latin America and the
Caribbean, Pamela Cox, to elaborate on what kind of private-sector
role was being envisioned for Haiti's future, she said, "You'd have to
talk to the private sector...in the sense that they're the ones who
would be putting their money in so they'd have the decision. What we
want to hear from them is what kinds of things they need, so that they
can come back." Cox cited "one proposal" that she'd heard
vis-&gravea;-vis investment in the "garment manufacturing industry"--a
sector that has long been associated with sweatshop labor practices in
Haiti.

For anyone familiar with Haiti's experience of this sweatshop-based,
pro-corporate development model over the years, it is clear that the
road map the banks and "Friends" are charting for the "new Haiti" is
not in the least bit new. And, for the Haitian people, who have always
paid the price for these failed policies, it is nothing less than
disastrous.