30 Years of Mismanagement : Haiti Has Tough Task in Reviving Economy

In the turbulence that surrounded the departure of President-for-Life Jean-Claude Duvalier, the impoverished people of Haiti saw an opportunity, and they seized it.

They pillaged the warehouses of religious organizations that dispense food, they looted farm cooperatives, they took over half-finished buildings in a public housing project.

Figures are hard to come by, but the losses from the looting reach into the millions of dollars.

Reasons Varied

The reasons behind the incidents are varied, but there is one element common to all: The looters took advantage of an opportunity to better their lot, even if only for a few days.

“Duvalier is gone and we are free, and we have taken these homes as our prize,” said Astrel Olibrice, a sugar cane cutter who is among the hundreds of impoverished slum dwellers who occupied half-finished houses in the waterfront slum known as Cite Simone. “No police force in the world can get us out of here now.”

So far, the five-member National Council that took over when Duvalier fled to France earlier this month has made no move to oust the squatters or pursue the pillagers. Faced with Haiti’s economic problems, the new rulers may find that getting rid of Duvalier was the easiest part of their task.

The Haitian economy, which has been on a downhill slide for six years, is kept afloat by foreign assistance. Organizations mainly funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development feed about 500,000 of Haiti’s population of 6 million.

There is no significant upturn in sight. The gross national product, the sum of all goods and services, increased by 1.7% last year, but the population increased by 2.3%. Western diplomats estimate that the standard of living for Haitians has declined by 20% since 1980.

More than half of Haiti’s work force is unemployed, and the minimum wage is about $3 a day. Only one in five Haitians can read and write, and Ministry of Education statistics show that only 9% of secondary school-age children are registered in schools.

Eighty per cent of the Haitian people live in rural areas, but their primitive farming methods make for low yields. Moreover, Haiti’s agriculture has been crippled by the indiscriminate felling of trees, chiefly to produce charcoal for cooking fires. The deforestation has contributed to massive soil erosion that has turned much of the country into desert. At the same time, silt has built up in hydroelectric reservoirs and reduced the production of energy.

“Haiti’s economy is not developing, it is undeveloping,” a diplomat said.

Ellis Franklin, director of the relief agency CARE in Haiti, observed, “This is the result of 30 years of economic mismanagement.”

New Loans Needed

A U.S. Embassy official said that Haiti’s Central Bank may hold as little as $1 million in foreign reserves, far below what is needed each month to import fuel and food from abroad, although Haitian bankers say the government may have access to another $18 million to $20 million in bank accounts overseas. The Haitian government has already told foreign embassies here that it will need emergency loans to cover immediate expenditures for imports.

Other than that, the National Council has given no hint of its future economic plans.

Last year, the Reagan Administration asked Congress for slightly more than $50 million in aid for Haiti, but before Duvalier’s fall, the funding was held up by questions about the country’s human rights record.

Almost three decades of dictatorship under Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude, have aggravated the country’s economic problems. By failing to develop an alternative to wood as a fuel, the Duvaliers contributed to the deforestation. And they did virtually nothing to promote reforestation or improve farming techniques. Programs of this sort were left almost exclusively to foreign agencies.

For example, in the 1960s, technicians from Taiwan helped lay out rice paddies in the valleys north of Port-au-Prince. The goal was to make Haiti self-sufficient in grain, and the program was almost immediately successful, to the extent that at one point it was producing 60% of Haiti’s needs.

No Follow-Up

But over the past decade the effort lagged as the government failed to back up the initial irrigation program with maintenance and assistance. Production has declined by half.

“Prototype projects became an end in themselves,” CARE’s Franklin said. “There was never any follow-up.”

Meanwhile, cash from abroad has been squandered and perhaps stolen. Three years ago, a $20-million loan from the International Monetary Fund, intended to increase Haiti’s foreign reserves, disappeared without adequate accounting.

In the last few years, the only bright spot in Haiti’s economy has been the growth of assembly industries that use cheap Haitian labor to put together everything from toys to telephones. They employ about 50,000 people, mainly in Port-au-Prince.

But this buildup, along with commerce in general, have suffered from something beyond Haiti’s control--the AIDS epidemic. Haitians were initially placed among the so-called high-risk categories of AIDS, the acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Fallout from that scare prompted retailers abroad to reject toys and clothing made in Haiti. Tourism has all but dried up.

Inaction Cited

Even in this instance, some people fault the government for failing to take action. Claude Levy, who heads the Industry Assn. of Haiti, said, “The government could have helped nip this problem, but it never instituted nationwide testing to get to the bottom of the problem.”

The sort of poverty everywhere evident in Haiti produces scenes that would seem more appropriate in famine-stricken Africa. Naked children display the distended bellies and red-tinged hair that signify malnutrition. Gnarled old women scratch the earth for loose grains of corn. The men not only cut down the few stunted trees to be found here and there but pull out the roots as well. Signs in the rural areas warn of the danger of malaria.

Most Haitians live in hovels made of mud or scrap sheet metal with thatch roofs. Cinder block is the material of comparative luxury. Indoor plumbing is for the rich.

Shopping in the squalid markets is done in terms of pennies--a handful of flour, an ounce or so of cooking oil.

Thus, it came as no surprise that the disorder of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s last days in Haiti was accompanied by looting.

“Let’s face it, there’s hunger,” said John Klink, director of Catholic Relief Services here. “That makes a food warehouse a big attraction.”

$500,000 in Loot

Food supplies valued at about $500,000 were taken from the Port-au-Prince warehouse of Catholic Relief Services, a worldwide relief and development agency. Klink suspects that the looters identified warehouses with the government, even though the Duvaliers had failed to provide so much as transportation to distribute the food.

Franklin, whose CARE organization lost $600,000 worth of food from a warehouse in Gonaives, a town up the coast, said: “The looters showed they meant business. It was a target they knew the government would notice.”

In Bayonnais, a country village at the end of a dirt road near Gonaives, 2,000 people attacked a cooperative started with U.S. foreign aid money and administered by the Roman Catholic Church. This incident took place on Feb. 1, the day after White House spokesman Larry Speakes announced, mistakenly, that Duvalier had left Haiti.

The attackers took corn and peanuts intended for spring planting by the cooperative’s members. They took pigs and rabbits and plows and hoes used by the 1,500 members. Desks and chairs were stolen, presumably for use as firewood. Even window frames and shutters were carried away.

Miscellaneous Targets

The Bayonnais cooperative was only one of a number of targets in the Gonaives region. A school, a medical dispensary, the food warehouse of the Presbyterian church, and a community council building were also looted.

“I think there was a mix of sentiment among the attackers,” said Constant Jean Baptiste, an agricultural expert who works at Bayonnais. “There was euphoria, opportunism, even a tactical attempt to put the country in a crisis.”

Baptiste said that local resentment contributed to the incident. Some Bayonnais residents aspired to join the cooperative but could not do so because of a lack of resources.

The cooperative’s members have decided to rebuild. Recently they contacted neighbors who took part in the looting and asked them to return the grain and equipment. The looters gave back much of the booty, Baptiste said, but it is not likely that outsiders will return what they took.

A week after Duvalier’s flight, hundreds of Port-au-Prince slum dwellers occupied cinder-block homes under construction in Cite Simone, which stands on flat shoreland above the capital.

West German Funds

The West German government provided money for the project, which is alongside a similar project financed by the World Bank. Many of the houses that were taken over had been allocated to slum dwellers, but the squatters have scraped away their names.

One of the squatters, Jacques Bazine, said: “We could not stand living where we did before. There was no electricity, no water. We needed these places.”

The squatters say they are willing to pay rent. They do not seem to be concerned about the people who had expected to move in. Olibrice, the cane cutter, asked: “Why are they better than us? We need homes, too.”

The housing takeover appears to have been carried out on a selective basis. Identification with the government seems to have been a factor. Houses being put up nearby, by slum dwellers under a self-help program directed by Catholic Salesian brothers, were left untouched.