Haiti – the world was not ready
admin January 15th, 2010
As the news this morning reports rising anger in Haiti at the ongoing failure of aid and relief supplies to arrive on the island, one thing is clear – the world was not ready.
That is not to say that we should all have foreseen a ‘once-in-200-years’ event. Or that we should have known that it was going to happen this week on Haiti. And it is not to underplay the devastation to an already weak infrastructure that has been caused by the earthquake. The level of devastation is such that it clearly makes it even harder to get such goods as are available onto the island.
But it is still true to say that we were not ready. There were not sufficient stockpiles of basic goods and medical supplies nearby, or even in the same hemisphere. None of this is the fault of the aid agencies who are, as always, achieving miracles with the resources that they have available. But the way that the emergency relief system operates works against them.
Insiders report that the fact that it has been a relatively long time (20 months) since Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar in May 2008, combined with the effects of the worldwide recession mean that there are very few stocks of relevant materials as companies have rundown inventory in the face of an apparent lack of large scale demand and a bid to control their own costs.
And now it is going to cost the world much much more to respond. It is going to cost a fortune (and be highly profitable for air cargo companies) to charter planes to bring in emergency relief supplies from around the world. Anyone who does have suitable stock to sell will be able to get top price for it – more profits there.
But above all the Haitians will pay. They will pay with their lives as thousands will die who might have been saved had there been more timely relief available. They will pay for decades as their livelihoods will take much longer to recover than if they had had immediate help. A country already 158th in the world (out of 182) according to the Human Development Index (HDI) will slip back even further. Already the least developed country in the Americas (on the HDI), and plagued by decades of dictatorship and bad government Haiti faces a bleak future.
The Disasters Emergency Committee here in the UK has launched its appeal for donations and if you are reading this and have not donated, please do so now.
But after-the-event donations are really not the answer. They are just a sticking plaster on a gaping wound. As what is generally now a rich planet, we should be investing before the event in emergency relief supplies and planning where they should be held and in what volumes.
Is that really so hard to do?