How NOT to help Haiti long term

Much as the Tsunami in 2004, the immediate needs in Haiti are great and the more aid that can be rushed there, the better the immediate consequences for Haitian citizens.

But what to do for Haiti in the longer term is a much different question. A penetrating analysis about organized aid appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

On the one hand you have the calls for greater and greater flows of money to Haiti: "Haiti needs a new version of the Marshall Plan—now," writes Andres Oppenheimer in the Miami Herald, by way of complaining that the hundreds of millions currently being pledged are miserly. Economist Jeffrey Sachs proposes to spend between $10 and $15 billion dollars on a five-year development program. "The obvious way for Washington to cover this new funding," he writes, "is by introducing special taxes on Wall Street bonuses." In a New York Times op-ed, former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush profess to want to help Haiti "become its best." Some job they did of that when they were actually in office."

But there are chilling counters to these knee-jerk pleas for more money. Writer Brett Stephens adds that "All this works to salve the consciences of people whose dimly benign intention is to "do something." It's a potential bonanza for the misery professionals of aid agencies and NGOs, never mind that their livelihoods depend on the very poverty whose end they claim to seek. And it allows the Jeff Sachses of the world to preen as latter-day saints.

For actual Haitians, however, just about every conceivable aid scheme beyond immediate humanitarian relief will lead to more poverty, more corruption and less institutional capacity. It will benefit the well-connected at the expense of the truly needy, divert resources from where they are needed most, and crowd out local enterprise. And it will foster the very culture of dependence the country so desperately needs to break.

Read the article from WSJ which provides the case histories to support the allegations that doing more often ends up in providing less than advertised.