All but one of Haiti’s textile plants – which account for 90 per cent of its exports – were in Port-au-Prince. Consequently, the earthquake has essentially knocked out the country’s entire export sector. The Port-au-Prince region also accounted for 85 per cent of government revenues.
And on Haiti’s dependence on UN food supplies:
The UN says that yesterday it managed to feed 40,000 people and that it hopes to increase that to 1 million people a day within two weeks, and 2 million in a month.
“By the end of Monday, we will have distributed more than 200,000 food rations in and around Port-au-Prince,” the UN World Food Programme announced in a statement. It said that it was establishing food kitchens to feed the hungry.
If the Food Program needs to be supplying rations to that many people a month out from the disaster, that is very foreboding news for Haiti’s long-term future. The population of the entire affected region is around 3 million — and some estimates have as many as 300,000 people there dying in the earthquake and its immediate aftermath. If so, that would mean the UN is gearing up to be responsible for the food supply of nearly three fourths of the people in the greater Port-au-Prince area. That is, to say the least, an unsustainable situation.
In a post last week, I brought up the issue of whether a state without a territory is still a state. But having a government is also one of the formal requirements of statehood, a condition which Haiti now only nominally qualifies for. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that it is only inertia and the continued communal belief that Haiti-is-a-State by the rest of the world that makes Haiti a State at all.
-Susan
The View From LL2 