- Posts tagged haiti
- Explore haiti on posterous
Haiti update
Has a new dystopian form of urban organization been invented, or rather reinvented in the Western hemisphere, namely the aid-supported tent city?:
A large but unknown number of people in the camps are choosing to stay in them. Life is better there than in the sprawling, gang-infested slums. Camp-dwellers pay no rent. Nor do they have to pay for sanitation, because latrines are often provided by the aid agencies, or clean water, since that is often supplied by the agencies or by the government. Medical services are also easier to find and, again, probably free, courtesy of agencies like UNICEF or charities like Médecins Sans Frontières. A cholera epidemic makes that all the more vital.
A Looming Food Crisis
Haitians are a resilient group of people. The evidence is very much clear as it was back when I was there five years ago and, even today, as I browse the news that's coming from the despoiled anomaly island.
As it was distinctly predicted, one of the recent earthquake's many repercussions is already in sight. Food scarcity now leaves many in desperate situations where families are resorting to eating stored seeds to feed the unending arrivals of the estimated 500,000 people who migrated to the rural areas after the quake. When compared to two years ago, when prices had risen by 56% compared to 12 months prior, that raised the expectation of starvation and mass hunger, violent unrest had swept through Haiti and the spectre of famine soared. This predicament at this moment seems very much real again. The effects of a 30% price increased in bread last week sparked riots in Mozambique which left 13 dead.
International food prices were up 5 per cent in August, the biggest one-month increase since last November, said the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, which has called a one-day meeting on Sept. 24 to examine the global markets for grains and rice. European wheat prices hit more than €231 ($308 Canadian) a tonne last week, which was close to the two-year high of €236 set in August, largely because drought has hammered the crop in Russia. Corn prices are at their highest level since mid-2009. Sugar and oilseed prices are also climbing.
This all comes after the recent extension of the Russian export ban on cereals. The FAO however maintains that this is not to be held as a 'crisis' and attempts to pacify the threat as the it could cause unintended market overreactions, which, the FAO claims, is what drove up the prices of the last food crisis.
It seems to me that the supply side may be the culprit this time around as it was argued that the causes of the 2007-2008 food price crisis was due to unforseen changes in the demand side where population growth, shifting diets (the nutrition transition), urbanisation, unsustainable lifestyles, and increasing private investor demand contributed heavily. We are indeed about to inaugurate what Dupont and Thirwell called 'a new era of food insecurity.' Yet I have no fear in terms of Haiti's withstanding yet another hardship whether natural or not.
elasticity of deaths due to natural disasters vs. income
Going back to hammer in the topic of economic freedom, Matt Kahn has a paper on the topic of the elasticity of deaths due to natural disasters vs. income which states this in the Abstract:
Though richer nations do not experience fewer natural disasters than poorer nations, richer nations do suffer less death from disaster. Economic development provides implicit insurance against nature's shocks. Democracies and nations with higher-quality institutions suffer less death from natural disaster. Because climate change is expected to increase the frequency of natural disasters such as floods, these results have implications for the incidence of global warming.
The paper concludes:
Death counts differ sharply by continent. African nations experience fewer natural disasters and all else equal, suffer less death from natural disasters. Unlike other Institutions play a role in shielding the population from natural disaster death. Future research should pinpoint the mechanisms. This paper has shown using several empirical models, that controlling for national income, less democratic nations and nations with more income inequality suffer more death. Controlling for a nation's population size and geography, I showed using OLS and instrumental variable estimates that a host of institutional quality proxies lower national death counts from disasters. One important hypothesis that merits future research is the role of government corruption in exacerbating death counts from natural disaster. Existing corruption indices are highly negatively correlated with national per-capita income. It is quite plausible that government corruption raises death counts through the lack of enforcement of building codes, infrastructure quality, and zoning enforcement.
House in Haiti
My family house looks ok but with a hole on the roof. Still no contact.
Update: Fine for now, but with an aunt missing. They've moved out of the city.
18.01
