Haiti-Politique
Décès de l’ancien premier ministre Marc Louis Bazin
Une des figures de proue de la scène politique haïtienne des 25 dernières années
mercredi 16 juin 2010,
Radio Kiskeya
(Read the original article here)
L’ancien premier ministre Marc Louis Bazin (78 ans) est décédé d’un cancer tôt mercredi matin en sa résidence à Thomassin (Pétion Ville, Est de Port-au-Prince).
Un de ses cousins, Jean Max Bazin, qui a confirmé la nouvelle de ce décès au micro de Radio Kiskeya, a précisé que la famille s’attendait depuis quelque temps à ce triste événement, mais qu’elle a été tout de même surprise qu’il se soit si vite produit. Il a assuré que la famille allait faire face avec courage à cette disparition.
Economiste, ancien fonctionnaire international au Maroc et à la Banque Mondiale, Marc Bazin a fait son entrée sur la scène politique haïtienne au cours de la seconde moitié des années 80. Surnommé alors « Mister Clean » et jouissant de la réputation d’être « l’homme des Américains », Marc L. Bazin entra au gouvernement de Jean Claude Duvalier (Baby Doc) au poste de Ministre de l’Economie et des Finances. Il devait en sortir sans avoir rempli la mission qu’il avait vraisemblablement d’assainir les comptes et d’ajuster l’économie selon alors les prescrits des institutions de Bretton Woods.
Marc Bazin allait par la suite revenir sur la scène politique par le biais de la formation politique qu’il avait créée, le Mouvement pour l’Instauration de la Démocratie en Haiti (MIDH). Sous la bannière de l’Alliance Nationale pour la Démocratie et le Progrès (ANDP), avec le PANPRA et le MNP-28 de Serges Gilles et Déjean Bélizaire respectivement, Marc Bazin brigua la présidence en 1990 face à Jean Bertrand Aristide qui fut alors élu largement président.
Marc Bazin refit surface à titre de premier ministre « de facto » en remplacement de l’agronome Jean Jacques Honorat qui fut nommé chef du gouvernement par les auteurs du sanglant coup d’Etat qui avait renversé le président constitutionnel le 30 septembre 1991.
Avec les militaires également, Marc Bazin n’eut pas la partie belle. Il dut laisser le gouvernement par la « petite porte », humilié par les putschistes. Marc Bazin devait malgré tout faire partie de l’un des gouvernements de l’après coup d’Etat.
Après une longue période de retrait suite à cette nouvelle expérience, Marc Bazin devait refaire surface dans les colonnes du quotidien Le Nouvelliste où il tint une rubrique d’analyses sociopolitiques et de mise en perspective des plus importants dossiers d’actualité.
Quelques semaines avant sa mort, Marc Bazin s’est allié aux ex-premier ministres Robert Malval, Jean Marie Chérestal, Yvon Neptune, Jacques Edouard Alexis et Rosny Smarth pour produire des réflexions et adopter des positions sur la difficile situation politico-sociale créée dans le pays par le séisme dévastateur du 12 janvier 2010. [jmd/Radio Kiskeya]
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Good neighbours?
Good neighbours?
Published: June 08, 2010
Foreign Direct Investment
Haiti and the Dominican Republic have endured a fraught relationship over the past 200 years, but could the latter’s response to the former’s recent earthquake lead to a more mutually beneficial partnership in the future? Michael Deibert investigates.
(Read the original article here)
When an earthquake devastated a large section of Haiti in January, no country responded more empathically than the Dominican Republic, which shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with Haiti.
Despite what has been an often stormy and distrustful relationship between the two countries – due in large part to the many Haitian occupations of the Dominican Republic, as well as the long history of abuses committed against the almost 1 million Haitians living in the Dominican Republic – Dominicans almost immediately began fundraising drives and gathered supplies. These were then ferried across the border to Haiti by a combination of local relief organisations and ordinary citizens.
“I had been visiting Haiti for such a long time, and have such good friends over there, that I knew I had to do my best to help,” says Juan Pablo Fernandez, president of Químicos & Plásticos, a Dominican company that supplies raw materials to the industries of both nations. After the earthquake, Mr Fernandez and his employees joined other Dominican businesses in transporting privately donated relief supplies to Haiti’s stricken capital, Port-au-Prince.
The Dominican response to the earthquake just might have eased some of the mutual recrimination brought on by an oft-tragic shared history stretching back two centuries.
In 1822, then Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer invaded the eastern part of the Dominican Republic. Despite this, country succeeded in declaring its independence in 1844. Another Haitian leader, Faustin Soulouque, who would go on to declare himself emperor of Haiti, then invaded the Dominican Republic twice.
In 1937, following the expulsion of Haitian cane cutters by Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, even more Haitian labourers flooded the Dominican Republic, then led by dictator Rafael Trujillo, who would rule the country from 1930 until his murder in 1961. That October, under Mr Trujillo’s orders and for reasons that still remain unclear, Dominican soldiers and police massacred an estimated 20,000 Haitians.
Haitians continue to stream into the Dominican Republic looking for work today, even though they continue to face “severe discrimination”, according to the 2009 Human Rights Report issued by the US State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. But though both countries have experienced authoritarian regimes and high levels of corruption, their economic and investment portfolios paint a markedly different picture, analysts say, especially over the past two decades.
Revealing data
Before the earthquake, according to the CIA’s World Factbook, the GDP real growth rate for the Dominican Republic was 1.8% during 2009, and the GDP per capita was $8300. In Haiti, these figures were 2% and $1300, respectively. While average life expectancy for the Dominican Republic is 73 years, the figure in Haiti is just 57 years. To add to Haiti’s woes, according to its government’s Preliminary Damage and Needs Assessment, the damage bill from January’s earthquake was in the region of $7.9bn.
While two-thirds of Dominican exports remain bound for the US, foreign remittances, mostly from the US, continue to account for nearly one-tenth of the country’s GDP, and there remains a robust tourism industry. Boasting the largest economy in the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic currently has approximately 50 free trade zone parks, producing everything from textiles to electronic devices and pharmaceuticals. The country’s financial sector has also largely stabilised since the collapse of its second-largest bank, Banco Intercontinental, in 2003, which had to be bailed out by the Dominican treasury at a cost of some $2.2bn.
“Business is increasing on a daily basis [in the Dominican Republic] and there is much optimism,” says Aryam Vázquez, an economist who covers country risk for Wells Fargo’s emerging markets unit in New York. “The banking sector is much better regulated than in the past, and we have seen concerted efforts by successive governments to stabilise the domestic demand market.”
Across the border
Before the earthquake, Haiti seemed to be regaining some of its financial footing following the chaotic presidency of Jean-Bertrand Aristide between 2001 and 2004 and the often erratic rule of the interim government that replaced him. Relations between Dominican president Leonel Fernández, in office since August 2004, and Haitian president René Préval, who has governed since May 2006, are said to be warm. During their mutual first term in office in the 1990s, Mr Fernández made the first official state visit by a Dominican leader to Haiti since the 1937 massacres.
Political instability in Haiti has led to environmental degradation and economic atrophy. While Haiti was ruled by a series of ravenous civilian and military dictatorships for much of the past 50 years, Joaquín Balaguer, a long-time Trujillo consigliere who led a series of authoritarian governments in the Dominican Republic over the past half-century, was taking steps to prevent the country from sliding into the environmental disaster that was befalling Haiti, including using the Dominican army to prevent extensive deforestation. Haiti, on the other hand, has lost 90% of its tree cover over the past 60 years (and about one-tenth between 1990 and 2000), with the resulting erosion destroying two-thirds of the country’s arable farmland.
Hope beyond the despair
Despite such statistics, there is hope that out of the tragedy of January’s earthquake there lies an opportunity to help Haiti advance beyond the modest improvements in economic stability and security of recent years.
Haiti’s garment industry, once a pillar of its economy, has benefitted in recent years from measures that provided certain Haitian textiles with duty-free status when entering the US. Last year, Haitian firm the WIN Group, along with the Soros Economic Development Fund, announced their intention to construct a $45m industrial park in Port-au-Prince’s Cité Soleil slum region, a project that has been put on hold in the aftermath of the earthquake.
The OTF Group, a competitiveness consulting firm, has continued to advocate for the creation of “growth clusters” around Haiti, a proposal that fits closely with the Haitian government’s desire for decentralisation, economic diversification and the “decongestion” of the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area, rather than rebuilding as before.
Such measures might well provide a possible future at home for the Haitians currently living in the Dominican Republic and spell a less fractious new era for two nations whose economic destinies, despite frequent tensions, remain inextricably linked.
Published: June 08, 2010
Foreign Direct Investment
Haiti and the Dominican Republic have endured a fraught relationship over the past 200 years, but could the latter’s response to the former’s recent earthquake lead to a more mutually beneficial partnership in the future? Michael Deibert investigates.
(Read the original article here)
When an earthquake devastated a large section of Haiti in January, no country responded more empathically than the Dominican Republic, which shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with Haiti.
Despite what has been an often stormy and distrustful relationship between the two countries – due in large part to the many Haitian occupations of the Dominican Republic, as well as the long history of abuses committed against the almost 1 million Haitians living in the Dominican Republic – Dominicans almost immediately began fundraising drives and gathered supplies. These were then ferried across the border to Haiti by a combination of local relief organisations and ordinary citizens.
“I had been visiting Haiti for such a long time, and have such good friends over there, that I knew I had to do my best to help,” says Juan Pablo Fernandez, president of Químicos & Plásticos, a Dominican company that supplies raw materials to the industries of both nations. After the earthquake, Mr Fernandez and his employees joined other Dominican businesses in transporting privately donated relief supplies to Haiti’s stricken capital, Port-au-Prince.
The Dominican response to the earthquake just might have eased some of the mutual recrimination brought on by an oft-tragic shared history stretching back two centuries.
In 1822, then Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer invaded the eastern part of the Dominican Republic. Despite this, country succeeded in declaring its independence in 1844. Another Haitian leader, Faustin Soulouque, who would go on to declare himself emperor of Haiti, then invaded the Dominican Republic twice.
In 1937, following the expulsion of Haitian cane cutters by Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, even more Haitian labourers flooded the Dominican Republic, then led by dictator Rafael Trujillo, who would rule the country from 1930 until his murder in 1961. That October, under Mr Trujillo’s orders and for reasons that still remain unclear, Dominican soldiers and police massacred an estimated 20,000 Haitians.
Haitians continue to stream into the Dominican Republic looking for work today, even though they continue to face “severe discrimination”, according to the 2009 Human Rights Report issued by the US State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. But though both countries have experienced authoritarian regimes and high levels of corruption, their economic and investment portfolios paint a markedly different picture, analysts say, especially over the past two decades.
Revealing data
Before the earthquake, according to the CIA’s World Factbook, the GDP real growth rate for the Dominican Republic was 1.8% during 2009, and the GDP per capita was $8300. In Haiti, these figures were 2% and $1300, respectively. While average life expectancy for the Dominican Republic is 73 years, the figure in Haiti is just 57 years. To add to Haiti’s woes, according to its government’s Preliminary Damage and Needs Assessment, the damage bill from January’s earthquake was in the region of $7.9bn.
While two-thirds of Dominican exports remain bound for the US, foreign remittances, mostly from the US, continue to account for nearly one-tenth of the country’s GDP, and there remains a robust tourism industry. Boasting the largest economy in the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic currently has approximately 50 free trade zone parks, producing everything from textiles to electronic devices and pharmaceuticals. The country’s financial sector has also largely stabilised since the collapse of its second-largest bank, Banco Intercontinental, in 2003, which had to be bailed out by the Dominican treasury at a cost of some $2.2bn.
“Business is increasing on a daily basis [in the Dominican Republic] and there is much optimism,” says Aryam Vázquez, an economist who covers country risk for Wells Fargo’s emerging markets unit in New York. “The banking sector is much better regulated than in the past, and we have seen concerted efforts by successive governments to stabilise the domestic demand market.”
Across the border
Before the earthquake, Haiti seemed to be regaining some of its financial footing following the chaotic presidency of Jean-Bertrand Aristide between 2001 and 2004 and the often erratic rule of the interim government that replaced him. Relations between Dominican president Leonel Fernández, in office since August 2004, and Haitian president René Préval, who has governed since May 2006, are said to be warm. During their mutual first term in office in the 1990s, Mr Fernández made the first official state visit by a Dominican leader to Haiti since the 1937 massacres.
Political instability in Haiti has led to environmental degradation and economic atrophy. While Haiti was ruled by a series of ravenous civilian and military dictatorships for much of the past 50 years, Joaquín Balaguer, a long-time Trujillo consigliere who led a series of authoritarian governments in the Dominican Republic over the past half-century, was taking steps to prevent the country from sliding into the environmental disaster that was befalling Haiti, including using the Dominican army to prevent extensive deforestation. Haiti, on the other hand, has lost 90% of its tree cover over the past 60 years (and about one-tenth between 1990 and 2000), with the resulting erosion destroying two-thirds of the country’s arable farmland.
Hope beyond the despair
Despite such statistics, there is hope that out of the tragedy of January’s earthquake there lies an opportunity to help Haiti advance beyond the modest improvements in economic stability and security of recent years.
Haiti’s garment industry, once a pillar of its economy, has benefitted in recent years from measures that provided certain Haitian textiles with duty-free status when entering the US. Last year, Haitian firm the WIN Group, along with the Soros Economic Development Fund, announced their intention to construct a $45m industrial park in Port-au-Prince’s Cité Soleil slum region, a project that has been put on hold in the aftermath of the earthquake.
The OTF Group, a competitiveness consulting firm, has continued to advocate for the creation of “growth clusters” around Haiti, a proposal that fits closely with the Haitian government’s desire for decentralisation, economic diversification and the “decongestion” of the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area, rather than rebuilding as before.
Such measures might well provide a possible future at home for the Haitians currently living in the Dominican Republic and spell a less fractious new era for two nations whose economic destinies, despite frequent tensions, remain inextricably linked.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Haitian farmers protest Monsanto seed donations
Jun 04, 2010
Haitian farmers protest Monsanto seed donations
By Alice Speri
AFP
HINCHE, Haiti - Thousands of farmers marched in central Haiti Friday claiming the government was misleading them with seed donations from US multinational Monsanto.
The region was spared the worst of the January quake which leveled much of the capital Port-au-Prince, but with a dire shortage of seeds in the Caribbean country farmers are struggling to get the supplies to work their land.
Giant company Monsanto is donating 475 tons of maize to Haitian farmers in cooperation with Project Winner, a USAID initiative, which aims to increase the country's agricultural productivity, the agriculture ministry said.
But farmers fear they are being given seeds which could threaten local varieties.
"The Haitian government is using the earthquake to sell the country to the multinationals," charged Jean Baptiste Chavannes, coordinator of the Mouvman Peyizan Papay (MPP), a farming cooperative and one of the leading organizations in Haiti's peasant movement.
Sporting red shirts and straw hats sprayed in signs against President Rene Preval and Monsanto, people rallied under a hot sun in the town of Hinche.
Demonstrators chanted "Down with Preval," "Keep Monsanto Out of Haiti" and the occasional "Down with the Occupation."
Kettly Alexandre, an organizer with the MPP said they estimated the number of participants was between 8,000 and 12,000. There was no immediate confirmation from police.
"We have to fight for our local seeds," Chavannes told the crowd. "We have to defend our food sovereignty."
"This is not just about the seeds," argued Samuel Smith, a 74-year-old organic farmer and long-time supporter of local agriculture, who came for the rally from Massachusetts. "It's about imposing on people a system that they can't get out of."
Monsanto however dismissed fears it was donating genetically modified seeds to the country.
"The seeds Monsanto is donating to Haiti are not genetically modified. They are conventional hybrid seeds that are already grown in the Dominican Republic," a Monsanto spokesman in the United States told AFP.
Monsanto has donated 255,000 dollars to Haiti for disaster relief and the company is committed to the success of Haitian farmers, Monsanto Executive Vice President Jerry Stein wrote in a letter to Agriculture Minister Joanas Gue.
But Chavannes slammed the donation as "a gift of death."
"It's an attack on peasant agriculture, on the farmers, on biodiversity, on native seeds, on what remains of our environment in Haiti."
Many protestors leveled most of their anger against the government.
"I'm here because I'm angry with Preval," said Pierre Charite, a 61-year-old farmer from Haiti's central plateu, where he grows maize, plantains, sugarcane and pistachios. "He accepted corn that is bad, that will kill Haitian corn. I won't use that."
Haitian farmers protest Monsanto seed donations
By Alice Speri
AFP
HINCHE, Haiti - Thousands of farmers marched in central Haiti Friday claiming the government was misleading them with seed donations from US multinational Monsanto.
The region was spared the worst of the January quake which leveled much of the capital Port-au-Prince, but with a dire shortage of seeds in the Caribbean country farmers are struggling to get the supplies to work their land.
Giant company Monsanto is donating 475 tons of maize to Haitian farmers in cooperation with Project Winner, a USAID initiative, which aims to increase the country's agricultural productivity, the agriculture ministry said.
But farmers fear they are being given seeds which could threaten local varieties.
"The Haitian government is using the earthquake to sell the country to the multinationals," charged Jean Baptiste Chavannes, coordinator of the Mouvman Peyizan Papay (MPP), a farming cooperative and one of the leading organizations in Haiti's peasant movement.
Sporting red shirts and straw hats sprayed in signs against President Rene Preval and Monsanto, people rallied under a hot sun in the town of Hinche.
Demonstrators chanted "Down with Preval," "Keep Monsanto Out of Haiti" and the occasional "Down with the Occupation."
Kettly Alexandre, an organizer with the MPP said they estimated the number of participants was between 8,000 and 12,000. There was no immediate confirmation from police.
"We have to fight for our local seeds," Chavannes told the crowd. "We have to defend our food sovereignty."
"This is not just about the seeds," argued Samuel Smith, a 74-year-old organic farmer and long-time supporter of local agriculture, who came for the rally from Massachusetts. "It's about imposing on people a system that they can't get out of."
Monsanto however dismissed fears it was donating genetically modified seeds to the country.
"The seeds Monsanto is donating to Haiti are not genetically modified. They are conventional hybrid seeds that are already grown in the Dominican Republic," a Monsanto spokesman in the United States told AFP.
Monsanto has donated 255,000 dollars to Haiti for disaster relief and the company is committed to the success of Haitian farmers, Monsanto Executive Vice President Jerry Stein wrote in a letter to Agriculture Minister Joanas Gue.
But Chavannes slammed the donation as "a gift of death."
"It's an attack on peasant agriculture, on the farmers, on biodiversity, on native seeds, on what remains of our environment in Haiti."
Many protestors leveled most of their anger against the government.
"I'm here because I'm angry with Preval," said Pierre Charite, a 61-year-old farmer from Haiti's central plateu, where he grows maize, plantains, sugarcane and pistachios. "He accepted corn that is bad, that will kill Haitian corn. I won't use that."
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