Haitian sea cucumbers, the Chinese New Year, and reforming foreign aid

My latest piece for GOOD is up on their website: “What A Box of Sea Cucumbers Teaches Us About Foreign Aid.” It’s a feature that tries to weave together a story about a Haitian sea cucumber exporter, an NGO that’s working to get more aid money spent locally in places like Haiti instead of in places like Washington D.C., and USAID’s reform agenda that’s largely aimed at spending more money locally. Here’s an excerpt:

[Ernst] Charles, a Haitian-American who grew up in Boston, moved to Haiti in 2005 to build cell phone towers for a telecom company. Once he finished his two-year contract, he decided to stay in his parents’ native country and start Sonac Agricole, a lobster exporting business. He later branched out into cocoa bean exports, and, eventually, sea cucumbers.

He credits Building Markets, an organization that connects local businesses to regional and global supply chains, with much of his export success. The NGO’s database of verified Haitian businesses gave Sonac Agricole essential credibility with Hong Kong importers.

But Charles’ business is an outlier—most of Building Markets’ (formerly known as Peace Dividend Trust) work involves helping Haitian firms apply for contracts from organizations like USAID and the United Nations.

In Haiti, USAID awarded only 0.02 percent of contracts for fiscal years 2010 and 2011 to local firms, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. By contrast, nearly 80 percent of such contracts went to government contractors in Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Maryland. Chemonics and Development Alternatives, Inc., two of USAID’s top six vendors for fiscal year 2011, combined to receive more than $1 billion of the Agency’s $15 billion in global program funding for the year.

Read the entire piece here, which provides more detail about why Asians are so into sea cucumbers.

There were a few things I didn’t have space to delve into in the piece, like recent opposition to USAID’s proposed reforms by some American contractors and large NGOs.

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Haitians want your old t-shirt

Today Reason posted a video that Jon Bougher and I produced: “Haiti’s Pepe Trade: How Secondhand American Clothes Became a First-Rate Business”.

There’s been no dearth of recent criticisms of donations to the developing world—they can undercut local producers and vendors and also usually do a pretty good job of perpetuating white-savior complex stereotypes. Charles Kenny said it best and succinctly in Foreign Policy: “Haiti Doesn’t Need Your Old T-Shirt: The West can (and should) stop dumping its hand-me-downs on the developing world.” No one would mistake me for a defender of the practice.

But after researching Haiti’s pepe market—the local name of the country’s secondhand goods market—and interviewing a lot of vendors and consumers of the stuff, it’s apparent that the market is just that—a market—and has all the sorts of price and information signals that one entails. Most of it originates with Haitian-American buyers at U.S. thrift stores and shipping product to Port-au-Prince and other ports. So the market does rely on U.S. donations, but not on direct donations by large NGOs to the masses, as is sometimes portrayed by media and other onlookers (and which surely happens at times, like when World Vision passes out misprinted Super Bowl t-shirts to Zambians). It’s decidedly a business—not a charity.

In my mind, this distinction provides even more supporting evidence to the cases made by Kenny and others against developing world donations en mass, which lose all the market signals contained in a genuine market and are often “stuff ‘we’ don’t want and stuff ‘they’ don’t need.”

Practically everything you read on pepe—this 1996 article, for example, or this 2010 one—will feature quotes from well-off Haitians—professors, textile magnates, big-businesspeople, etc.—decrying the practice and maybe even calling for it to be banned. But every average or down-and-out Haitian we talked to in the streets and markets of Port-au-Prince talked about how much they love pepe. This should not be lost on viewers of our video or people who comment on pepe from air-conditioned offices in Port-au-Prince or Washington D.C. The story about pepe is really about gains from trade, not charity or donations.

In a country where per capita income is about $650, pepe provides access to name-brand apparel at an affordable price, even if it comes in the form of hand-me-downs. (I should also note that not all pepe is actually secondhand—new apparel, from Levi’s to Converse to Walmart-brand button down shirts, is also sold by some vendors and is a slightly higher segment of the market.)

Watch the video, comment and let us know what you think, and send hate mail and hot tips to tate.m.watkins at gmail dot com.

Haiti is much more than tent camps and cholera. For most Haitians, Chuck Taylor’s and Lacoste are a bigger part of quotidian life.

The unremarkable sour taste for an aid worker in Haiti

Yesterday, NPR interviewed Quinn Zimmerman, an “aid worker leav[ing] Haiti with a sour taste,” as the radio outlet put it. Zimmerman had recently written a blog post in which he outlined many of the frustrations—locals seeing his white skin as little more than dollar signs, locals giving him shit merely for being a foreigner in Haiti, locals expecting him to dole out cadeux all the time—that he’s felt while working for an NGO in Leogane over the past couple of years.

“I came down here with kind of rose-colored glasses,” Zimmerman told NPR, “and this belief that intention was enough, that my desire to want to help people was enough.” In the blog post, he noted, “I knew a bit about the idea of the white savior industrial complex, but didn’t know enough to realize I was playing right into it.”

The interview and post are a glimpse into what it’s like for someone to have his or her idealism chastened. Most Peace Corps Volunteers can probably relate, as I’m sure many aid workers can. While serving in Peace Corps Senegal I went through many of the things Zimmerman describes —similar frustrations, the gradual hardening—even if I limited my outlet to venting with fellow PCV friends when I was out of my village, rather than doing it online or in a national interview with NPR.

Historian Laurent Dubois commented on the Zimmerman interview yesterday on Twitter. Dubois’ Avengers of the New World is a fantastic if a little dense account of the Haitian Revolution, and his Haiti: The Aftershocks of History garnered oodles of praise when it came out in January and is possibly now recognized as the best broad overview of Haitian history, for a layman and English-speaking audience, at least.

A string of four tweets by Dubois about the Zimmerman interview read like this:

Post/interview is good in a way for honestly and openly saying what many aid workers in #Haiti feel and say privately. At the same time, there’s a great deal of confusion between the self-criticism and deeply patronizing vision of #Haiti. The lesson should be, I think, that that matrix of #Haiti volunteer/NGO structures clearly provides too little preparation for people. One wonders how different the experience would have been if he arrived with language/knowledge of #Haiti rather than just good intentions.

Zimmerman’s story isn’t remarkable; the remarkable thing is that so many people who ship off to Haiti or Senegal or wherever on do-good missions in the world of internet and Twitter and instantaneous communication have such warped expectations about the people they will find at their destinations, about the work they will be doing, and about the work of “saving” or “fixing” a place or people that they’ll never be able to do. Just look at a few quotes from people recently-returned from short-term volunteer or missions trips. (Most people, on Tumblr (on Tumblr!), do not seem to get the irony of the site.)

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Why is it taking so long to rebuild Haiti?

Today a sort of big-picture Haiti reconstruction piece I wrote for The American Interest ran online. The headline it ran under is, “Rebuilding Haiti: Why is it taking so long?” Two years-plus isn’t so long in the context of the enormous task of rebuilding much of Port-au-Prince and its environs. But there are systemic reasons that progress has been hard to come by. Here’s an excerpt from the piece:

“Can any good news come out of Haiti?” [U.N. humanitarian coordinator Nigel] Fisher asks in the introduction of the U.N. 2011 report on Haiti. “Not if one listens to the eminent person who travels from the airport to the hotel and promptly pronounces that no progress has been achieved, or if you believe the TV correspondent who stands in front of a collapsed house and states that almost no rubble has been removed since the earthquake.” As Fisher goes on to point out, more than half of the estimated twenty million cubic yards of rubble that once littered Port-au-Prince has been cleared—enough to fill five Louisiana Superdomes. And while nearly half a million people are still living in tents, that figure is about a million fewer than in the months following the quake.

But beyond the simple enormity of the task, there are other reasons that reconstruction will continue for years, even decades, to come. Those reasons, which derive from the nature of aid work itself, help explain why the glass remains 90 percent empty despite the unprecedented international attention directed to Haiti after the disaster, the good intentions of foreign organizations working toward reconstruction, and the billions of dollars of aid inflows.

Many international organizations working in Haiti are disconnected from the people they’re here to help, which directly affects their ability to aid those people. Additionally, compared to locals and Haitian institutions, foreign organizations usually work on much shorter timelines. Both factors hamstring their ability to effect progress in recovery and reconstruction.

Read the entire piece here.

Caring about “KONY 2012”

Despite all the online backlash against Invisible Children’s “KONY 2012” 30 minute documentary—Ugandan co-founder of Project Diaspora TMS Ruge summed it up as “a slap in the face to so many of us who want to rise from the ashes of our tumultuous past and the noose of benevolent, paternalistic, aid-driven development memes”—the YouTube post of the video currently counts 1.3 million “likes” to about 90,000 “dislikes.”

As plenty of critics have noted, the video simplifies a decades-long intractable conflict that spans across four countries in Central Africa into a story of, “If more American college kids knew about this bad man in Africa, we could solve this problem.” Invisible Children advocates a military solution to capture or destroy Kony once and for all.

The ignorance and hubris and naiveté conveyed in the video are almost as incredible as the positive response to it from energized viewers who evidently think that the root of the problem in Central Africa really is that not enough Westerners know about the Lord’s Resistance Army or Joseph Kony.

So, despite all the online backlash, why does my Facebook feed keep recycling links about “an important and powerful video that YOU MUST WATCH NOW!!!”

Western twenty-somethings don’t get caught up in campaigns like Stop Kony—or Save Darfur or (RED) or, in an earlier time, Bob Geldof’s Live Aid—because of some deep-rooted and nuanced understanding about what’s happening half-way across the globe, and a resulting compassion for people caught up in horrible events. It surely isn’t the reason people are drawn Invisible Children’s campaign, because probably only a handful of the nearly 100 million people who have watched “KONY 2012” have a deep-rooted and nuanced understanding of the historical and cultural and ethnic background of the last 25 years of the LRA’s existence.

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The aid economy, housing market in Port-au-Prince

Today Reason published a piece I recently reported and wrote about the aid economy in Port-au-Prince and its effects on the local Haitian economy. Here is an excerpt:

The widespread destruction from the disaster jolted real estate prices, but the presence of foreign NGOs and government organizations, who pay premiums for office and housing space in the capital, pressures local rental markets as well.

“Many foreigners come to rent houses and pay a lot of money,” says [Jocelyn] Louis, “and they pay in U.S. dollars. We get paid in Haitian goud, but owners want U.S. dollars and want foreigners to rent from them.”

Property owners prefer dollars, which are more scarce and hence more valuable than Haitian goud—and more difficult for ordinary Haitians to come by, often at an unfavorable exchange rate. The preference for foreign currency predates the earthquake, but it’s since become much more common for owners to demand bills marked with dead white presidents instead of those featuring Haitian revolutionary heroes.

Read the entire piece here.

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*A Bed for the Night*, Auschwitz, and Joseph Kony

In his 2003 book A Bed for the Night, David Rieff critiqued some of the moral underpinnings of aid and humanitarian work. Rieff is a writer and journalist who spent years covering conflicts and crises in places including Bosnia, Rwanda, and Afghanistan.

Early on in the book, Rieff discusses the penchant of NGOs and media to simplify complex wars and conflicts by dubbing them “humanitarian crises”:

All wars have causes. They are not humanitarian emergencies, and to describe them in this way is to distort both their reality and their significance. Rony Brauman of MSF once remarked bitterly that if Auschwitz were taking place today, he feared that both humanitarians and the mass media would choose to describe it as a humanitarian crisis.

Rieff further explains Brauman’s fear:

… while humanitarians may undersand perfectly well that [Auschwitz was not a humanitarian crisis], they must deal with the crises they now face, most of which are no more humanitarian at their root that the Nazi death camps were, with only the tools of humanitarianism at their disposal.

By calling some terrible historical event a humanitarian crisis, it is almost inevitable that all the fundamental questions of politics, culture, history, and morality without which the crisis can never be properly understood will be avoided.

Rieff may as well have been writing about the recent Stop Kony campaign by the nonprofit Invisible Children. The group’s viral 30 minute video about Joseph Kony, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), and child soldiers has been criticized for ignoring all the fundamental questions in areas Rieff raises.

As G. Pascal Zachary put it:

Many of the stories of the LRA are simply fabricated, and there is no discussion [in the Invisible Children video] of the geopolitical rationale for Sudan’s support for Kony and the LRA — or why [Ugandan President Yoweri] Museveni and the US tolerated his activities for so long. These documentaries are also profoundly ignorant of ethnic issues. The film-makers, invariably white and professed altruist, present a story that goes like this: black people woke up one day and started killing each other for no reason. the men also mistreated horribly their women and children, again for no reason.

…

These film-makers are part of industry that gets monetary rewards for re-packaging lies and half-truths for the sole purpose of presenting Africans as half-human, diminished victims of their own people.

More commentary and criticism on the Stop Kony affair from Michael Wilkerson here, Teju Cole here, Elliot Ross here, and Max Fisher here.

Back in October, I blogged about the LRA when the Obama administration sent about 100 advisors to central Africa to help try to snuff out the movement.

Jeffrey Sachs: “I will solve all of the world’s most intractable problems.”

Jeffrey Sachs has an op-ed in The Washington Post today in which he lobbies for the presidency of the World Bank and outlines how he would some of solve history’s most challenging problems from that post:

My quest to help end poverty has taken me to more than 125 countries, from mega-city capitals to mountaintop villages, from rain forest settlements to nomadic desert camps. Now I hope it will take me to 18th and Pennsylvania, to the presidency of the World Bank. I am eager for this challenge.

…

I will work with industry, governments and civil society to bring broadband to clinics, schools and health workers, creating a revolution of knowledge, disease control, quality education and small businesses. I will work with agronomists, veterinary scientists, engineers and communities to build prosperity in impoverished and violence-ridden dry lands.

I will work with engineers and financiers to harness the solar power of the deserts in the service of hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa who lack electricity. I will work with urban planners, architects and community organizations to help ensure that the developing world’s mega-cities are places to live and thrive.

I cannot tell which descriptor most accurately describes his tone: optimism, hubris, or delusion.

Sachs also notes that the Bank has become “disconnected from critical areas of science and knowledge,” ironic given the criticisms of his pet project, the Millennium Villages, for not being rigorously and scientifically evaluated.