Haiti Update

Yggy has some frankly brilliant ideas on helping in Haiti.

The US is reportedly sending a few thousand more soldiers to Haiti, to join the already-extant UN forces there. Since Haiti is a relatively small country you could imagine the international community undertaking an effort to send many more forces than that and essentially run the country on an interim basis. Countries like France, Canada, Belgium, and Switzerland can, in principle, offer well-trained soldiers who can communicate easily with the local population which would make such an undertaking more feasible than a lot of other population security missions.

But the real problem is again what to do with millions of Haitians in a country with basically zero infrastructure:

Short of that, it’s worth thinking about the extent to which generous immigration policies could do enormous good for Haiti’s population. In the short-term, what’s most needed is immediate assistance to save as many lives as possible. But Tyler Cowen’s guess that “the country as a whole is currently below the subsistence level and will remain so for the foreseeable future” seems very plausible. The most likely alternative to mass immiseration and death for the survivors seems to me to be large-scale emigration to the developed world. Otherwise you’re going to have millions of people with no means of supporting themselves.

Who will step up to take in these Haitians?  The size and the scope of this disaster is off the charts, as BooMan says:

It's probable that Haiti will need to become a protectorate of some sort, if not in letter then in fact. And very clever people will have to devise economically sound plans to rebuild. For example, temporary housing could actually be semi-permanent, with an option to buy equity and have eventual ownership. The Department of Agriculture could encourage the planting of fruit trees rather than attempting reforestation that will be used for timber. Of course, having first-world corporations swoop in and begin making profits off this misery will bring about charges of imperialism and exploitation. But, really, what are the alternatives? Without some profit-motive, there will never be enough aid to keep Haiti at a sustenance level of existence.

And that's the size and the scope we need to be considering.  Aid to Haiti is not going to cut it.  The country is no longer a going concern at this point.   The government is non-functional, and at this point unless we see large-scale disaster relief on a holistic level accounting for millions of survivors and soon, they're no longer going to be categorized as survivors, dig?

A fantastic, unprecedented, massive and comprehensive effort will have to be mobilized here to get Haiti up from face down on the mat.  Yes, it's going to have to involve corporations, as BooMan said.  The alternative is tens of thousands of people who survived the initial earthquake only to die from lack of basic infrastructure.  The fact is putting up enough infrastructure to serve Haiti will take far longer than the people of Haiti have.  It's a complete meltdown there.

The entire world is going to need to chip in here.