This disturbing observation from a report on food prices from the Haitian and US government (which otherwise reports that food prices in P-a-P are only ~10% higher overall than pre-quake):
Fresh vegetables and fruits are also rotting in the fields because of this loss of purchasing power in Port- au- Prince due to the losses of assets and employment opportunities in Port- au- Prince. The stability or decrease in staple food prices is not so much due to increased supplies (except for the imported rice given the current relief distributions), but to the reduced demand.
Unfortunately this means that food prices may rise once demand does increase back to pre-quake levels. More disturbing for the moment, however, is that (a) a variety of foods are not coming to urban markets (i.e., not being purchased) which implies declines in the nutritional value of diets and (b) that rural areas are losing income, putting additional pressures on migration.
INGOs and donor nations should begin to put out the word that they will purchase food from farmers or at the markets and then use these at either feeding stations (e.g., schools including those outside of quake-affected areas) or pass them on to timachann (if even just a thousand such merchants in the cities are enrolled in such a program this could work) or…and this may sound bizarre…destroy any purchased foods that cannot be used or given away fast enough and that would not have gone to market due to decreased demand. This was a common event during the Great Depression in the U.S.: the government both giving out food and destroying it at the same time so that agricultural economies and rural communities would not sink. These programs can end or be phased out once “regular” demand increases.
While it would be hard to set up, another alternative would be to create a food stamp system: provide the public with vouchers not for bags of food but for food they buy on the street markets; registered merchants could then exchange them for cash. Again, this would require enrolling merchants in the program, but I actually do not think this should be too hard if there are some managers on the ball that are working in a couple dozen neighborhoods in P-a-P (and in other cities, of course). Work programs were established almost over night during the New Deal and with modern communication and printing technology it should be easy to do now (note how quickly Fonkoze got their banks running again). The hard part is developing food vouchers that merchants can easily identify as non-fraudulent.
Do any of these ideas make sense? Am I getting the economic or administrative issues wrong?
I have written about unintended negative consequences of aid (and specifically the role of logistics decisions on those consequences) in this blog post: http://michaelkeizer.com/humourless/2009/not-a-fairy-tale-when-the-five-rights-of-logistics-are-not-enough/. It's always a serious problem, often caused by the fact that in the throes of an immediate response to an urgent emergency, you just don't often have the time to take a breath and think about what might be the downstream results of every decision that you take. It is one of the things that make relief logistics inherently complex.
Posted by: michaelkeizer.com/humourless | February 17, 2010 at 04:16 PM
Yes. Hopefully more research on this can be done. I am meeting with some university folks here in the US soon hoping that some will help collecting all the stories and reports that are coming out of Haiti so that the documents do not go "fugitive".
Posted by: Doug | February 17, 2010 at 04:40 PM
The voucher idea is interesting but I feel that the risks of fraud are too high. It may be better to have more cash for work programs which give people more flexibility about what they can buy, or to just purchase food from farmers as you mention at the beginning.
Posted by: Carl-Henri | February 17, 2010 at 09:15 PM