Research for Haiti

New from the National Academies Press: “Engineering, Social Justice, and Sustainable Community Development: Summary of a Workshop”

The National Academies Press is a great place to look for discussions and summaries about research on the cutting edge of the sciences. Their reports are often free to read online (sometimes free to download in their entirety as PDFs). Importantly, even when the topic is rather technical, the authors strive to keep the reports succinct and approachable by people outside the field (as best they can).

Given the current situation in Haiti, many engineers or people making use of engineers may find the following very brief report worth a glance, a skim, or even a read: Engineering, Social Justice, and Sustainable Community Development: Summary of a Workshop. Some presenters for the workshop were engineers discussing their work in locations following crises. (Note that the online version is a prepublication copy.)

At a glance, a major theme seemed to be that young engineers working in crises will find that they may be quickly taken out of their area of expertise and working with low-quality information in a fast-past environment. On the topic of planning projects that are sustainable and ethical, presenters emphasized the need to work with local knowledge and address local populations’ concerns; the skills for doing this, it was noted, are  not something that many engineering education programs may not emphasize.

From the description:

Engineering, Social Justice, and Sustainable Community Development is the first in a series of biennial workshops on the theme of engineering ethics and engineering leadership. This workshop addresses conflicting positive goals for engineering projects in impoverished areas and areas in crisis. These conflicts arise domestically as well as in international arenas. The goals of project sponsors and participants, which are often implicit, include protecting human welfare, ensuring social justice, and striving for environmental sustainability alongside the more often explicit goal of economic development or progress.

The workshop, summarized in this volume, discussed how to achieve the following:

• Improve research in engineering ethics.
• Improve engineering practice in situations of crisis and conflict.
• Improve engineering education in ethics and social issues.
• Involve professional societies in these efforts.

Biodiversity in Haiti’s Cloud Forests

Cloud forests along the southern peninsula of Haiti in the Pic Macaya National Forest are home to a variety of endangered frogs and birds found only in Haiti (see also this report).

The Vermont Institute for Natural Science (VINS) has made several trips to the Pic Macaya in recent years to capture, tag, and document birds there. This 2006 brief, but very informative, report (with a couple of nice photos) is worth a look (a longer and much more technical report from 2004 is also available). It sounds as if plans exist to help protect both of Haiti’s national forests and some part of future international funds should, I feel, go towards this goal. This 2007 report by VINS indicates that interest in the government is present. They also found that the local population had an interest (although they gave no specific details):

Locally, a conservation ethic appears to be present, but acknowledgment of Macaya's importance is constrained by the day-to-day struggle of its people to survive. No one harbors illusions that long-term conservation must entail significant socioeconomic changes for the local population. We batted around many ideas of how that might happen, but it is clear that a significant international commitment of resources will be needed. The situation is tenuous, but far from hopeless. (page 2; emphasis in original)

I lived for several weeks in Jeremie and went up into the mountains one day on a mule. The greenery and fog up in those mountains are truly amazing.

Haiti’s other national forest, La Visite in the southeast, is also home to some endangered bird species (see page four of that VINS report).

Groups Issue Letter to Key Congressional Staffers Urging a More Flexible Approach to Food Aid

More than two dozen organizations have signed a letter to Congress asking the US to purchase food aid in Haiti in order to play “a more constructive role” in food security policy. This echoes comments President Preval made earlier about food aid. They also mention the importance of identifying and tackling barriers to increased agricultural productivity, including:

the absence of credit, anti­quated tools, dam­aged irri­ga­tion sys­tems, pro­hib­i­tively high fer­til­izer prices, sub­si­dized rice, and food aid that under­cuts their sales.

An earlier post pointed to a hortatory essay by development expert John Mellor on the vital importance of agricultural development in poverty reduction.

In a quote in Haiti Liberte, President Clinton referred to the dumping of rice in nations like Haiti as a “devil’s bargain”:

[There was an economic theory that] you would free [the poorest nations by giving food aid] to skip agricultural development and go straight into an industrial era. And it’s failed everywhere it’s been tried. And you just can’t take the food chain out of production … it also undermines a lot of the culture, the fabric of life, the sense of self-determination... And we made this devil’s bargain on rice. And it wasn’t the right thing to do. We should have continued to work to help them be self-sufficient in agriculture. (April 13, 2010; English language version)

 

Gabions in Haiti, part two

In response to this earlier post about Gabions, Lori Moise sent in some photos she took just the other day of gabions being used in Haiti (the earlier post describes what gabions are). I believe these are along the Riviere Torcelle.  Lori’s blog is here. Here are Lori's photos (cropped by me to save space) of the gabions:

NOTE:  Lori also has some incredible photos of the fort and old coffee plantation houses that were rediscovered on the ridges of the mountains while the road was being built between Cazale and Lachapelle. Well worth the look! If the Cabaret area becomes a major new population center, these ancient ruins (one building has the date 1792 on it!) could be great tourist attractions (although it isn’t easy getting up there).

Media Slowly Resurfacing in Haiti: The Haiti News Project

The Haiti News Project—citing Claude Gilles of the Media Operations Centre that Reporters Without Borders and the Canadian media group Quebecor established in Haiti (story on that effort here)—reports that Le Nouvelliste is preparing to begin print operations and has rehired 24 reporters; Le Matin is running biweekly from printing presses in the Dominican Republic. They also report that about half of the 50 (!) radio stations that were operating in Port-au-Prince before the earthquake are operating at least part of the time.

Using WolframAlpha’s Reference Tool to Explore Haiti

The company Wolfram is building an amazing reference resource that pulls together all sorts of data. You ask it questions much like you would a reference librarian. To get oriented: a page of topics they cover and an amazing video explaining what it can do.

Some examples related to Haiti:

1. Basic page on Haiti (note the many options to get more info in the orange-colored links to the right of each subheading).
2. What is the GDP of Haiti?
3. Compare the GDP of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
4. What is life expectancy in Haiti? (Click the orange “distribution” link to see demographic distributions by age groups and gender.)
5. Who was the president of Haiti in 1922? 

However,there are still some kinks to work out. For instance, it gets confused when asked about prime ministers for certain years I noticed. Also, the climate data seems to come from an airport at Barahona in the Dominican Republic. So, you should examine other sources (they could make it easier to see what sources they use but the sources are usually provided) and always remember caveat lector when using the Internet. In the end, this could be something to watch, especially if experts help them to improve the data as this reference tool grows.

Do Flamingos Still Come to Haiti?

I could not find any footage of flamingos in Haiti. Do they still come to Haiti? Perhaps their return would be a measure of the restoration of healthy mangroves in various bays and at Etang Saumatre.

This article from 1990 estimated that only about 900 flamingos (give or take several hundred) were still feeding or roosting in Haiti during non-breeding seasons. It also states that nesting in Haiti had not occurred since the 1920s due to lost habitat. That was 20 years ago. In any event, for the weekend enjoy these two youtube clips (follow links to more clips) about these odd birds.

The first is a wonderful video from the show Nature (a larger version of this video is here). This video features Chilean flamingos which are similar to the ultra-bright Caribbean, or American, flamingos that come from Cuba to Haiti (sometimes also called the Caiman flamingo).

The second video is about the lesser flamingos of Africa. This is from the French film “The Crimson Wing” (“Les Ailes Pourpres”) which should be out in the USA in 2010.

Plots of Land Identified for Temporary (or longer) Resettlements (Updated April 8 2010)

Here’s a graphic from the Washington Post showing where some land is located that the Haitian government is either taking or renting (not clear which) through procedures similar to eminent domain to use for resettlements (i.e., deconcentrate “tent cities”). Melissa and Orlando over on the Haiti Rewired forum identified where four of these five plots are on Google Maps. You can zoom in and see from the satellite photo option on Google Maps how they line up with existing roads and communities.

I wonder what people in the plots that are farther from central P-a-P will do for employment. It will be interesting to hear how bus and tap-tap services adjust to bring them into Port-au-Prince for what work there is, and if schools can be set up there. Perhaps assisting with the constructions of the shelters will make these areas both housing and employment sites for a few months.

From what I can tell, these plots look fairly large and there are plenty of similar plots around them (although putting everybody to close together may not be the idea).

Update: A presidential decree a couple weeks ago set aside a very large (over 10,000 acre) parcel of land north of Port-au-Prince that seems to be renamed Corail Cesselesse. You can see the tract in blue on Openstreetmap.org (thanks to Jean-Guilhem Cailton and others at over at Haiti Rewired) or in the photo below from Radio Metropole. Note that one point on the map includes the town of Boucassin which is called Cabaret on other maps.

Social Science Research Council: Haiti, Now and Next

The Social Science Research Council has an ongoing series of brief articles about Haiti on its web site. They keep adding to it bit by bit and are now up to 18 articles.

Notable Letter from Progressive Civil Sector to Sec. Clinton on Private Security Firms; Corruption in Reconstruction in US Efforts Overseas

More than a dozen progressive organizations in the US and Haiti have sent a letter to Sec. Clinton expressing concern that the US government may hired private security firms to work in Haiti. The letter details (citing news and analytical reports) a list of human rights scandals that these firms have been engaged in, including child trafficking and murder. It also notes that private security firms

…have routinely been implicated in accusations of financial mismanagement. The problem of poor oversight has directly led to what Congress’s own Commission on Wartime Contracting has called “fiscal hemorrhaging.” (p.2)

Reading some of the articles cited in the letter, it becomes clear that fighting corruption in the reconstruction efforts in Haiti will mean making sure that foreign contractors, donor nation employees, and NGOs act in a transparent fashion. To date, most press and pundit coverage of corruption in Haiti has focused on Haitians, not NGOs and private contractors. One of the earliest posts on the web site mentions a report on the impact of UN peacekeeping in many nations that mentions the frequent connection between peacekeeping forces and increases in prostitution and trafficking in women.

The letter closes with:

Finally, we request that you reiterate your support for the Stop Outsourcing Security Act that was reintroduced in February 2010 by Rep. Jan Schakowsky (IL) in the House and Sen. Bernie Sanders (VT) in the Senate. The U.S. has only begun to rebuild its image in the world; we should not turn our backs on this progress now.