Famine Crimes
Feb. 4th, 2010 09:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purejuiceCopy of an email sent today
Mr. Cave,
Thanks for a masterful summing up of the chaos caused by feeding programs and the doers of good [in Haiti]. It makes me despair of human nature. Briefly, famine/disaster management has been a subject of academic concern since Geldof's 1984 feed Ethiopia concerts had unintended consequences explored and confronted by Alex de Waal in his 1997 book, Famine Crimes, which also owes a great deal to the Nobel prize winning work of Amartya Sen, who found that famines are always man-made.
De Waal went on to become one of the founders of a scholarly journal, Disasters: The Journal of Disaster Studies, which has no less than 13 free links to earthquake disaster management up right now.
Mary B. Anderson's 1999 Do No Harm analyzes the depredations of the doers of good.
Court Robinson's Terms of Refuge, about the largest immigration, I believe, in the 20th century --the SE Asians of the 1980s -- is electrifying on the subject of the United Nations' consigning these lost souls back to their untenable countries because no one wants refugees of color -- including the massacre of Cambodians forced by Thai govt soldiers at gunpoint over the precipice at Preah Vihear back into Cambodia.
The single most valuable book about food distribution and the depredations of aid volunteers -- one including a guy who is one of the richest people in Canada and a mover and shaker among Mennonite missions (sometimes racist) -- is Rice, Rivalry and Politics by Mason and Brown.
Your story sounds exactly like what they wrote about the Cambodian camps in 1985; I believe their book has been used as a Yale business school case study.
You might also want to take a look at Marcus on famine crimes in international law -- how governments manipulate food distribution to create what arguably is genocide (my letter making these points in response to Marcus' piece was published in a subsequent issue of that journal).
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3100102
None of these institutions have any institutional memory about the awful chaos they cause among people already suffering the nadir of extremity. If you can read one of these books, the Mason/Brown one is the one.
Thanks again.
This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers here or use the "Reprints" tool that appears next to any article. Visit www.nytreprints.com for samples and additional information. Order a reprint of this article now.
February 3, 2010
Coupons Ease Chaos in Efforts to Feed Haitians
By DAMIEN CAVE and GINGER THOMPSON
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Four days into a new food distribution program from the United Nations that aims to repair a faltering aid effort, paper coupons that can be redeemed for 55 pounds of rice have become more valuable than Haitian money.
Women hide them away in their bosoms. Aid workers count them furtively in the back of S.U.V.’s. The government wants control over who gets them, while schemers have already created counterfeits.
The food coupons are akin to diamonds: they are precious because sustenance is scarce. For three weeks since the international effort to feed millions of Haitians has been dogged by confusion, transportation snags, security problems and a lack of coordination. Before the coupon program started on Saturday, food giveaways had become a Darwinian sport — with biscuits and bottles of canola oil or biscuits thrown like footballs from the backs of trucks to masses of men jockeying for position.
Many are still hungry. As of Sunday, 639,200 people had received a meal from the United Nations’ World Food Program, 32 percent of the two million estimated to be in need.
Aid groups say that they have been knocked back on their heels by a catastrophe they describe as more difficult to manage than famine in Africa or the tsunami in Asia.
Rarely if ever, they say, has a natural disaster so ravaged the crowded capital of an already poor country, devastating both the government and the international agencies that usually step in.
And yet the food crisis is not simply a natural disaster. Interviews with aid groups, United Nations officials, experts and Haitian government leaders reveal that communication was not a top priority early on. Inexperience and a go-it-alone approach — by groups Haitian and foreign — contributed to the dysfunction.
In many ways, the new food distribution program is an improvement, with its stepped-up security, emphasis on women as recipients and its plan for 16 fixed locations. But the disorientation that immediately followed the earthquake has been especially hard to cure.
Two weeks after the quake, in a khaki tent on the United Nations campus in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s interior minister led a meeting of bleary-eyed officials from the government, the United Nations and a half-dozen other agencies assigned to such issues as food, water and shelter.
Almost immediately, confusion surfaced: they were not working from a common map.
Several people at the meeting complained that they were not getting reports fast enough from organizations on the streets to help keep an accurate tally of which areas were getting assistance.
Numbers were tossed about, all of them adding up to staggering challenges. The shelter cluster reported that it had only 4,000 of the 200,000 tents requested by Haitian authorities. Food rations — a basic meal — had been distributed to less than half of the people the government believed needed them. And while potable water was reaching about 500,000 a day, only 20,000 had been given access to latrines.
“How do you provide toilets to makeshift camps,” Guido Canale of Unicef said in an interview after the meeting, “in a city that did not have sufficient sanitation to begin with?”
Agencies Were Also Hurt
The meeting revealed how aid groups were struggling with an unexpected development: in a country where many of them had worked for years, they were starting from scratch. Sophie Perez, the country director for CARE, for example, said that 80 percent of her 133 employees had lost their homes to the quake.
The government, weak in the best of times, was incapacitated, and three of four United Nations warehouses with stockpiles of rice and other staples had been damaged. Food, more than anything else, became the pressure point. Haitian officials pushed to get off the sidelines; aid groups, fearing rampant corruption and violence, sought to limit their role.
The World Food Program started out by trying to feed as many people as possible, wherever, whenever. But by Week 2, some aid groups and Haiti’s interior minister, Paul Antoine Bien-Aimé, were saying that without better coordination, “it’s like we are shooting in the dark.”
Anthony B. Banbury, a high-ranking United Nations logistician, said that it had become clear that distributing food properly would bring peace, while mistakes could lead to unrest.
“One of our main tools to achieve security is also a source of insecurity,” he said after being sent to Haiti to speed the relief effort. “We need to do it in a well-planned, well-organized and well-coordinated manner.”
That, however, proved to be immensely difficult. The collapse of the headquarters of the United Nations mission here robbed the relief effort of a central command.
Some of the groups that had rushed into the void were competent veterans. Others were what organizers from larger groups described as “humanitarian tourists”: nongovernmental organizations full of good intentions, but with limited supplies and experience.
“They added to the confusion,” Mr. Canale of Unicef said, “not to the solutions.”
Dysfunction Was Clear
The dysfunction was all too obvious to besieged Haitians. Sheets and splintered plywood with painted calls for help began to appear on the streets of Port-au-Prince just a few days after the quake. “We need food,” said one sign, then 6, then 20.
Most were in English, Spanish or French. The underlying message was not just that Haiti’s people were desperate — they also had no idea who was in charge or how to get help. Voltaire Samuel, like many others, concluded that perhaps the foreigners needed some direction.
Last week, with one arm in a sling, he and a half-dozen neighbors put up another S O S sign in the median of Delmas Street, outside downtown.
“They are giving food to other places,” Mr. Samuel said. “Here, they bring us nothing.”
Many of the residents in the district of Delmas 1 said last week they had not eaten in days. They hesitated to go too far in search of food because they feared that someone would steal their last remaining possessions, so they selected five men from among them to look.
But it did not work for them, or for thousands of others.
At the most visible food distribution site in the capital, near the collapsed presidential palace, the line typically lasted hours, with a swell of hungry Haitians leaving empty-handed.
After several days of trucks coming and leaving without serving the entire group, chaos engulfed the process.
Marcus Prior, a spokesman for the World Food Program, said that around 60 police officers and United Nations troops usually managed security at locations where as many as 5,000 people crowded around trucks with food.
On at least two days last week, United Nations troops used tear gas after a mass of men rushed the food distribution point and began grabbing what they could. In a separate case, one World Food Program truck stuck in traffic was robbed by men on motorbikes.
First Come First Served
Violence was more the exception than the rule, but food was still given out first come first served. A truck would drive up and men would run toward it. After awhile, women and those who lived a few blocks away did not even bother.
“They are treating people like dogs, just tossing things at them,” said Séjour Jean Rodrigue, 38, one of the leaders in Delmas 1. “We don’t want anything to do with it.”
The new system for food distribution, devised to address these problems, has two major changes: coupons and a focus on women, who are supposed to be the only ones collecting rice.
The process also shifts power from Haiti’s government to foreign aid groups; and from men throwing food from trucks to local leaders giving out coupons, like Rigaud Joachin, 48, a gregarious bookkeeper with the national telecommunications company who lives in one of the few houses still standing in the neighborhood of Nazon.
He was responsible on Sunday night for handing out 300 coupons to a list of families, and he took his job seriously. Inside his porch at dusk, he bellowed for each person to come forward.
“Lafleur Fernande!”
“Renette Briole!”
Before long, the crowd was 15 people wide and 3 deep. But Mr. Joachin, a respected neighborhood figure, had little trouble keeping order.
The next day, his 300 coupon holders and hundreds of others lined Poupelard Street, as two women at a time walked away with sacks of rice.
Security Still a Problem
Other locations have had a harder time. Security has been stepped up for food distribution, but twice since Saturday Haitians have set up blockades to try to stop United Nations supply trucks from passing, and pressure on coupon holders has intensified. On Monday afternoon, a crowd of several hundred people rushed workers from Catholic Relief Services as they tried to hand out coupons near the presidential palace, forcing them and a small team of American soldiers to flee.
One woman, Marcelin Cristana, admitted that she had gamed the system. “I bought the coupon for 20 Haitian dollars,” she said, or about $2.50 in the United States.
At a park in the wealthy suburb of Pétionville that day, the food arrived late, after thousands without coupons had already gathered. Brian Casey, an emergency coordinator with Goal, an Irish aid group, explained that there had been a problem obtaining fuel. His loaders also failed to show up, leading him to pull 23 men with coupons out of line, offering them $5 each.
The biggest problem was the location: the driveway of a police station that was wide open, with no natural entrance or exit. Aid workers and United Nations troops set up a perimeter with orange plastic fencing, and the area where people left with rice felt as chaotic and aggressive as the food lines before the new program had started.
Meanwhile, theft occurred almost openly. Partly because workers were trying to move quickly — letting men, not just women, pick up the rice — pairs of off-duty police officers slid in to collect what they had no right to take.
“I’ll make a note of it,” said a United Nations police officer who had pulled one of the men aside. “But he’s a policeman, so nothing will happen.”
Many people nonetheless left pleased. Bernadette Volcy, 54, said she was “so happy the Americans are helping us.” But, she added, “it’s not enough.”
United Nations officials agree. As of Tuesday morning, the new program had handed out enough rice to feed about 212,000 people, according to United Nations figures — more than 100,000 people short of its initial goal. Of the 16 sites chosen for distribution, only 9 were up and running on Sunday, increasing to 12 on Monday, and 14 on Tuesday.
Hundreds of thousands of people are still waiting. When the empty trucks left Pétionville, Haitians from the camp walked around looking for another gathering, holding up small strips of paper with their names written in careful script.
Desperate, hungry and still not satisfied, they said they were looking for the white men in control of food distribution. They needed coupons. They needed to eat.
Marc Lacey contributed reporting.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
Privacy Policy Terms of Service Search Corrections RSS First Look Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map
Mr. Cave,
Thanks for a masterful summing up of the chaos caused by feeding programs and the doers of good [in Haiti]. It makes me despair of human nature. Briefly, famine/disaster management has been a subject of academic concern since Geldof's 1984 feed Ethiopia concerts had unintended consequences explored and confronted by Alex de Waal in his 1997 book, Famine Crimes, which also owes a great deal to the Nobel prize winning work of Amartya Sen, who found that famines are always man-made.
De Waal went on to become one of the founders of a scholarly journal, Disasters: The Journal of Disaster Studies, which has no less than 13 free links to earthquake disaster management up right now.
Mary B. Anderson's 1999 Do No Harm analyzes the depredations of the doers of good.
Court Robinson's Terms of Refuge, about the largest immigration, I believe, in the 20th century --the SE Asians of the 1980s -- is electrifying on the subject of the United Nations' consigning these lost souls back to their untenable countries because no one wants refugees of color -- including the massacre of Cambodians forced by Thai govt soldiers at gunpoint over the precipice at Preah Vihear back into Cambodia.
The single most valuable book about food distribution and the depredations of aid volunteers -- one including a guy who is one of the richest people in Canada and a mover and shaker among Mennonite missions (sometimes racist) -- is Rice, Rivalry and Politics by Mason and Brown.
Your story sounds exactly like what they wrote about the Cambodian camps in 1985; I believe their book has been used as a Yale business school case study.
You might also want to take a look at Marcus on famine crimes in international law -- how governments manipulate food distribution to create what arguably is genocide (my letter making these points in response to Marcus' piece was published in a subsequent issue of that journal).
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3100102
None of these institutions have any institutional memory about the awful chaos they cause among people already suffering the nadir of extremity. If you can read one of these books, the Mason/Brown one is the one.
Thanks again.
This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers here or use the "Reprints" tool that appears next to any article. Visit www.nytreprints.com for samples and additional information. Order a reprint of this article now.
February 3, 2010
Coupons Ease Chaos in Efforts to Feed Haitians
By DAMIEN CAVE and GINGER THOMPSON
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Four days into a new food distribution program from the United Nations that aims to repair a faltering aid effort, paper coupons that can be redeemed for 55 pounds of rice have become more valuable than Haitian money.
Women hide them away in their bosoms. Aid workers count them furtively in the back of S.U.V.’s. The government wants control over who gets them, while schemers have already created counterfeits.
The food coupons are akin to diamonds: they are precious because sustenance is scarce. For three weeks since the international effort to feed millions of Haitians has been dogged by confusion, transportation snags, security problems and a lack of coordination. Before the coupon program started on Saturday, food giveaways had become a Darwinian sport — with biscuits and bottles of canola oil or biscuits thrown like footballs from the backs of trucks to masses of men jockeying for position.
Many are still hungry. As of Sunday, 639,200 people had received a meal from the United Nations’ World Food Program, 32 percent of the two million estimated to be in need.
Aid groups say that they have been knocked back on their heels by a catastrophe they describe as more difficult to manage than famine in Africa or the tsunami in Asia.
Rarely if ever, they say, has a natural disaster so ravaged the crowded capital of an already poor country, devastating both the government and the international agencies that usually step in.
And yet the food crisis is not simply a natural disaster. Interviews with aid groups, United Nations officials, experts and Haitian government leaders reveal that communication was not a top priority early on. Inexperience and a go-it-alone approach — by groups Haitian and foreign — contributed to the dysfunction.
In many ways, the new food distribution program is an improvement, with its stepped-up security, emphasis on women as recipients and its plan for 16 fixed locations. But the disorientation that immediately followed the earthquake has been especially hard to cure.
Two weeks after the quake, in a khaki tent on the United Nations campus in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s interior minister led a meeting of bleary-eyed officials from the government, the United Nations and a half-dozen other agencies assigned to such issues as food, water and shelter.
Almost immediately, confusion surfaced: they were not working from a common map.
Several people at the meeting complained that they were not getting reports fast enough from organizations on the streets to help keep an accurate tally of which areas were getting assistance.
Numbers were tossed about, all of them adding up to staggering challenges. The shelter cluster reported that it had only 4,000 of the 200,000 tents requested by Haitian authorities. Food rations — a basic meal — had been distributed to less than half of the people the government believed needed them. And while potable water was reaching about 500,000 a day, only 20,000 had been given access to latrines.
“How do you provide toilets to makeshift camps,” Guido Canale of Unicef said in an interview after the meeting, “in a city that did not have sufficient sanitation to begin with?”
Agencies Were Also Hurt
The meeting revealed how aid groups were struggling with an unexpected development: in a country where many of them had worked for years, they were starting from scratch. Sophie Perez, the country director for CARE, for example, said that 80 percent of her 133 employees had lost their homes to the quake.
The government, weak in the best of times, was incapacitated, and three of four United Nations warehouses with stockpiles of rice and other staples had been damaged. Food, more than anything else, became the pressure point. Haitian officials pushed to get off the sidelines; aid groups, fearing rampant corruption and violence, sought to limit their role.
The World Food Program started out by trying to feed as many people as possible, wherever, whenever. But by Week 2, some aid groups and Haiti’s interior minister, Paul Antoine Bien-Aimé, were saying that without better coordination, “it’s like we are shooting in the dark.”
Anthony B. Banbury, a high-ranking United Nations logistician, said that it had become clear that distributing food properly would bring peace, while mistakes could lead to unrest.
“One of our main tools to achieve security is also a source of insecurity,” he said after being sent to Haiti to speed the relief effort. “We need to do it in a well-planned, well-organized and well-coordinated manner.”
That, however, proved to be immensely difficult. The collapse of the headquarters of the United Nations mission here robbed the relief effort of a central command.
Some of the groups that had rushed into the void were competent veterans. Others were what organizers from larger groups described as “humanitarian tourists”: nongovernmental organizations full of good intentions, but with limited supplies and experience.
“They added to the confusion,” Mr. Canale of Unicef said, “not to the solutions.”
Dysfunction Was Clear
The dysfunction was all too obvious to besieged Haitians. Sheets and splintered plywood with painted calls for help began to appear on the streets of Port-au-Prince just a few days after the quake. “We need food,” said one sign, then 6, then 20.
Most were in English, Spanish or French. The underlying message was not just that Haiti’s people were desperate — they also had no idea who was in charge or how to get help. Voltaire Samuel, like many others, concluded that perhaps the foreigners needed some direction.
Last week, with one arm in a sling, he and a half-dozen neighbors put up another S O S sign in the median of Delmas Street, outside downtown.
“They are giving food to other places,” Mr. Samuel said. “Here, they bring us nothing.”
Many of the residents in the district of Delmas 1 said last week they had not eaten in days. They hesitated to go too far in search of food because they feared that someone would steal their last remaining possessions, so they selected five men from among them to look.
But it did not work for them, or for thousands of others.
At the most visible food distribution site in the capital, near the collapsed presidential palace, the line typically lasted hours, with a swell of hungry Haitians leaving empty-handed.
After several days of trucks coming and leaving without serving the entire group, chaos engulfed the process.
Marcus Prior, a spokesman for the World Food Program, said that around 60 police officers and United Nations troops usually managed security at locations where as many as 5,000 people crowded around trucks with food.
On at least two days last week, United Nations troops used tear gas after a mass of men rushed the food distribution point and began grabbing what they could. In a separate case, one World Food Program truck stuck in traffic was robbed by men on motorbikes.
First Come First Served
Violence was more the exception than the rule, but food was still given out first come first served. A truck would drive up and men would run toward it. After awhile, women and those who lived a few blocks away did not even bother.
“They are treating people like dogs, just tossing things at them,” said Séjour Jean Rodrigue, 38, one of the leaders in Delmas 1. “We don’t want anything to do with it.”
The new system for food distribution, devised to address these problems, has two major changes: coupons and a focus on women, who are supposed to be the only ones collecting rice.
The process also shifts power from Haiti’s government to foreign aid groups; and from men throwing food from trucks to local leaders giving out coupons, like Rigaud Joachin, 48, a gregarious bookkeeper with the national telecommunications company who lives in one of the few houses still standing in the neighborhood of Nazon.
He was responsible on Sunday night for handing out 300 coupons to a list of families, and he took his job seriously. Inside his porch at dusk, he bellowed for each person to come forward.
“Lafleur Fernande!”
“Renette Briole!”
Before long, the crowd was 15 people wide and 3 deep. But Mr. Joachin, a respected neighborhood figure, had little trouble keeping order.
The next day, his 300 coupon holders and hundreds of others lined Poupelard Street, as two women at a time walked away with sacks of rice.
Security Still a Problem
Other locations have had a harder time. Security has been stepped up for food distribution, but twice since Saturday Haitians have set up blockades to try to stop United Nations supply trucks from passing, and pressure on coupon holders has intensified. On Monday afternoon, a crowd of several hundred people rushed workers from Catholic Relief Services as they tried to hand out coupons near the presidential palace, forcing them and a small team of American soldiers to flee.
One woman, Marcelin Cristana, admitted that she had gamed the system. “I bought the coupon for 20 Haitian dollars,” she said, or about $2.50 in the United States.
At a park in the wealthy suburb of Pétionville that day, the food arrived late, after thousands without coupons had already gathered. Brian Casey, an emergency coordinator with Goal, an Irish aid group, explained that there had been a problem obtaining fuel. His loaders also failed to show up, leading him to pull 23 men with coupons out of line, offering them $5 each.
The biggest problem was the location: the driveway of a police station that was wide open, with no natural entrance or exit. Aid workers and United Nations troops set up a perimeter with orange plastic fencing, and the area where people left with rice felt as chaotic and aggressive as the food lines before the new program had started.
Meanwhile, theft occurred almost openly. Partly because workers were trying to move quickly — letting men, not just women, pick up the rice — pairs of off-duty police officers slid in to collect what they had no right to take.
“I’ll make a note of it,” said a United Nations police officer who had pulled one of the men aside. “But he’s a policeman, so nothing will happen.”
Many people nonetheless left pleased. Bernadette Volcy, 54, said she was “so happy the Americans are helping us.” But, she added, “it’s not enough.”
United Nations officials agree. As of Tuesday morning, the new program had handed out enough rice to feed about 212,000 people, according to United Nations figures — more than 100,000 people short of its initial goal. Of the 16 sites chosen for distribution, only 9 were up and running on Sunday, increasing to 12 on Monday, and 14 on Tuesday.
Hundreds of thousands of people are still waiting. When the empty trucks left Pétionville, Haitians from the camp walked around looking for another gathering, holding up small strips of paper with their names written in careful script.
Desperate, hungry and still not satisfied, they said they were looking for the white men in control of food distribution. They needed coupons. They needed to eat.
Marc Lacey contributed reporting.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
Privacy Policy Terms of Service Search Corrections RSS First Look Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-02-04 05:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-04 05:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-04 06:30 pm (UTC)I think that I've told the story somewhere about working the State Department's Africa human rights desk in the summer of 2000, during the Ethiopia-Eritrea War. We came across the final report by a series of agronomists from the University of Michigan who had been studying food-aid targeting in Ethiopia. Said report put together all of their earlier reports from different regions, which the Ethiopian government had signed off on; and when they were put together, it was an open-and-shut case that the government had systematically been diverting food aid toward its Tigray and (less so) Amhara supporters and depriving the rest of the country of the same. (The Michigan team was apparently expelled from the country a week after they submitted the report.) But do you think that such facts had any impact on our policy, which was to treat the two countries exactly the same, even though all the evidence pointed to the Ethiopians doing far more brutal things? Oh ho ho ho ho ho...
no subject
Date: 2010-02-04 07:31 pm (UTC)i am electrified by your account, and if you get a chance, i'd forward it to david marcus. i hope he's keeping string on this.
http://www.law.arizona.edu/faculty/getprofile.cfm?facultyid=280