Haiti's Cholera Crisis--March 2013--Crof/The Nation

 

March 21, 2013

Haiti's cholera crisis

Via The Nation, a very good article by Isabeau Doucet: Haiti's Cholera Crisis. Excerpt:

Invoking immunity under the UN’s 1946 convention, the United Nations basically snubbed the claim as “not receivable” and has not apologized. Worse, it has committed itself to fund only 1 percent ($23.5 million) of Haiti’s cholera elimination plan; it recommends Haiti get the rest from the “private sector” or from “major venture philanthropist individuals,” according to Nigel Fisher, the new head of the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti. 

In a country where nearly 80 percent of people live on less than $2 a day, privatized water and sanitation access has left more than 80 percent of the population without adequate sanitation and nearly a third without potable water. Those in tent camps and shanties who can’t pay for toilets are forced to defecate into plastic bags, which end up in the nearest canal or ravine. 

Those who can pay avail themselves of a free-market chaos of water and waste tanker trucks, run almost entirely by the local or international NGO private sector. A sharp rise in the price of gasoline, which could easily result from a change in the PetroCaribe deal offered by Venezuela’s late president, Hugo Chávez, could quickly deepen Haiti’s water and sanitation crisis. 

Haiti is one of the few countries in the world where water security has deteriorated since the Millennium Development Goals were implemented, despite a $650 million-a-year peacekeeping mission whose premise for being in a country with no war and one of the lowest homicide rates in the region is that Haiti is a “failed state.” 

The UN knew full well the menace cholera posed, yet the UN Development Program does not see water access as part of its “development” mandate. 

Jon Andrus, deputy director of the Pan American Health Organization, agrees that the privatization of Haiti’s water and sanitation has threatened its most vulnerable people, and he concedes that PAHO and its partners “have failed for decades to reverse that situation.” Still, Andrus is optimistic about the cholera elimination plan, having seen firsthand the eradication of polio, rubella and measles in some of the poorest parts of the world. 

However, on February 27, at the launch of the elimination plan, Médecins Sans Frontières communication officer Yann Libessart was not impressed by the lofty speeches, given that barely half ($238 million) the plan’s funding for the next two years has materialized. 

Cholera treatment centers that MSF passed on to the Haitian government are “degenerating” into “contamination zones,” he says. When asked who should fund the plan, Libessart is blunt: “The people who are responsible for the introduction of the disease into the country.”