6/11/2013
Associated Press
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GEORGETOWN, Guyana — A Caribbean trade bloc says it plans to launch a strategy to boost trade through providing aid. Haitian President Michel Martelly will be joined on Tuesday by outgoing World Trade Organization Secretary General Pascal Lamy in Haiti. They’ll announce an “aid-for-trade” strategy for the Caribbean. Announced Saturday, the effort would try to secure support from donors to help develop maritime transport infrastructure to move goods through the region. Caribbean countries fear they could lose millions by signing two-way free trade agreements with the European Union, U.S. and other countries. They argue that their economies will be hurt because they have little to export and will get few taxes from imports because of duty-free policies.

Britain is to open an embassy in Haiti to boost the Caribbean country’s recovery from the ravages of the 2010 earthquake and create new trade opportunities for UK firms. Foreign Office minister Hugo Swire, who will travel to Port au Prince next week to unveil the embassy, said the move was part of a wider strategy to boost Britain’s presence throughout Latin America in response to its growing economic and political importance. He said one key aim of the expansion into Haiti was to assist its government in “nation-building” as it seeks to establish a stable democracy following the earthquake, which killed an estimated 200,000 people, and preceding years of political turmoil and dictatorship. But Mr Swire said British businesses could capitalise as tourism and trade revived in the country. “We want to see more British companies trading there,” he told the Evening Standard. “Haiti was an incredibly rich country once and if you look over the border at the Dominican Republic, and particularly its growing tourism industry, there is no reason why it can’t be again. We want our businesses to benefit from that.”
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Mr Swire said Britain was already spending £70 million a year in Haiti in aid channelled through the UN, the European Union and World Bank, and had given a further £10 million in January to help it cope better with future earthquakes and other disasters. A continuing cholera epidemic has claimed thousands of lives and there has been a food shortage after Hurricane Sandy last year. Mr Swire added: “We have a lot invested in Haiti and we want to help because there are concerns about the government being strong enough to deliver the reforms that are needed.”
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As well as the embassy in Haiti, Britain has also opened a consulate in the Brazilian city of Recife and a embassy in El Salvador. Another new embassy will open in Paraguay later this year. Britain last had an embassy in Haiti in 1966 and has had links with the country since 1833. The new embassy will be within the Canadian embassy in Port au Prince to reduce costs.

5/22/2013
New York Times
By RASHMEE ROSHAN LALL
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The Pétionville suburb of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, has long been a tourism-friendly area, with a smattering of boutiques, galleries and restaurants.
Connect With Us on Twitter A scene last month at a camp for people displaced by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Now it is home to a Best Western Premier, the first of several of the hotelier’s upscale branded properties that are planned throughout the Caribbean. The $15 million hotel is also the first in the area affiliated with an American hospitality company since the Holiday Inn closed 15 years ago.
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Haiti remains the poorest country in the hemisphere, and a high-end hotel in a residential community just beyond the dusty warren of streets in its capital seems incongruous. But this 106-room Best Western has embraced its surroundings, or at least a version of them. So in addition to a restaurant, two bars, a spa and a pool, 600 works of Haitian art are on display on the hotel’s walls, many of them made of repurposed materials like recycled tires, oil drums and aluminum sheeting. The staff, mostly local, greets visitors with a welcome drink.
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Still, at $162 a night, the hotel is well beyond the reach of most Haitians, 78 percent of whom live on $2 a day, according to the Haitian government. So who is the Best Western Premier for? “Eighty or 90 percent of our customers are in business,” said Ronald Maidens, Best Western’s general manager. Because the country has been in a state of regeneration since being struck by an earthquake in 2010 — drawing $7.5 billion in aid, not all of it yet spent — there is no shortage of businesspeople, nongovernmental-organization workers and filmmakers and writers seeking to document it all passing through. They are the target market. Though people invested in Haiti’s renewal are expected to fill the hotel, there are efforts to keep the country’s chaos at bay. In late March, just days before the hotel opened, the city administration barred residents from washing their cars and motorcycles on the street — a common practice — in the vicinity of the hotel, or risk a fine of 5,000 gourdes (roughly $115 in U.S. dollars). And the hotel, which is a six-mile traffic-clogged, pothole-ridden drive from the airport, is setting up a help booth so that arriving guests don’t have to weave their way through hordes of people clamoring to carry bags or get a taxi. “It is a challenge, but almost everything here is,” said Stanley Handal, a local businessman who owns the development with two Indians who live in the United States, Hiroo Melwani and Kenny Narwani. “Yet, we started to build a year after the 2010 earthquake and finished in just two years. This hotel serves a real need.”
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Best Western isn’t the first luxury property in the region. The palatial Royal Oasis, which was built with a $2 million investment from the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, opened late last year with rooms starting at $250 a night. And a Marriott broke ground late last year on a property in Port-au-Prince that is expected to open in early 2015. With the latest openings, Haiti is roughly two-thirds of the way toward its goal of having 1,000 rooms. Some markers, like a recent dip in rates at the Best Western Premier, suggest that demand may be softer than thought. To kick-start its tourism industry, Haiti is marketing itself as a destination for those of Haitian descent and adventure travelers, in addition to businesspeople. There is just one exception, said Stéphanie Villedrouin, Haiti’s tourism minister. “I’m not pushing voluntourism,” she said, capturing the challenge of selling her politically tumultuous, tragedy-scarred country as a tourist destination. “If an actor comes to Haiti to visit an NGO, it’s good for their P.R., not for the country’s P.R. Come to Haiti to have a good time. For leisure.” For the moment, that remains an aspiration. The few people hurrying through the lobby on a recent visit looked as if they were in Haiti to work, to do business. The typical visitor stays three days, Mr. Maidens, the general manager, said. Just long enough to get the job done.
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A version of this article appeared in print on May 26, 2013, on page TR11 of the New York edition with the headline: An Unlikely Location for Luxury.

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) will support a $3 million technical cooperation project to help the government of Haiti test different renewable energy solutions with the goal of expanding rural electrification. Haiti has the lowest level of electrification in the Americas. In the countryside, over 70 percent of the population lacks access to electricity. The new project will finance feasibility studies and pilot projects to test models based on solar energy, sustainable biomass, and hybrid approaches combining more efficient uses of fossil fuel with renewable energy sources. The technical cooperation will also fund studies to determine the feasibility of introducing natural gas in Haiti, which relies heavily on imports of more expensive and polluting fossil fuels to generate electricity.
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In addition, the project will assist the Haitian government in establishing an office for rural electrification and in developing regulations to promote the use of cleaner energy resources and energy efficiency for rural electrification. “These studies will shed light on significant knowledge gaps. Our goal is to give the Haitian government a clear picture of what it will need to carry out a successful rural electrification plan using renewable energy sources,” said the project’s team leader, IDB energy senior specialist Christiaan Gischler. The resources for this technical cooperation will come from the Haiti Reconstruction Fund ($2 million), the IDB’s Sustainable Energy and Climate Change Initiative ($500,000) and the IDB-administered Korea Fund for Technology and Innovation ($500,000).

5/8/2013
Quartz
By Tate Watkins
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CARACOL, HAITI—Along the highway that parallels Haiti’s north coast, not far from the bay where Christopher Columbus’s Santa Maria is believed to have shipwrecked on Christmas Day in 1492, giant billboards with smiling faces dot the landscape of alternating crop fields and scrub acacia. The billboards carry the country’s new mantra: “Haiti is open for business.” The cliché gains at least a little credence in this case from a $300 million industrial park, backed by the US government and other donors. The single biggest investment in Haiti since the devastating earthquake of January 2010, the park symbolizes the debate about foreign-led economic development in very poor nations. Its backers say it will bring tens of thousands of jobs to a country in desperate need of them, while critics see it as merely another way for foreign firms to exploit cheap labor. The reality is that the park could be both a quick way to create jobs and a means to boost the nation toward industrialization—and many locals, at least, say it gives them hope. But its success depends on manufacturers there making the transition fairly fast from cheap clothes to higher-value products—or else on the US continuing to give preferential trade terms to Haitian goods.
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The industrial park sits just south of the small coastal town of Caracol and employs 1,600 people today, in an area where there are three main alternatives: farming, fishing, and leaving. The Haitian government estimates unemployment at 40.6%, but the official figure pales next to the reality that around three-quarters of Haitians struggle to scratch out a living each day in the informal sector. “We had learned that supporting long-term prosperity in Haiti meant more than providing aid,” US secretary of state Hillary Clinton said at the October inauguration of the park, where visitors included her husband, ex-president Bill Clinton, and celebrity actors Ben Stiller and Sean Penn. “It required investments in infrastructure and the economy that would help the Haitian people achieve their own dreams.” Haiti is not the easiest place to run a business. It lacks reliable electricity, good roads and ports, and solid institutions. But it managed to attract Korean textile manufacturer Sae-A Trading Co., among the largest in the world, as the anchor tenant of Caracol Industrial Park. The US government put up $124 million for an on-site power plant and other infrastructure. The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) promised $100 million to build the park. The government of Haiti gave Sae-A a 15-year tax holiday. Sae-A itself pledged $78 million to cover equipment and operations, with a reported initial investment of $39 million.
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Sae-A public affairs officer Karen Seo says the “decision to invest in Haiti became clear” with the international aid package. But there was one other sweetener, which officials say was the linchpin of the whole deal: US legislation that, with a few conditions, gives apparel imports from Haiti duty-free status. Backers claim that Caracol Park could eventually create 60,000 jobs, albeit mostly low-paying work assembling garments. The minimum daily wage for textile workers in Haiti is 200 Haitian gourdes, about $5. (In 2011, the UN reported that 75% of Haitians live on less than $2 per day.) The project has been controversial. Building it meant displacing about 350 families from the fertile stretch of state-owned land that an American consulting firm identified as a suitable spot. The area contains an important watershed, which makes it prime farming land, and some worry that the park’s water usage and disposal could upset the local ecology. Most residents either fish or grow crops such as black beans or plantains. Mangroves grow in the bay, home to one of Haiti’s few intact coral reefs. Both guard against shoreline erosion and provide wildlife habitat; a 2009 study estimated the direct economic value of the mangroves and reef at $110 million. Local officials say they weren’t consulted about the park’s potential location.
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Last month’s collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh has put the conditions of workers who make clothes for the rich world in the spotlight. In Haiti, US trade preferences require the creation of a program called Better Work, run by the International Labor Organization, to bring labor laws up to international standards and inspect factories. Many factories don’t yet meet the standards (pdf, p. 15), particularly on health and safety and minimum wages, but the Caracol facility is too new to have been included in the latest Better Work report. Others worry about the social consequences. Amy Wilentz, one of the best known American writers on Haiti, called the park “a new kind of plantation” and compared low-wage factory work to slavery. Others have decried the idea of using low-paying factory jobs as a step in the country’s development. Some say that Haiti has already tried this strategy, and failed, or that the investment would be better spent in agriculture.
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It’s certainly true that Haiti’s apparel sector has boomed before. A 2010 Congressional Research Service report estimates that it employed up to 100,000 people between the 1960s and the end of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986. A military coup in 1991 led to a trade embargo that hamstrung the industry, at the same time that competition was growing from regional neighbors like Honduras and emerging markets in Asia. Hans Garoute, a Haitian social entrepreneur, remembers that period. At the time, he says, US manufacturers in Haiti that had initially produced only low-value goods like t-shirts and underwear were starting to make products that command higher prices and wages. But in the political chaos of the late ‘80s, he watched many of those companies move production to Asia. ”Today,” he says, “we’re back to t-shirt.” Apparel manufacturers have slowly rebuilt since the end of the trade embargo, with the help of a US law passed in 2006 that allowed Haitian apparel to enter America duty-free. The law, known as HOPE (the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Act) was amended and expanded in 2008, and after the 2010 the earthquake, expanded once again through HELP (the Haiti Economic Lift Program). Employment in Haiti’s textile sector has rebounded to about 30,000. In 2009, knit and woven apparel accounted for 92% of Haiti’s exports to the United States. Haiti needs growth like that to counterbalance its large trade deficit—$3 billion in 2011 according to the World Bank, or 41% of GDP. Haiti exports crops such as mangoes, cacao, and coffee, but agricultural products comprise only about 6% of all exports. The country imports 80% of the rice it consumes, mostly from the United States. Decades of deforestation and soil erosion, the lack of a modern farming sector, and government subsidies doled out to American farmers make it difficult for Haitian farmers to compete globally. “Working in a factory is not a gift,” says Garoute, “but believe me, sitting in Trou-du-Nord and do nothing, and you are 24 years old, that is worse.” In 1992, Garoute founded INDEPCO, a non-profit network of tailors across Haiti who sew school uniforms and other garments for the domestic market. It also does training sessions, like one it held last year in the northern town of Trou-du-Nord for a group destined to work at the Caracol park.
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But in the global textile industry, margins in low-value production can hardly pay Haiti’s $5 per day minimum wage, Garoute says. “They have China making t-shirt,” he says. “They have India making t-shirt. You have Pakistan making t-shirt. And don’t forget, those countries make the raw material as well.” He says that Haiti’s textile industry will only grow into higher-value-added production with proper investment in the workforce. “This isn’t the ideal job, but it’s better than nothing” At the industrial park, female workers wearing chartreuse aprons and headscarves stream out of the blue factory buildings on their lunch break. Frandline Joseph sits outside. She sews for Sae-A and says she doesn’t like the work: “I don’t have time to sit.” But she also says that she had no job before her current one, and life has improved since finding employment. “Now I work for 200 gourdes,” she says, and can pay her daughter’s school fees in a country with a virtually non-existent public education system. “Before the park, I worked for nothing.”
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Her story is similar to other published accounts, and that of Rosedaline Jean, a 22-year-old who’s worked for Sae-A for five months. “Before, I lived only by the grace of God,” says Jean. “Although I don’t have a husband or children, my life wasn’t easy because I wasn’t working. When I got here, a lot changed in my life. “This isn’t the ideal job,” she continues, “but it’s better than nothing. I don’t intend to make a career in this job. I plan to start a business, and I’m already saving for it. But it’s difficult, because my salary is practically nothing.” Haiti’s northern coast faces the United States, and so it is from this part of the country that people leave on makeshift boats, bound, they hope, for a better life. “The park can be good if it can give you a job,” Edouard Riche, a maintenance worker there, said, as we watched a couple of fishing boats skimming the surface of the water. “If you have work in Haiti,” he said, “you don’t need to take a boat abroad to look for work.” Sae-A shipped 76,000 t-shirts to Wal-Mart in October of last year, the first products from the factory. It now employs 1,400 people and says that number will double by the end of 2013. It hopes to create 20,000 jobs in total over the coming years. The park’s only other tenant is Peintures Caraïbes, a Haitian company that makes paint for Sherwin-Williams and employs about 200 people. Last month, US garment company Safi Apparel signed a contract to become the park’s third occupant. Georges Sassine, a Haitian textile manufacturer and and the former head of SONAPI, the Haitian industrial parks agency, says the industrial park’s cheap-manufacturing strategy is “just a time-buying procedure.” But he is adamant that the Caracol development is viable only thanks to the duty-free access to America. The extension granted by US lawmakers after the earthquake continues that tariff exemption until 2020. Whether Haiti can develop a higher-value-added textile sector by then—or whether US lawmakers extend the legislation again—remains to be seen.

http://www.hougansydney.com/whats-happening-in-haiti.php?fb_comment_id=f...

3/29/2013
Caribbean Journal staff
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South Korean firm Willbes Co, Ltd will be expanding its facility in Haiti’s Port-au-Prince with up to $4 million in loans approved by the Inter-American Development Bank. The facility at the Parc Industriel Metropolitain in Haiti’s capital could lead to jobs and training for 918 new Haitian workers, according to the bank. “The Bank´s loan will enable Willbes to pursue a longer-term expansion creating additional jobs and associated economic benefits for Haiti,” said Alexandre Fernandes de Oliveira, Chief of the Industries and Services Division in the Structured and Corporate Finance Department. ¨It is expected that the company will hire significantly more women than men, contributing to greater gender equality in the workplace — the project will also help ensure compliance with international environmental and labour standards.” The expansion, which is slated to take several years, could ultimately add up to 4,500 jobs to Haiti’s economy, the bank said, with “direct and indirect benefits that would affect as many as 38,700 people.” Willbes, which is based in Cheonan, South Korea, is the oldest and largest private investor in Haiti’s garment sector. The expansion aims to increase sewing capacity by 37 percent.

A U.S. hotel chain opened a hotel in Haiti on Thursday for the first time in 15 years. Best Western International has completed construction on a $15 million, seven-story hotel that features 106 guest rooms and several suites. The towering facility is located in the hillside district of Petionville and is targeted at the business traveler. The new hotel is part of a larger hotel boom in Haiti that has taken hold since the earthquake in 2010 destroyed thousands of buildings. To date, developers are building or planning at least seven hotels and many hope that the businesses will create thousands of jobs in a country where unemployment hovers around 60 percent. Together, the projects add up to more than a $100 million investment. In December, the Royal Oasis, run by Spanish firm Occidental Hotel & Resorts, opened as an upscale hotel a few blocks from the Best Western Premier now stands. The Marriott International, also in December, began construction on a $45 million hotel that's scheduled to open in 2015. Even before the earthquake, which officials say destroyed more than 800 hotel rooms, it was difficult to find hotels in Haiti that met international standards. Those that did were often filled with diplomats and humanitarian workers. The last U.S. hotel chain to run a hotel in Haiti was the Holiday Inn. It closed in 1998 because of political instability.

Miami Herald
By Jacqueline Charles
jcharles@MiamiHerald.com
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The first U.S. brand — and Haiti’s second luxury hotel to open in three months — will welcome its first guests Thursday. Designed for the business traveler, the Best Western Premier, a 106-room seven-story hotel in tony Petionville is finally making its debut. A soft-opening is planned for April 4, but guests will get their first glimpse before then. “It feels amazing,” said Haiti-born Chris Handal, who had planned the hotel before the country’s monstrous Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake. “It’s really gorgeous.” To give the hotel its own “Haitian flavor within the Best Western standard,” it will feature the work of Haitian artisans, including local artwork. This is in tribute, Handal said, to sister-in-law Paola Handal, who died in the quake. Room rates range from $160 to $275 per room per night, plus tax, and government rates are available, said Dallas-based Aimbridge Hospitality, which operates the Best Western brand. The Best Western Premier is located in Petionville and within walking distance of two other luxury brands. The 128-room Royal Oasis, operated by Spanish firm Occidental Hotel & Resorts, opened in December as Haiti’s first internationally branded upscale hotel. Next door, a new El Rancho, operated by the Spanish hotel chain NH, also will open soon.
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U.S. brands Marriott and Comfort Suites are also expected to open soon in Haiti, which is expected to inaugurate 1,200 additional hotel rooms this year at a cost of $161 million, according to the tourism ministry. “We are very excited and privileged to open the newest full service hotel on the beautiful island of Haiti,” said Rich Cortese, senior vice president of Caribbean operations and development for Dallas-based Aimbridge Hospitality, which operates the Best Western. The company has hired 95 employees, the majority of them local residents, along with a seasoned management staff. In addition to the local artwork, the Best Western boasts executive suites, 42-inch flat screen TVs, wireless internet access, a French-inspired restaurant, whisky bar and full-service spa.

GEORGETOWN, Guyana (GINA) – The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) can play a major role in Haiti and vice versa, Haitian president and current CARICOM chairman Michel Martelly told the media, noting that his country needs investments to develop. The catastrophic 7.0 magnitude earthquake in 2010 affected about three million people and caused major damage to the country’s capital, Port-au-Prince. Speaking on the issue of the free movement treaty that CARICOM has implemented, Martelly said that strategies have to be created such as not to have a mass exodus of its citizens. What are needed he said, are investments that can bring jobs to Haitians. “Instead of having Haitians come here looking for jobs, why don’t entrepreneurs from here go to Haiti and create these jobs and both countries can benefit?” he asked. Martelly, who was on a two-day visit to Guyana, described his trip as a very good one, but regretted leaving after two days as he wanted to see more of the country. As chairman of CARICOM, he said that it was important for him to visit to headquarters to meet staffers and other key personnel. “I held discussions with the secretary general and his executive management team on matters which came out from the highly successful and transitional meeting held in Haiti last month so that we could move forward on some of the decisions. These included food safety and accessibility, which is important as we seek to take advantage of the trade opportunities available globally and regionally so that our products would meet the standards demanded by the various countries,” he stated.
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In fact, Haiti is taking the lead on this matter, he said, and in fact, last night that country’s ministers of trade and foreign affairs held discussions on this matter with their local counterparts, and with the secretary general and his technical team. Other issues discussed included, “Follow up decisions regarding security, the reform process in CARICOM, preparation for transportation, the launch of the approved CARICOM Aid for Trade Strategy and a concentrated programme of assistance to help Haiti participate more fully in CARICOM,” Martelly said. As a result of his visit, and after a series of high level talks with both government and CARICOM officials, the regional body will be visiting his country shortly on a fact finding mission. The team will be headed by CARICOM Secretary General Irwin LaRocque and intends to meet with key stakeholders in that country, including parliamentarians, officials, private sector and civil society. The Haitian president speaking on the regional education sector, said, “We had a very good meeting in earlier in March with the Chancellor of the University of the West Indies and his team, The University of the West Indies and our Ministry of Education, and our Universities will be working together to strengthen tertiary education in Haiti.”
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The Caribbean Examinations Council will also be engaged, Martelly said, in an attempt to lift that country’s educational standards. Asked about the promised aid following the devastating earthquake that his country is still recovering from, the president said that Haiti is currently experiencing two situations; firstly much of that aid had not been delivered and secondly as the promised funds have not materialised his fellow countrymen and women are using the chance to escape from their dependency on aid and foreign assistance, and are showing how a major catastrophe can attract regional enterprises. “Reinvigorate the energy sector, reinvigorate the agriculture sector, reinvigorate construction, we need ports, airports, roads, buildings, there are things that can be done, because what we want to do is create jobs for our people,” he told the media.
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He added that of the monies allocated, his government has not been able to get any directly and was not even prepared to handle such an event. The country is now better prepared for disasters as a civil defence unit has been set up, more emergency workers have been trained and there are more special police and relief workers. A building code has also been instituted and is now enforced. The issue of the United Nations security mission, spending $800 million annually, raised serious questions for Martelly. “I’m wondering if investing this money into reconstruction, development would have been a better investment because security yes but real insecurity will prevail when you have people who are not working, people who are looking for food, people who are hungry, and people who want to feel free,” he said. He said that maybe it was time to convert the UN’s mission from that of security to one of development. According to the Haitian president, his relationship with CARICOM is still growing and it is important that his people, as well the regional body understand and get to know each other better.

By TRENTON DANIEL
Associated Press
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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- A U.N. envoy in Haiti said Friday that the Caribbean nation is "not yet" ready for foreign investment. The remarks by U.N. Acting Special Representative Nigel Fisher challenged a mantra often championed by Haitian President Michel Martelly's government. The slogan "Haiti is open for business" has been a rallying cry for the government as it seeks outside investors to help the country rebuild from the devastating 2010 earthquake. "We can blame external partners for their slowness to pay the promised assistance," Fisher said at his first news conference since taking his post earlier this month. "But the problem is much broader. When friends of Haiti and potential investors are wondering if 'Haiti is open for business,' ... some say, yes. But the majority, after a period of reflection, is saying, 'Not yet.'" Fisher cited the bidding process for contracts, not enough transparency to ensure healthy competition and concerns about an independent justice system as reasons for outsiders to hesitate in doing business in Haiti. He also said Martelly has identified areas that require reform but that those efforts are only in process.
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Haiti's economy has not improved as many had hoped. The gross national product grew about 2.5 percent last year, compared to a projected 8 percent, Fisher said. Fisher also reiterated concerns within the international community that Haitian authorities have yet to organize legislative and local elections that were supposed to have been held in November 2011. The delay stems from an inability for government officials to agree on the composition of the electoral body. The U.N., United States and European Union have stepped up pressure in recent weeks for Haiti to hold the vote before year's end. The vote seeks to fill 10 seats in the 30-member Senate and hundreds of seats at the local level, an election almost certain to be fraught with political tension. The Senate has been working at a third of its capacity and the government has appointed an unknown number of mayors to fill vacancies at the municipal level. Martelly said at a news conference Friday on the grounds of the National Palace that he has been meeting with lawmakers to figure out how the country can hold elections. The European Union would contribute 5 million euros ($6.7 million) for the vote, he said.

BY DENIS O’BRIEN AND ARNE SORENSON
www.clintonglobalinitiative.org
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We’ll never forget our first impression of post-earthquake Haiti, when piles of rubble buried entire stretches of Port-au-Prince. Pulverized homes and impassable streets became chilling symbols of a nation’s physical and economic collapse. Three years later, most of that debris has been removed from the capital’s roads, and with it have gone many of the social and structural obstacles to Haiti’s emerging markets. For foreign investors with integrity and foresight, the indomitable Caribbean country is open for business. This includes a new Marriott hotel that broke ground within the past few weeks.
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Following the earthquake, tourism was the last thing on our minds. As Haiti counted casualties, South Florida Marriott hotels became solemn sites of song, prayer and mourning for more than 1,000 Haitian associates. The tally of family members lost climbed into the double digits for several grief-stricken employees at a Marriott resort in Ft. Lauderdale. As the associates pushed onward with their lives, they provided Marriott’s leadership with more than just inspiration — they also had a solution. “Build it in Haiti,” they urged. Ever forward-looking, they introduced the idea of helping the nation’s beleaguered economy by bringing Marriott’s brand — and thus much-needed jobs, skills training and tourism — to Port-au-Prince. And we will.
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Just last month, construction began on Digicel and Marriott’s $45 million, 175-room joint venture in the capital’s Turgeau section. Expected to open in early 2015, it will bring Haiti its first Marriott and four-star branded hotel. Such undertakings are needed to boost the tourism infrastructure of a country that lost not only homes and schools in the rubble, but also accommodations for the foreign leaders and investors who can help build them back. We want our hotel to shine as a beacon for other companies seeking an opportunity to build up their business and rebuild a nation. As Haiti’s largest employer and investor, Digicel is intimately familiar with the possibilities — and challenges — that lie in Haiti’s economic revival, and the company is pleased to see that the nation now offers a viable environment for foreign investors. Here is some advice for tapping into Haiti’s potential while spurring a speedier recovery:
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• First, work with Haiti’s government, don’t circumvent it. In addition to a social responsibility, cooperation is common sense, especially with an administration as business-friendly as President Michel Martelly’s. The president has ardently told the international community that the time to invest is now, with incentives including tax breaks and eased property ownership restrictions.
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• Second, a successful venture in Haiti is an inclusive one. Incorporating local workers and experts increases the trust and purchasing power of the community. Fortunately, initiatives in place are giving the talent pool a boost. The Digicel Foundation has built more than 80 schools to date, and a reported 1 million students have been subsidized to receive a free education.
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To further develop the talent that will move Haiti forward, Marriott made a commitment through the Clinton Global Initiative to create a workforce development program in partnership with Haiti’s tourism ministry. Even before Marriott opens its doors, we will train hospitality workers through paid internships in our other Caribbean hotels and report on the efficacy of existing programs. Research shows that Haiti’s emerging tourism industry has the potential to double by 2022 with wider foreign investment, and through our CGI commitment, we will help generate a blueprint for this growth. However, accelerating economic expansion in Haiti will take dedication, considering the challenges that remain. A housing shortage, high unemployment, and the threat of cholera have been exacerbated by the exodus of outside organizations that many disillusioned Haitians believe weren’t in it for the long haul.
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• Thus, the final lesson: Making good on long-term commitments is key to supporting the stability of a developing nation and the success of any enterprise. The rewards are there, not for fly-by-night ventures, but for big picture investments in Haiti’s future.
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We hope foreign investors find inspiration in our endeavor and see that whether it’s a hotel, plant or factory, it makes sense to build it in Haiti. In the world’s most resilient nation, the rubble and obstacles to responsible commerce are disappearing. And so are our excuses. Arne Sorenson is president and CEO of Marriott and Denis O’Brien is chairman and founder of Digicel.

1/21/2013
Global and Mail
LAURENT LAMOTHE
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It has been three years since Haiti experienced one of the most severe natural catastrophes in recorded history. Just over a week ago, millions of Haitians commemorated this tragedy in honour of family members, friends and colleagues they lost on Jan. 12, 2010. After three years, some of you are asking: Why continue to help Haiti with donations or even through government aid? Has the money really helped the country, since it still seems to be faced with so many problems. First, let me thank you for your help. Canadians have been very generous toward Haiti after the earthquake and, thanks to you, our most vulnerable people have received food, drinkable water, shelter, medical care and education. For that, we are extremely grateful. Also, you should know that Haiti is in a better position today than it was 20 months earlier, when President Michel Martelly took office. We still face many problems and challenges, but nearly 80 per cent of the people living in camps after the earthquake are now returning to their communities, while 95 per cent of the debris has been collected. We started rebuilding our ministries and other public administration buildings, as well as our schools and hospitals. We have launched significant programs, such as social safety nets for the most vulnerable, subsidized by the government itself, and they have already reached more than four million people in 2012.
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We have dismantled five of the largest criminal organizations in the country, and this is reflected in our crime statistics. We are strengthening our police force, and technological resources. Haiti has the same homicide rate as Long Beach, Calif. We have introduced free education at the primary level, and 1.27-million children now attend school free of charge. For many of them, this is the first time. We will also teach reading and writing to more than 300,000 adults in 2013. We rebuilt the main airport in Port-au-Prince and are upgrading three others near tourism centres. We are building hundreds of kilometres of roads. We are investing in health care and drinkable water, and we have put in place a plan to eradicate cholera. In the last week of December, cholera cases accounted for only 7 per cent from the peak reached in 2011.
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We have maintained a stable economy, and have opened a new industrial park in the north of the country. Foreign investments were up 21 per cent in 2012, compared with 2011. This brings me to my third point. Although we are very grateful, we would prefer not being dependent on your goodwill. What we really want, what we would prefer above all, is that your private sector invests in Haiti to create jobs that would generate much-needed tax revenue for the government. What we would prefer is that you spend your holidays in Haiti to support the tourism industry. You are welcome, and you will be safe. It will take time before our government’s vision bears fruit, and we need your help to get there. The earthquake marked us, without a doubt. But it does not define us. Haiti is not a case study in development. Haiti is 10.4-million people, of whom 35 per cent are children under 15. The country has always had great potential – and this is still the case. Our ill fortune has long been a matter of bad governance. And now things have changed. There is a new government, and a new approach to doing things that is dedicated to fixing past mistakes. We are working tirelessly to curb corruption. We have reduced administrative costs in order to maximize the impact of programs in key sectors. To face our challenges, we have defined a national strategic development plan. We know what is wrong, and are working toward overcoming our challenges. We seek nothing less than to support our people and care for them. We need partners like Canada to achieve this. We want our nation to rise. For the moment, we can’t do it without your help. Laurent Lamothe is the Prime Minister of Haiti.

The Economist
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“HAITI is open for business”, Michel Martelly, the country’s president since May 2011, likes to proclaim. His government has backed up this talk by making it easier for foreigners to own property and by setting as a goal that Haiti climb into the top 50 countries in the World Bank’s ranking for ease of doing business (it now comes 174th out of 185). In November the president opened a gleaming arrivals hall at Toussaint Louverture airport. Mr Martelly himself is in such constant motion abroad—courting donors and investors, he says—that his peregrinations and the per diems alleged to be associated with them have become a source of mordant jokes. But gangbuster growth, hoped for as the country rebuilds itself after the earthquake of January 12th 2010 that wrecked the capital, Port-au-Prince, and killed tens of thousands of people, has failed to materialise. In the 12 months to the end of September the economy expanded by a modest 2.5%. It was the second year of dashed expectations: the IMF had forecast growth of 8% in both 2011 and 2012.
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Thanks in part to tropical storms that in 2012 inflicted what the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation called “colossal” damage on Haiti’s farmers, the cost of living, especially for food and housing, has risen dramatically. Most of the donor-supported cash-for-work programmes set up after the earthquake have come to an end. Many of the NGOs that thronged the country, and which threatened to eclipse the government, have departed. “We’ve gone from being the Republic of NGOs to the Republic of Unemployment,” says Frantz Duval, the editor of the country’s leading newspaper, Le Nouvelliste. Around three-quarters of Haitians are either unemployed or try to make ends meet in the informal economy. Mr Martelly won 67.5% of the votes in an election in which less than a quarter of the electorate voted. He remains popular. But his critics grumble that his policies amount to putting Haiti up for sale. They argue that 15-year tax holidays offered to foreign investors will hinder the government’s efforts to cut its dependence on dwindling foreign aid. For the moment this complaint seems academic: despite the tax breaks, as well as the promise of duty-free import of components and export of final goods and cheap labour, few foreign investors have set up shop.
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The United States staked its prestige and $124m—its biggest single post-quake investment—on Caracol, an industrial park in the north of the country. So far the park has only one tenant, Sae-A, a South Korean textile manufacturer, with 1,050 workers (though its owners claim the number could rise to 20,000). With its colourfully painted, dedicated power plant, Caracol is still a beautiful ghost town. Haiti’s prime minister, Laurent Lamothe, a 40-year-old telecoms entrepreneur, calls Caracol a “work in progress”. He says a Haitian-owned paint factory will soon open there, and a Dominican clothing firm recently signed a contract. Some observers think that potential investors are deterred by fear of social instability and lack of clarity over land rights. Mr Lamothe replies that the government is conscious that Haiti lacks a “perfect” business environment but is “making great strides in creating it”.
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The problem is that at the same time as Haiti needs investment to generate social stability and economic growth, it also needs social stability and better infrastructure to attract investment. There are some signs of progress, besides the new airport terminal. Most of the earthquake rubble is finally gone from the capital’s streets. The most visible refugee camps have been emptied. Several new hotels, aimed at attracting those elusive business visitors, are due to open. The first of them, the Royal Oasis, welcomed hundreds of high-society Haitians to its opening in December, where they frolicked in its five bars and around its still-unfinished infinity pool. And yet more than 350,000 Haitians are still living in tents in scattered camps; many of those who have moved out have returned to substandard housing in hillside shanties and seaside slums. A cholera outbreak that has killed more than 7,500 people since October 2010 remains a threat, with cases spiking after each tropical storm. Epidemiologists blame poor hygiene at a military base of the UN peacekeeping mission for the outbreak, though the UN has denied responsibility.
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Billions of dollars of aid were pledged to Haiti after the earthquake, amid much talk about “building back better” and working with—not around—the government so as not to perpetuate the “Republic of NGOs”. But according to reports from the Centre for Global Development, a Washington think-tank, and the UN Special Envoy for Haiti, many aid pledges were unfulfilled. And in practice, most of the money that was disbursed went to a handful of international bodies, which mainly spent it on temporary relief (tents, shelters, water-tankers and so on) and the salaries of expat staff. Grand schemes to remake Haiti came almost to nought, partly because they lacked local input: outsiders have finally come round to the view of many Haitians that what is most needed is speedy and cheap housing. Donor-fatigue is mounting. The UN humanitarian “cluster” system, intended to co-ordinate the response to the crisis, ended with 2012. The UN has launched a new humanitarian appeal for $144m to tackle cholera, homelessness and food shortages, but a similar appeal for $151m in 2012 went largely unfunded.
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Direct budget-support for the government totalled less in 2011 and 2012 than before the quake, according to the IMF. The government is also hampered by its lack of suivi, or implementation capacity. Many public employees are time-servers who owe their jobs to past patronage; many in Mr Martelly’s administration lack experience of government. Donors complain that it is hard for them to support projects that lack the proper paperwork. As a result, hospitals stand unfinished. Rebuilding of the main Hôpital Général has stopped. To fill the gap, Mr Martelly relies on Petrocaribe, an aid scheme set up by Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, which supplies Haiti and several other countries with subsidised oil. By reselling a chunk of the oil, the government gets up to $400m a year, or about 4% of GDP. Mr Martelly plans to use this to rebuild a corridor of government offices in Port-au-Prince and to pay for several social programmes, including cash transfers to the poorest. The aid comes without the strings that many other donors attach. No wonder that Mr Martelly and Mr Lamothe attended a mass a few days before Christmas to pray for Mr Chávez’s recovery from cancer surgery.

http://www.nytimes.com/video/2012/07/05/world/americas/100000001632553/a...

12/21/2012
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Haiti will invest $17.25 million in programs to promote the development of micro-, small, and medium-size enterprises, and support the launch of leasing services to stimulate economic growth and generate sustainable employment, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) announced today. One of the programs will expand a pilot project for sustainable textile production in priority economic areas. The program will include the use of a business incubator and the creation of "microparks" that foster micro-, small, and medium-size enterprises linked to industry, tourism, and agribusiness value chains. Through the program, the business incubator is expected to support 56 new companies by providing technical, administrative, and financial support in the form of seed capital to implement medium- and long-term business plans. The program will also include the creation of six microparks for firms that cannot afford their own production facilities. The microparks will give producers access to strategic investments in basic and productive infrastructure, technical assistance, and training in organization to support the generation of sustainable income.
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A second program will encourage the creation of financing sources for small firms and agricultural enterprises. The program will finance loans for the creation of new leasing companies for machinery and other productive equipment. An invitation will be made for the submission of leasing projects aimed at micro-, small, and medium-size enterprises, including small farmers. Resources will be provided to projects that demonstrate a potential for solid financial returns as well as a positive impact on beneficiary firms. Most of resources for this program will be provided by the government of Haiti. The programs will be carried out by the Ministry of Economy and Finance in coordination with the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. Program resources will be provided by the government and the private sector of Haiti ($7 million), the IDB ($5.25 million), and the Haiti Reconstruction Fund ($5 million).

12/18/2012
Viet Nam News
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Vietnam sees a rich future for its friendship with Haiti, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung said during talks with his counterpart from the Republic of Haiti, Laurent Salvador Lamothe, in Hanoi yesterday. At the talks, Dung applauded the four-day visit - the first to Vietnam by a high-ranking Haitian leader – and said Lamothe's presence will help strengthen the friendship and co-operation between the two countries. He spoke highly of Haiti's achievements in maintaining political stability, achieving socio-economic development and expanding foreign relations, and admired the Haitian Government and people's efforts to overcome the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. Lamothe praised the Vietnamese people's struggle for national independence, freedom and reunification, and thanked Vietnam for its valuable assistance to Haiti after the earthquake. He affirmed Haiti's interest in developing cooperation with Vietnam in food security, telecommunications, trade, culture and education.
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The two leaders agreed on measures to boost cooperation in science-technology, education, health, food security and poverty reduction. They also discussed increasing cooperation in the areas of trade, telecommunications, agriculture and construction and pledged to discuss the establishment of a long-term strategic partnership on food security. The two sides agreed to work on legal mechanisms to increase bilateral ties and begin negotiations on issues such as investment promotion and protection and visa exemption for holders of diplomatic and official passports. Both leaders praised the success of Natcom, a joint venture between Vietnam's Military Telecoms Group (Viettel) and Haiti's Ministry of Economy and Finance, and noted that the model should be expanded to other fields. Lamothe voiced his support for Aseans determination to settle the East Sea disputes through peaceful negotiations on the basis of international law and the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
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Following the talks, both PMs signed a Vietnam-Haiti Joint Communique and witnessed the signing of a memorandum of understanding for the establishment of a strategic investment partnership between Viettel and the Haiti Government. During his visit, Lamothe also met with Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong. Trong affirmed that Vietnam treasures the development of friendship and cooperation with all Latin-American countries. Lamothe pledged to further deepen ties between the two countries in a more practical and effective manner. He expressed his wish to share national management knowledge with Vietnam and strengthen bilateral ties in many fields, especially food security. He affirmed that Haiti will open an embassy in Hanoi in the future.
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At a meeting with National Assembly Chairman Nguyen Sinh Hung the same day, Lamothe vowed to develop cooperation with Vietnam in food security, telecommunications, trade, culture and education. Hung suggested the two parliaments promote cooperation and exchanges to enhance the friendship between the two countries, and that they work together to encourage peace and development in their regions and the rest of the world. The Haitian leader also met with President Truong Tan Sang yesterday. Lamothe said Haiti would like to learn from Vietnam's agricultural and food security experiences and has always admired Vietnam's role and position at regional and international forums. He also suggested Vietnamese firms invest in textiles and garments for export to Haiti, adding that the country will create favourable conditions for the companies to operate effectively.

12/14/2012
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PORT AU PRINCE, Haiti -- Clinton Bush Haiti Fund co-chairs arrived in Haiti on Wednesday to meet with several of the small businesses and workforce development programs the Fund has supported. Co-chairs Joshua Bolten, former chief of staff to President George W. Bush, and Laura Graham, chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, are taking this opportunity to visit as the Fund prepares to commit its remaining funds in 2012. Once it does so, the Fund will step back, empowering Haiti to chart its own successful future. “By providing training, increasing access to financing, and improving the livelihoods of individual Haitians across the country, we are reaching the people -- from doctors to small business owners to farmers -- who are building a stronger Haiti,” Gary Edson, CEO of the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, said. “Importantly, the results we see from projects we have funded are just the beginning: we look forward to seeing their progress in the years to come.”
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As part of the co-chairs’ visit, they are attending the opening of the Royal Oasis Hotel in Port-au-Prince, which the Fund helped finance. During its construction phase, the hotel supported more than 400 construction jobs. Going forward, the hotel will employ close to 200 staff, and will support even more indirect jobs, ranging from restaurant suppliers to local artisans. On Thursday, the co-chairs were due to visit the Haiti Hospitality School, which is preparing students with professional training for hospitality jobs throughout the country. The Oasis Hotel’s philanthropic arm reopened the school with a grant from the Fund. Thursday’s visits will highlight the Fund’s commitment to small and growing businesses. The co-chairs will meet with the Haitian entrepreneurs who started the office supply store Global Home and Office Smart and whose retail outlet was rebuilt with a loan from the Fund. They will also visit fund grantee GaMa’s KayTek factory, which is producing steel framing for construction. GaMa recently completed reconstruction on the historic Sacre Coeur secondary school in Port-au-Prince. Nearly 1,000 students attend the school. As the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund continues to spend down its remaining funds, it has announced more than $2.5 million in new grants to programs that are working toward a healthier, more resilient future for Haiti.

Haitian clothing makers are increasingly benefiting from a U.S. trade preference aimed at promoting the impoverished nation's economy, U.S. congressional auditors reported Friday. The U.S. Government Accountability Office said nearly $18 million in Haitian apparel was exported to the United States under a duty-free provision during the first nine months of 2012. This accounted for about 4 percent of the apparel Haiti exported to the U.S., it said. The amount was significantly more than what GAO auditors found the year before during the same period, which was about $350,000. That was less than one-tenth of 1 percent of Haiti's U.S.-bound exports. The report said the number of special trade credits Haitian apparel firms received grew about fivefold. These credits are given to firms that use U.S.-produced fabric and other materials in exchange for duty-free trade preferences.
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Haiti's garment industry once employed more than 100,000 people but it was devastated in the 1980s and 1990s when the country stumbled through a period of political upheaval and economic sanctions. There were fears the industry would suffer again after the devastating January 2010 earthquake. The disaster interrupted apparel production but there were signs that production had been restored two months later, the report said. The U.S. government's biggest investment in Haiti following the earthquake is a $300 million industrial facility that organizers hope will transform the northern part of the country by creating thousands of jobs. Some in Haiti have criticized that investment, saying the money should have been put into agriculture, housing or other areas of reconstruction.

A mission from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) headed by Mr. Boileau Loko visited Port-au-Prince from November 27-December 7, 2012 to conduct the discussions for the Article IV consultations for 2012 and the fifth review under the Extended Credit Facility (ECF) arrangement.1 The mission met with Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe; Minister of Economy and Finance Marie Carmelle Jean-Marie; Minister of Commerce and Industry Wilson Laleau; Minister of Agriculture Thomas Jacques; Minister Delegate responsible for human rights and combating extreme poverty Marie Carmèle Rose Anne Auguste; Governor of the Bank of the Republic of Haiti Charles Castel; Chair of the Senate Finance Commission Jocelerme Privert; other senior government officials, representatives of the banking sector, and development partners. Mrs. Ketleen Florestal, Advisor to the IMF Executive Director, participated in the policy discussions. The mission would like to thank the authorities for their warm hospitality and the close cooperation and frank discussions that prevailed throughout its stay. At the end of the visit, Mission Chief Boileau Loko issued the following statement:
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“Implementation of the ECF-supported program is broadly on track. Preliminary data indicate that the gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate will come in at about 2.5 percent, below the program forecast of 4.5 percent. The lower-than-expected growth is partly due to the spring drought and Hurricane Isaac which damaged crops, and a slow execution of public spending because of low absorption capacity. Inflation has accelerated since end-June, reaching 6.8 percent in October, primarily because of rising food prices. The fiscal position deteriorated as a result of lower-than-projected revenue collection and disbursement of budget support as well as a slightly higher level of current expenditure. Overall credit growth continues to rise while gross foreign reserves reached about six months of imports at end-November 2012.
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“The government of Haiti and the mission have reached understandings ad referendum on the broad outlines of a macroeconomic and structural reform program covering the remainder of FY2012-13 (October 2012-September 2013). The authorities’ program will continue to focus on preserving macroeconomic stability, supporting economic recovery, and further reducing poverty. “With reconstruction gathering speed against the backdrop of political stability and security, real economic growth could be within a 6-7 percent range in 2013. Mobilization of additional resources to fund capital expenditure and poverty reduction spending will depend on continued efforts to raise government revenue. This will be particularly important considering declining external aid and a more efficient management of government expenditures, including through lower subsidies to the national electricity company (EDH). An appropriate combination of budgetary, monetary, and foreign exchange policies should help maintain inflation at around 5 percent and preserve a strong external position.
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“The structural reform program will focus mainly on: (i) raising domestic revenue collection, primarily through a strengthening of the tax and customs administrations; (ii) improving public financial management and economic governance; (iii) strengthening institutional capacity to enhance public investment execution and efficiency; (iv) reinforcing liquidity management and monetary operations; and (v) accelerating reforms seeking to improve the business environment. Continued close coordination between the government and the donor community is important to ensure the success of the program. “The IMF staff will recommend that management submit the staff report for the fifth review under the ECF to the Executive Board in February 2013.”

Caribbean Journal
By Alexander Britell
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Haiti is trying to move the process of reconstruction into a higher gear. While the country’s GDP has been growing at a strong pace, natural disasters and the lingering effects of the earthquake continue to present roadblocks. Laurent Lamothe, a former telecom executive and graduate of Saint Thomas University and Barry University in Florida, has served as Haiti’s Prime Minister since May, leading a government that is pushing a message that the country is “open for business.” But what are the government’s business priorities, and how does Haiti follow a new path in areas like tourism and education? To learn more, Caribbean Journal spoke to Lamothe about issues from reforming the country’s business environment to its plans to reposition its tourism sector.
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What is your biggest priority right now?
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The biggest priority is to create sustainable jobs. We have a 75 percent unemployment rate, but we also have the Caribbean’s highest growth, and we also want to have growth in GDP. This is the biggest priority. We’re doing business legislation reforms. We’re trying to reduce the number of days to open a company to 10 days by making it an online process, to reduce the costs of opening a company, and to boost the budget of the investment promotion office. We’re also working with the Presidential Advisory Council for foreign direct investment. As for government programmes in terms of emergencies, we have had two storms that flooded the northern part of the country, so we are investing in disaster relief bills and prevention. So we extended the State of Emergency for 30 days — that will allow us to complete the plans to finish working on the disaster prevention strategy.
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So how are you working to promote investment in Haiti?
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In terms of finding investors, Haiti has a big opportunity. We have several large investors that came here with the northern industrial park that opened its doors in Caracol, with the help of the IDB and the US State Department. This has created a platform for which companies can come in and invest and benefit with some of the favourable trade laws between Haiti and the United States. So we have had several large investors come in and show interest through the industrial park in order to create manufacturing plants here for their products abroad. I will be going to Davos at the World Economic Forum to discuss some of the opportunities that Haiti has in terms of manufacturing. We are investing also in an industrial park in Port-au-Prince, and several industrial parks across the country, to spur economic growth and job creation.
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So what is your pitch to foreign investors on why they should invest in Haiti?
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Well, very simple. We have a very aggressive investment code. The government is open for joint ventures, and the government is opening to new companies coming in and investments in products are coming in. Basically, the main attraction is the trade agreement we have with the US.
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Haiti’s Tourism Minister, Stephanie Villedrouin, has been pushing a new tourism strategy for Haiti. What do you see as the best ways to grow that sector in the country?
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One of them is Ile a Vache, the second site where we have invested. We have invested already in Jacmel, over $40 million to refurbish the town of Jacmel in the southeast of the country to be a port for tourism and boats to come in for a few days and enjoy that port. And now, we have decided to take the tourism development on the island of Ile a Vache, so there we’re going to build an international airport, and then the tourism [infrastructure] to attract investors — we have several investors already. There is a hotel coming up there [in Ile a Vache], which is certainly one of the nicest islands in the Caribbean.
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Can Haiti eventually produce a significant portion of its GDP from tourism, like many of its Caribbean neighbours?
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This is the objective — this is the goal. We have — again — a treasure in the Caribbean that we can exploit and promote fully and invest in fully. I think Ile a Vache has great potential, and it doesn’t present the challenges for land title that you might face on the mainland.
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You mentioned land title. Land title and real property rights have been a challenge for Haiti for some time — how is your government working to change that?
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Well, it’s going to be a process. Because the land titling has always been part of the history in Haiti, and so we are definitely putting a lot of energy and effort in that. We have the CIAT [the Interministerial Committee for Territorial Planning], the territorial agency that works on land titles, and we are working with different friendly countries in order to keep working on that strategy. But it’s going to be a long term process — we’re also working with private companies to do it for us.
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The upcoming elections have been a continued issue — what is the current status on holding these elections?
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Well, it’s very positive. Only [Tuesday] the Executive was working with different sectors of society including the Parliament, and there was a parliamentary commission that was put together to work through our commission, so things are moving forward on that, and I’m happy to know that.
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How much is the Diaspora involved in Haiti’s reconstruction, and what role can it play?
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The Diaspora is coming back. I think that they can come back at a greater number. But of course, we have to create conditions for them. So we’re building a programme to put them in a situation where they can help us. But like I said, in my Cabinet we have a graduate from the London School of Economics, a Wharton MBA, we have several Canadian McGill graduates, a Fulbright scholar. So we have a young dynamic in the Diaspora, that is working together to contribute to put the country back to recovery.
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The government has been pushing an education agenda — what kind of progress have you seen?
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We decided to start with the basic — which is free education for primary children. And the education that we’ve had is 84 percent of children in school compared to 52 percent as before, so it’s a big success, putting 1,287,214 children in primary school for free.
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How much should the internet be a part of education in Haiti? Is your government looking to expand internet access across the country?
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Well, right now, the internet is a cable from the Bahamas that is connecting Haiti through our national provider, which is Natcom. We have a fibre-optic cable running through the country, and Natocm is to provide the schools to give them internet access to have those type of components. But there’s a lot of work that has to be done in that area.
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While the number has fallen, there are still hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the earthquake still living in tent camps. What is the plan for them?
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Well, the next step is that we have about 300,000 to 350,000 still living in camps. So the strategy is to remove all of them within the next 18 months. So that’s what we’re doing with our international partners, with local emergency funds to make that a reality. It’s unacceptable that we have people living in camps, in subhuman conditions. And we want to make Haiti an emerging nation by 2030, so we’ve got to make all types of efforts to make that a reality.
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Where do you see Haiti fitting in within CARICOM?
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Well, I’m happy to report that, starting in January, Haiti will be the Chairman of CARICOM for six months, so we’re going to do the best job possible and represent Haiti with pride and represent CARICOM through the world with the honour and respect that is owed to Caribbean nations. The relationship with CARICOM is very good, and we have a good understanding of what is good for CARICOM. Haiti is the largest market [in CARICOM], basically double the size of all the Caribbean nations put together. So we are working with CARICOM not only to benefit from the privileges that CARICOM nations have, but also from the different trade agreements to bring about Haitian products to them, and to get CARICOM member products into Haiti and start developing the trading exchanges that are necessary for the nations to prosper. We have wanted to have our citizens able to travel freely in CARICOM countries. We haven’t done that yet, but that’s what we want, and that’s what we’ll continue to push.
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You’ve been Prime Minister since May — what would you consider your biggest success so far, and what has been most challenging for you?
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The biggest success so far basically has been our education policy, and our social programmes — that by far. The biggest challenge, in that sense, is speeding up some of the business reforms through Parliament. So that’s what we’re working on — to fast-track the Parliamentary agenda. So we have several sessions this month in order to speed up the reforms.

11/12/2012
Caribbean Journal Staff
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The Inter-American Development Bank expects to approve a $17.5 million grant to help Haiti’s government finance the reconstruction of roads and bridges destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. The grant’s announcement comes after a meeting between Haiti’s government and IDB officials in Port-au-Prince last week. The assistance will focus on rebuilding transport infrastructure, revitalizing agriculture and reinforcing river banks to mitigate flooding. Resources from existing IDB projects will also be rerouted to support Haiti’s government in its efforts to help assist rural communities in some of the hardest-hit areas. Haiti’s government also plans to prioritize public works to reduce erosion and flooding The two sides have also agreed on new financing for 2013, with up to $200 million in grants expected.

By Thomas C. Adams
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Thomas C. Adams serves as Haiti Special Coordinator at the U.S. Department of State.
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Earlier this week, I had the privilege of accompanying Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis to Haiti. The trip marked Secretary Clinton's first visit to the northern region of the country to see more of the restoration since the traumatic earthquake of 2010. Before and since the earthquake, Haiti has faced great challenges -- ones the government and people of Haiti are working to confront and to lead the international community in helping them solve. In our work in the Administration on behalf of Haiti, we have looked for ways to promote sustainable economic growth. And we have also partnered in a serious manner with the government, because we wanted our priorities to be following Haitian priorities. That is the only way that those priorities will translate into lasting accomplishments for the people of Haiti. In its National Action Plan, the Haitian government expressed its desire to create centers of economic development outside of Port-au-Prince to spur economic growth and bring jobs to Haiti's underserved regions. The Caracol Industrial Park is a first step toward achieving this goal, bringing together the Haitian and U.S. governments, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and Sae-A Trading Co. Ltd. -- Korea's leading garment manufacturer. This first major public-private partnership is expected to bring permanent jobs to Haiti. The park is projected to initially create 20,000 permanent jobs through Sae-A's investment alone. Ultimately, the industrial park has the potential to create up to 65,000 direct jobs once fully developed. At a ceremony in November 2011, the first stone was laid in the park. On Monday, October 22, Secretary Clinton joined President Michel Martelly, Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe, local and national elected officials and others at the park's formal opening.
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During the opening ceremony, Secretary Clinton delivered remarks on “A New Day in Haiti,” and it truly was. As we walked through the factory at Caracol, we saw some of the more than 1,000 Haitians working towards a better future. Many of the employees we met were women who had never before held a job in the formal economy. As we toured the facility, all I could think was that this park made clear something we've been saying to everyone: Haiti is open for business. For our part, the United States is encouraging more investment in Haiti by cutting down trade barriers for textile and apparel exports, and we're also doing it in a way that respects the country's environment and resources and re-invests in communities. Now, in the years to come, there will be demand for more infrastructure, whether it's building roads, expanding the power grid, or improving and even building ports. There's a lot of opportunity in crafts and artisan work, in tourism, agriculture, and manufacturing. And of course, Haiti has an unmatched trading partner in the United States just a few hundred miles away.
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We see this partnership between governments and the private sector as absolutely essential in promoting and supporting long-term prosperity in Haiti. We have been united behind a single goal -- making investments in this country's people and infrastructure that place Haiti on the path to broad-based economic growth with a more vibrant private sector and less dependence on foreign assistance. Long-term prosperity for the Haitian people cannot come from just the provision of aid; there must be trade and investment. The U.S. government -- and the American people -- have been a steadfast partner in Haiti's efforts. We have made a decision in this Administration to make Haiti a foreign policy priority. As Secretary Clinton said, the United States is committed to the work we are doing in Haiti, and we believe in Haiti's promise.
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Editor's Note: In the accompanying photograph, USAID/Haiti engineer Mario Nicoleau (from left) briefs Inter-American Development Bank President Luis Moreno, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, former Haiti President Rene Preval and current Haiti President Michel Martelly on USAID-funded housing near the Caracol Industrial Park on Oct. 22, 2012.

As both Clintons and a coterie of celebrities and foreign investors flew into northern Haiti yesterday, some took the opportunity to praise Sae-A, the giant Korean garment manufacturer that opened a factory in the new Caracol industrial park. Hillary Clinton, for one, told reporters: And I too want to thank Sae-A, because Sae-A took a decision that was something of a risk, never having worked in Haiti before, after a tremendous natural disaster that was so devastating. But they brought their expertise and they brought their commitment. And Chairman Kim, we thank you for everything that you and the leadership of Sae-A is doing.
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But Sae-A’s decision to set up shop in Caracol could hardly be described as risky, as almost the entire cost of the project was borne by other actors. The New York Times, in an in-depth July investigation into the new park, reported that the land was provided free of charge by the Haitian government, the physical infrastructure was provided by the Inter-American Development Bank for around $100 million, and the United States government chipped in $124 million for infrastructure, energy and housing services. The industrial park tenants are also granted significant tax-exemptions, and will only have to pay docking fees, which are estimated to be just $17,500 a year, hardly a boon to Haiti’s coffers. Sae-A, which reported over $1.1 billion in export business last year, committed to spending just $39.2 million on the factory.
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Additionally, U.S. legislation provides duty-free access to the U.S. market, which was used by Clinton to “woo” the apparel industry. Deborah Sontag of the Times sums it up:
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In exchange, thanks to a deal that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton helped broker, Sae-A looked forward to tax exemptions, duty-free access to the United States, abundant cheap labor, factory sheds, a power plant, a new port and an expatriate residence outfitted with special kimchi refrigerators.
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Of course, it is also the case that if labor costs go up, subsidies end, or business doesn’t boom, Sae-A can simply walk away. Though non-binding, a memorandum of understanding between the Haitian Ministry of Economy and Finance, the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, the IADB, and the United States Department of State includes the following provision:
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It shall be acknowledged by the Participants that the continuation of participation under this MOU for Sae-A is contingent upon the existence of adequate infrastructure, labor force, labor policies, favorable access to export markets, access to sufficient funding and any other circumstances that affect the feasibility of investment by Sae-A.
Sae-A and other global apparel companies often compete in a race to the bottom, leaving countries in search of lower labor costs after wages rise. Due to rising expenses in Guatemala, Sae-A has closed their factory there. A local paper carried the story with the headline, “A Maquila Closes and Goes to Haiti.” A Sae-A spokesperson also told the New York Times that once trade preferences for Nicaragua end in 2014, “a lot of product orders now going to factories in Nicaragua can go through the Haiti operation.” But what’s preventing this from happening in Haiti down the road?
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Mr. Aguerre, of the IADB sums it up:
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Yes, it’s low-paying, yes, it’s unstable, yes, maybe tomorrow there will a better opportunity for firms elsewhere and they will just leave. But everyone thought this was a risk worth taking.
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So, though there may not be much risk for Sae-A, there is a definite risk for the people of Haiti. There’s also conceivably a risk for the U.S. government, which is touting this as the “centerpiece” of their reconstruction efforts, as well as for the IADB, Haitian government and other entities that are providing financial backing for the project.

Associated Press
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The Inter-American Development Bank is awarding Haiti a $53 million grant to upgrade a stretch of one of the Caribbean nation's major roads. The bulk of the money will go toward renovating a 16.4-mile (26.2-kilometer) strip of road between the western port city of Gonaives and the town of Ennery. The road connects the capital of Port-au-Prince with Haiti's second largest city, Cap-Haitien. The grant will also help finance a ministry that oversees road maintenance, road safety and other transportation matters, along with the ports department. Many of Haiti's roads are degraded by potholes or barely exist in remote areas. The impoverished nation's infrastructure was damaged further in the earthquake nearly three years ago when thousands of buildings collapsed. The IDB made the announcement Wednesday.

9/20/2012
Inter-American Development Bank
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Resources for additional manufacturing facilities, improved social and environmental conditions, Caracol Bay protected area The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) announced the approval of a $50 million grant to Haiti for the second phase of construction of the Caracol Industrial Park, a modern manufacturing facility in the Caribbean country’s northern region. The IDB expects to provide up to $180 million in grants over a six-year period for the new industrial park, which is being built on a 250-hectare plot of state-owned land. Once the project is completed, the facility could host as many as 40,000 workers in a region where there are few formal job opportunities. Since the IDB made an initial grant of $55 million for the project in July 2011, the Caracol Industrial Park has welcomed its first tenant, a Korean textile manufacturer that has started to hire and train hundreds of workers to export garments to the United States.
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Société Nationale des Parcs Industriels (SONAPI), the government agency that owns the new manufacturing facility and an older one in Port-au-Prince, is in talks with several foreign and local companies interested in establishing operations in northern Haiti. A Haitian paint manufacturer has already signed up to become the second tenant, with plans to hire as many as 300 workers. IDB resources are financing the construction of factory shells, administrative and residential buildings, internal roads, water and wastewater treatment plants, and utility connections. The new grant includes funds for additional hydrological studies, as well as for hiring firms to manage and maintain the new facility and to monitor tenants’ compliance with labor laws, health and safety standards and social and environmental safeguards. Beyond the industrial park’s perimeter, the IDB will provide technical assistance to strengthen local municipal governments by improving their capacity to manage urban planning and public services and by financing small infrastructure projects, such as access roads and community centers, with a particular emphasis on gender issues, as well as a solid waste management and recycling facility.
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IDB resources will also support a project, in cooperation with the United Nations Development Program and the Global Environmental Facility, to establish a protected area and marine natural park in the Caracol Bay, which features a large mangrove system. In addition, the IDB is also providing assistance to strengthen SONAPI’s institutional capacity to attract more investors to Haiti. These investments are being complemented by donations from the U.S. government, which financed the construction of a power generation plant for the industrial park that will have sufficient capacity to supply neighboring towns. U.S. resources are also financing the construction of hundreds of houses in a nearby community. Through other ongoing programs, the IDB will support the construction of additional housing, schools and water and sanitation systems in municipalities close to the Caracol Industrial Park. IDB-financed agriculture and transport projects will also prioritize investments in northern Haiti. The IDB is Haiti’s leading multilateral donor. Since the 2010 earthquake it has approved $590 million in new grants and disbursed more than $479 million to support projects in agriculture, education, energy, transport, water and sanitation and private sector development.

Miami Herald
By Jacqueline Charles
jcharles@MiamiHerald.com
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Haiti lawmakers are committed to passing investor-friendly laws to help the earthquake-recovering nation attract more foreign businesses and create jobs, Simon Desras, the president of the Haitian Senate told hundreds of Miami business men and women Wednesday. Among the laws the Haitian parliament has already passed, Desras said: reducing the time to obtain a construction permit from 1,110 days to just 60 days, and the number of days to register a new business from 180 days to 10. Such changes along with other investor-friendly laws in the pipeline, “demonstrate the commitment by the Haitian government to attract,” investors, said Desras, the keynote speaker during the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce monthly luncheon at Miami’s Parrot Jungle. “Without a long-term sustainable solution to our situation we will continue to be trapped in a hopeless cycle of poverty,” he said. “Haitians want solutions to move past this terrible cycle.” One investment Desras highlighted was the Caracol Industrial Park in northern Haiti. The $300 million park is jointly being funded by the U.S. government and Inter-American Development Bank, and is expected to create about 60,000 jobs. “This is the new Haiti which is going to attract individuals such as yourself,’’ he said. Prior to addressing the room, Desras presented the “Heart of Haiti” award to Barry Johnson, the president/CEO of the Miami Chamber of Commerce for his constant efforts to present Haiti in a positive light to the world. On Thursday, he will meet with students from Gulliver Prep in South Miami-Dade County to thank them for a water purification system they built on behalf of the country.

8/14/2012
IMF Survey
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Recovery, reconstruction are ongoing, but at slower pace More than half of population displaced by earthquake now back in housing Lack of economic capacity still remains a big challenge for the country Despite a period of political instability, economic activity is reviving in Haiti two years after a devastating earthquake, says the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The international community responded to the disaster with pledges of over $10 billion in aid. For its part, the IMF forgave around $270 million in debt and also offered Haiti a line of credit under the Extended Credit Facility arrangement (ECF). The IMF recently took stock of its dealings with Haiti during the fourth review of the country’s ECF. The IMF’s Executive Board approved a $7.4 million disbursement to support the country’s long-term economic reconstruction plans.
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In an interview with IMF Survey the IMF’s mission chief for Haiti, Boileau Loko, shared his insights on the country’s recovery and its economic prospects.
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IMF Survey: Two years on from the Haitian earthquake, is life better for the Haitian people?
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Loko: The recovery and the reconstruction are ongoing, but at a slower pace than we all thought. However, we can still see that more than half of the 1.3 million people living in camps have now found new houses. The downside is that there are still about 500,000 people living tents. But, the government is working to see how these people could be moved back to decent housing.
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IMF Survey: Can you point to something which tells you that the lives of ordinary Haitians have improved?
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Loko: In Port-au-Prince, many camps have disappeared and there is also some economic activity. This has translated into a positive GDP growth rate. Since then, new schools have been built, social health facilities have been restored, and the government is functioning. So the recovery is slow and we all want it to be faster. But we have to remember that this was a huge earthquake. We expect that everything will go quicker in the future and that the 500,000 people staying in tents will go back to decent housing.
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IMF Survey: What was the growth rate last year? What do you expect it to be this year and for the coming year?
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Loko: Before the earthquake, the average growth rate was about 3.5 percent. After the earthquake in 2010, we had a negative growth of about -5 percent. We have come back to a growth rate of about 5 or 6 percent and we expect the growth rate to be about 5.5 percent in this year, knowing that the population growth rate is 2 percent. This means that the GDP per capita will increase. We expect it to increase at least by 3 to 4 percent in the coming year.
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IMF Survey: Haiti has had a lot of outside assistance, especially in the aftermath of the earthquake, but has it received enough?
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Loko: The international community has done a lot. In total, donors have pledged about $10 billion and about 50 percent of the pledges have been disbursed, so we’re talking about $4-5 billion. A part of that is also debt relief from the IMF and other country institutions.
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IMF Survey: Does Haiti have the capacity of using all these big amounts of money coming in?
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Loko: This is the key issue in Haiti. $5 billion has been disbursed, but capacity is weak. Because of that, some donors, even if the disbursement is there, are not able to execute the projects. A small percentage of the amount disbursed has been used, not because the authorities do not want to use it, or because they do not want to accelerate the reconstruction, but because capacity is low and they need to mobilize capacity to be able to use the amount disbursed by donors.
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IMF Survey: Recently Haiti went through a difficult period on the domestic political scene: the sudden resignation of the prime minister. There was a hiatus before the appointment of a replacement prime minister. How much has this slowed down development?
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Loko: The 2012 presidential elections took almost one year to be completed, and the president only took office only eight or nine months later. Afterwards, there was a three- to four-month gap before the new prime minister was sworn in. After two months in office, the new prime minister resigned and it took an additional two or three months to replace him. So we can say that about 15 months have been used only for the political electoral process. This is a big problem in a country like Haiti, where we really need everybody to work together to make the reconstruction quicker. So, yes, part of the slow reconstruction is due to this political instability. We all hope that with the new prime minister, and the new government, we will have some political stability, and accelerate the reconstruction.
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IMF Survey: Let us turn to the role of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). They have played a big role postdisaster. There are more than 10,000 of them working in Haiti. That must create a lot of overlap and inefficiencies. What is being done to overcome these inefficiencies and this overlap?
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Loko: Indeed, there are more than 10,000 NGOs, and I think they have helped a lot in the reconstruction process. However, two years after the earthquake, we think it is important for the NGOs to now work more closely with the government, and make sure that what they are doing is consistent with the government objectives. For instance, NGOs are building schools, but the government probably has a strategy in the education sector about where they want the schools to be built, and where the kids need schools. The NGOs must make sure that the schools they build are exactly where the authorities need them to be.
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IMF Survey: Is this coordination actually happening?
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Loko: It is not yet, but the government is taking some measures to ensure that we work together with NGOs. Going forward, we hope there will better coordination between NGOs, donors, and the government, to make sure that they implement the measures, and then meet their objectives.
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IMF Survey: Up to now, we have been talking about all the hurdles and challenges that Haiti is facing. So, what do you see as the medium-term outlook for the country then?
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Loko: The outlook is positive. But, of course, as I said, they are issues. The first one is the lack of capacity; the second issue is about governance. The country needs to have political stability, better governance, transparency, and better coordination with donors. It needs to make sure that all the parties can work together in a consistent way to achieve their objectives.
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IMF Survey: You have not been mission chief for Haiti for very long. In fact, you were appointed after the earthquake. When you visit the country, do you feel optimistic or pessimistic about its prospects?
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Loko: I am optimistic about it because when I got to Haiti I saw that the population wants to move forward. They willingness is there. As I said, there is a lack of capacity. But the donors and the authorities are trying to improve this issue of capacity. They are looking into how to make the business environment friendlier, and how to attract investors in Haiti. Beyond that, many things are going on positively. For instance, one achievement since the earthquake is in terms of domestic revenue. By domestic revenue, I mean taxes and custom duties. Haiti had one of the lowest levels of domestic revenue in the world and we are working with the authorities to increase it. The objective is for Haiti to be less dependent on foreign aid and also show that they have enough resources for poverty-related spending, and for infrastructure. We were able to increase domestic revenue from about 10 percent of GDP to 13 percent, even 13.5 percent of GDP in three years. So, there is progress. The challenges are huge, but I am optimistic. I think that with the help of the donors and NGOs, Haiti can make it.

At a meeting with President Martelly, Prime Minister Lamothe and cabinet ministers
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The government of Haiti and the Inter-American Development Bank have agreed on a series of plans of action to accelerate the execution of projects in six key sectors: agriculture, education, energy, transport, water and sanitation and private sector development. The agreements were reached on Tuesday in Port-au-Prince during a meeting that brought together members of the cabinet of Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe and top executives of the IDB. Haitian President Michel Martelly and IDB President Luis Alberto Moreno addressed the participants at the closing of the event. As Haiti’s leading multilateral donor, the IDB is financing projects totaling nearly $1.4 billion, including $280 million in co-financing from other donors. These operations are in line with the Haitian government’s top priorities such as expanding access to education and energy, boosting employment and protecting the environment.
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Prior to this week’s meeting, IDB executives and specialists had held a three-day portfolio review exercise with officials from Haitian ministries and other government agencies in charge of project execution. During those discussions participants assessed the rate of progress of every operation and results achieved so far. They also identified bottlenecks and proposed solutions to overcome them. The plans of action will entail strengthening the government’s capacity to plan, execute and supervise projects and to operate and maintain public services, as in the case of utilities in mid-size cities where Haiti’s water and sanitation regulating agency, DINEPA, is making investments to expand and improve drinking water distribution.
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Actions will also entail giving priority to addressing specific problems. In the energy sector, for example, over the coming months the Haitian government and the IDB will prioritize the construction of a new substation and the upgrading of distribution networks in Port-au-Prince, as well as the deployment of a resource management system to help improve the operations of the electricity utility, EDH. Since the 2010 earthquake the IDB has approved $546 million in new grants for Haiti and disbursed more than $407 million. The Bank is committed to provide the country $200 million in new grants annually through 2020 and is taking measures to enable its government to absorb more than $200 million a year in disbursements.
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During the meeting Haitian authorities recognized the IDB for its efforts to reach out to other donors and leverage its resources. In turn, IDB officials encouraged the Haitian government to continue developing strategic public investment plans to attract additional funding for priority sectors. The IDB also reiterated its commitment to support projects that will help Haiti catalyze private sector investment, generate jobs and promote economic activity beyond the capital, such as the Caracol Industrial Park in the northern region of the country.

By Tate Watkins
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Péligre Dam was completed in 1956 as part of a flood control and irrigation project along the Artibonite River. The dam began producing hydroelectric power in 1971. Photo by Arikia Millikan/Wired.com. Electric lighting first came to Haiti in 1896 when a steam factory opened in the southern coastal town of Jacmel. It powered 200 electric street lamps among Jacmel’s traditional gingerbread architecture for seven months, until a fire roared through and destroyed much of town and, along with it, the electrical system. More than a century later, Haiti still struggles to light its cities’ streets. In the capital city of Port-au-Prince, grid electricity from the state-owned power company, Electricité d’Haiti (EDH), is unreliable and unpredictable, causing many people to rely on expensive diesel generators during blackouts. According to the Ministry of Public Works, Transportation, and Communication (MTPTC), only about 12 percent of 10 million Haitians have access to electricity, although the actual figure is undoubtedly higher given many extralegal connections into the grid. Haiti’s electricity problem is ultimately an energy problem with two facets: production and distribution. Most Haitians, especially in rural areas, cook with wood or charcoal. The Haitian government estimates that about three-quarters of energy used in the country comes from biomass, a factor that continues to exacerbate Haiti’s deforestation problem. The country has around 200 megawatts of installed electric production capacity, but because of lack of maintenance in past decades, most of the country’s major power plants produce at half capacity or less. According to MTPTC, nationwide demand for electricity is 550 megawatts, a fanciful figure given current output.
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Distribution is another issue altogether, as there’s no national grid. Instead, nine separate electrical networks dot the country. Poor maintenance, lack of funding, and lack of equipment for repairs has caused infrastructure to deteriorate over the years. Old transformers routinely fail. People not connected to the grid tap into it themselves, sapping output. Additionally, EDH doesn’t have the technical systems or management capacity required to bill customers properly, resulting in huge losses each month. Port-au-Prince may be home to most of the country’s electricity users, but Haiti’s electricity challenges reach well beyond the capital.
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An hour-and-a-half drive northeast of the capital in Haiti’s Central Plateau lies the lower end of the man-made Lac de Péligre. From atop the 230-foot-tall dam that created the lake in 1956, green mountains rise from the glinting body of water around which villagers make their homes. The construction of Péligre Dam plugged the Artibonite, Haiti’s largest river that twists toward the coast through the region known as the country’s rice basket. It was initially erected back in the '50s to control flooding and provide irrigation to farmers downstream. But it also had hydraulic potential to provide electricity to the capital’s burgeoning population down the plateau. Engineers from Milan oversaw the installation of the dam’s first two turbines, each with a capacity of 18 megawatts, which became operational in 1971. A third turbine completed four years later brought the dam’s power-generating capacity to 54 megawatts, and 24-hour electricity surged through the capital. “It’s a shame,” says Godson Christolin, an EDH engineer who’s worked at the dam for four years, when I ask him about upstream farmers who were displaced when the dam was built. Christolin grew up two kilometers downstream from the dam but comes from a generation, like many residents near the lake today, whose parents or grandparents used to farm land now underwater. The upshot of causing a flood that formed the lake was better flood control, irrigation and, eventually, the creation of renewable energy that would light city homes and businesses.
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Today, the dam’s capacity tops out at around 30 megawatts during the rainy season. The power plant was designed to operate for only 30 to 40 years, and wear-and-tear on the turbines and electromechanical equipment results in periodic breakdowns. During dry months, when the lake’s water level isn’t high enough to spin all three turbines with ample force, the dam produces only 10 megawatts, according to the MTPTC. An IDB study found that sediment that runs off from the somewhat denuded hills that surround the lake has reduced the reservoir’s volume by half, and, consequently, decreased the dam’s power-generating capacity. And for a project originally designed to control water, the smaller size of the reservoir today means that much of that control is back in Mother Nature’s hands. Heavy rains sometimes flood the villages that ring the reservoir — or require the dam to be opened, flooding fields and villages downstream. As I tour the dam with Christolin, two turbines are running, and gauges in the ’70s-era Soviet-esque control room show that both are generating about 14 megawatts. There’s not enough water in the lake today to spin the third turbine. Still, depending on the plant’s output and how little electricity is being produced by the country’s other, mainly thermal, power plants, Péligre can at times account for a quarter of the country’s electricity production.
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“Some people here have power,” says Jackson Felix, a 27-year-old resident of Adokin, “but most don’t.” Adokin is a community of about 3,000 people in the Delmas 33 neighborhood that sprung up after the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake. Like many communities scattered around Port-au-Prince that still hold some of Haiti’s estimated 390,000 displaced residents, it started out as a tent camp, but today is a more permanent settlement of structures made out of scrap wood and corrugated metal and tarps. Some residents, Felix explains, have jigged up their own connections into the electrical grid. These DIY connections not only contribute to the grid's degradation but also siphon power to consumers who will never be billed for their electricity use — potential revenues that EDH will never realize. In addition to neglecting physical infrastructure, EDH, which declined multiple interview requests for this story, has a huge problem with billing. For the customers the company manages to send invoices, the company collects only 18 percent. It all adds up to a loss of $11 million per month, Director General Garry Valdemar told Haiti Libre last December, which is sucked straight out of the government’s budget. Valdemar also claimed that the company’s revenues cover only about 30 percent the operating budget. High-tension power lines span the sheet metal and plastic tarp homes of Adokin, running to an electrical substation next door. One transmission line from Péligre distributes power locally to some, but not all, of the villages scattered around the lake and to Central Plateau towns like Mirebalais and Hinche. But most of the energy produced at the dam is transmitted via another high-tension line to two substations in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area, including the one in Delmas 33.
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As a spontaneously created community for residents displaced by the earthquake, no one intended for Adokin to have electricity. But many in the capital who are connected to the grid can commiserate with residents’ lack of electricity here. Port-au-Prince has grid power for only 10 hours per day on average. Affluent residents and businesses run diesel generators during blackouts if they can afford to, and some factories resort to using costly industrial-grade generators to ensure production continues in the absence of grid power.
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“Here, there is infrastructure,” Lumas Kendrick says as he sits in a shaded courtyard at his Port-au-Prince office off Route de Frères. “But there is a real challenge of the maintenance culture. So things that have been invested in and basically put in place have deteriorated.” Kendrick is an Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) energy specialist who’s been working in Haiti for the past four years. “The long-term issue,” says Kendrick, “is to move Haiti away from a fossil-fuel-based energy picture, where the cost of energy is increasingly going up, and Haiti’s ability to meet its energy bills based on buying energy on the international market is less and less.” Most of the electricity generated in the country comes from thermal plants that burn diesel or heavy fuel oil, a relatively costly way to generate electricity, which is part of the reason that a kilowatt hour of electricity in Haiti costs $0.28. In the United States, a kilowatt hour runs about $0.10.
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Two thermal plants that serve the capital’s metropolitan area — one in Carrefour and another in Varreux — originally produced slightly more than 100 megawatts of power. Today, they manage about a quarter of that output. Both plants burn diesel, which the Haitian government buys on credit. The Associated Press recently reported that after the government used post-earthquake donations to pay off its outstanding debts, the state began borrowing again — $657 million so far — largely to buy imported fossil fuels used to generate power. The plants’ decreased capacity is due to diesel motors that have failed over the years and remain unrepaired. The IDB, of which Haiti is a founding member, has invested more in post-earthquake Haiti than any other multilateral donor. The Bank, along with a German development finance agency and OPEC, is financing a $48 million rehabilitation of the Péligre Dam designed to restore its original 54-megawatt capacity. IDB is also funding a program in partnership with the World Bank and USAID to improve EDH’s technical and financial management, train staff, and, ultimately, reduce losses.
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“The lack of maintenance and deterioration,” Kendrick says, “is a symptom of the low level of leadership in the sector on the public sector side. I think that’s the real issue." The IDB recently hosted a panel event at its Bourdon office on the outlook for Haiti’s energy sector. René Jean-Jumeau, President Michel Martelly’s recently designated Minister Delegate in charge of energy security, was a speaker. Jean-Jumeau is a former secretary of state for energy in a country that has never had a discrete energy department. Energy policy is scattered between the MTPTC, EDH, and the Bureau of Mines and Energy. Title pages of energy reports issued by the government, like the most recent draft of proposed energy policy, bear the acronyms of all three entities. “Without that leadership,” says Kendrick, “all these symptoms that we see — the lack of maintenance of the facilities, a feeling of impunity on the part of the population to just take energy as they wish, that they can just tap in where they want, because they know there’s not going to be any repercussion to that — that’s all a part of the fact that in the large picture, there has really never been any leadership on the side of the Haitian state to take control over that.”
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At the IDB event, Jean-Jumeau stressed that the government has to prioritize the energy policy that’s best for the country, rather than letting politics simply dictate policy. In the past, politicians have been wont to pander for votes or support with promises of providing electricity in certain neighborhoods. On a recent trip to Washington, D.C., Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe said at a think-tank appearance that the Haitian government’s goal is to double the country’s capacity, increasing it to 500 megawatts, by the end of Martelly’s term in 2016. In addition to the Péligre Dam rehabilitation and the efforts to make EDH something other than a pecuniary black hole, the administration also plans to revitalize seven substations in the Port-au-Prince area and construct a new substation in Tabarre to serve the growing population on the northeastern side of town. Lamothe also stressed the need to connect the nine segmented regional networks into one national one.
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Jean-Jumeau and Lamothe have both pointed to prepaid meters as a possible way to improve electricity access and collection. Lamothe cites South Africa’s success using prepaid electricity and the example of cellphones, which are ubiquitous in Haiti and generally pay-in-advance. Relatives living abroad can top-up cell credit for Haitians, and Lamothe envisions the Haitian diaspora doing the same with electricity. “The government will never be able to make enough investments by itself to increase production to 500 megawatts,” Jean-Jumeau said during the IDB panel. A handful of private power generation firms sells electricity to EDH. One such company is E-Power, a 30-megawatt heavy fuel oil plant on the outskirts of Cité Soleil. The World Bank’s IFC arm provided the bulk of financing for the factory in 2009, and it was completed more-or-less on time, despite the earthquake, in October 2010. CEO Carl-Auguste Boisson says that E-Power has already begun to save the state $20 million per year in generation costs thanks to burning cheaper fuel oil instead of diesel. “It’s going to be a big challenge,” says Boisson, “because it takes time to develop a project of that importance, or several projects, to increase from about 200 megawatts to 500 megawatts.” “However, even if it’s not completed by the end of President Martelly’s term, I think they are giving the right signal and having the right priority. You have to start somewhere, put ambitious objectives on the table.” He adds that the private sector is already “available, ready, and interested to move into this sector of the economy.” Boisson stresses the importance of overcoming Haiti’s energy challenges to the country’s prospects for progress. “This government wants to grow at around 10 percent a year,” he says. “You’re going to need a fair amount of electricity to support that growth.” “Everybody should be working toward this goal if we want to help the development of Haiti."

Press Release No. 12/269
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The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) completed the fourth review of Haiti’s performance under the Extended Credit Facility (ECF) arrangement on July 20, 2012. The Board's decision was taken on a lapse of time basis.* Completion of the review will enable an immediate disbursement of SDR 4.914 million (about US$7.4 million), bringing total disbursements under the program to date to SDR 31.122 million (about US$46.9 million). Haiti’s ECF arrangement was approved on July 21, 2010 (see Press Release No. 10/299) together with the full relief on the country’s outstanding debt to the Fund of about SDR 178 million (equivalent to US$268 million). The debt relief, financed by the Post-Catastrophe Debt Relief (PCDR) Trust Fund and IMF financing are part of a broad international strategy to support Haiti’s longer-term economic reconstruction plans, following the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010.
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*The Executive Board takes decisions under its lapse of time procedure when it is agreed by the Board that a proposal can be considered without convening formal discussions.
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IMF EXTERNAL RELATIONS DEPARTMENT
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Public Affairs
E-mail: publicaffairs@imf.org
Fax: 202-623-6278
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Media Relations
E-mail: media@imf.org

Michel Dorlean, a Haitian horticulturalist, grew up learning the family business of planting and growing flowers on hillside plots in his mountainous hometown of Furcy. Despite all the intensive work that goes into cultivating flowers, Michel and many other local flower producers struggled each year to reach their full earning potential. The traditional hillside plots left their flowers vulnerable to excessive heat, humidity, and rain; Michel used to lose upwards of 8 percent of his flower yields. The massive earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010 made matters worse, leading to a dramatic drop in prices that nearly forced farmers in Furcy to abandon flower production for more profitable crops.
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Today, thanks to assistance from Feed the Future, Michel is the president of a flower growers’ association in Furcy that generates US$18,000 per year. The project, implemented through USAID, is teaching smallholder farmers like Michel and his association how to use greenhouse agriculture to produce a higher quantity and quality of crops on smaller areas of land. An average farmer using traditional methods makes $170 per year on a surface of 1000 m², whereas one that owns a greenhouse can generate about $1800 in a year on only a 70 m² area—a staggering difference. Not only is Feed the Future increasing incomes for rural Haitians, but it is also helping reduce the environmental impact on water and soil resources.
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Since 2009, Feed the Future has been working with farmers in the Kenscoff region of Haiti to promote sustainable agriculture on hillsides by focusing on protected and vertical agriculture through small, drip-irrigated greenhouses. Each of these efficient structures can generate revenues of more than $1,500 per year for local organizations. Feed the Future offers technical assistance to teach farmers not only how to build and operate a greenhouse, but also the financial management and business development skills that will make their increased production sustainable over the long term.
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By protecting flowers from humidity and rain, greenhouses can boost production to three harvests per year compared to the one or two farmers could count on using traditional mountainside plots. Since the flowers are drip-irrigated, the greenhouses use less water to generate greater outputs. “You only need three gallons of water to irrigate an entire greenhouse, compared to over 50 gallons needed outdoors for the same number of plants!” Michel says. Two years after receiving targeted assistance from Feed the Future, Michel’s association is operating 10 greenhouses that are built on a newly terraced landscape to help protect the mountain against soil erosion. The association’s success has been so impressive that Haiti’s Ministry of Agriculture funded the construction of 10 additional greenhouses in the region. In return, Michel’s association will plant 7,000 trees as part of agro-forestry efforts to reduce soil erosion. Four new greenhouses have already been built with assistance from the Ministry of Agriculture, and the flower growers in Furcy are eager to share their knowledge with other members of the community.
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Michel’s story is an example of the kind of sustainable models for agribusiness Feed the Future is helping to create in Haiti and elsewhere. By building the capacity of smallholder farmers, Feed the Future strives to increase agricultural production and the income of those who rely on agriculture for their livelihoods.

7/17/2012
Associated Press
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The Haitian government agreed Tuesday to allow a local painting manufacturing company become the second tenant at a major U.S.-backed industrial park under construction in the northern end of the country. The agreement came after President Michel Martelly and Cheryl Mills of the U.S. State Department took a tour of a 10-megawatt electrical plant that will power the Caracol Haiti Industrial Park and houses for up to 1,500 workers by year's end. The newest tenant, Peintures Caraibes SA, will join South Korean garment manufacturer Sae-A Trading Co. Ltd. and will export paint made by Sherwin Williams along with its own locally made paint. The facility will initially employ 167 people, with the expectation of hiring a total of 350 people, said Pierre Yves Gardere, CEO of Peintures Caraibes. "It's Haitian companies that came to the park and we're waiting for others to come, too," Martelly said at the future site of Peintures Caraibes, which is expected to begin production in October.
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Financed by $224 million in subsidies, the Caracol Park is the U.S.'s biggest investment in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake clobbered the capital of Port-au-Prince and threw up to 1.5 million people into grim settlements in southern Haiti. The bulk of reconstruction has focused on the crowded capital and other heavily damaged cities, but the U.S. government has also directed rebuilding efforts to other parts of Haiti. The Caracol project on a 617-acre (250-hectare) site was in the works long before the earthquake and is supposed to be Haiti's largest private employer. The goal is to provide 20,000 jobs at the park and create 133,000 in all through cottage industries. Sae-A, the main tenant, is scheduled to begin shipping T-shirts in September. Among the company's 20 existing factories are plants in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Indonesia and Vietnam.
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Sae-A has contracts with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to make products in Haiti, and Target Corp. executives recently toured the project. Workers will be paid Haiti's minimum wage, which is $5 a day, and will be eligible for bonuses based on performance. Critics of Haiti's garment sector say the wage isn't enough to provide a living. Critics also worry the industrial park could replicate earlier development efforts that spawned poor neighborhoods. One of Haiti's biggest shantytowns, Cite Soleil, was originally designed as a housing project for people working in a nearby manufacturing plant in Port-au-Prince. But when years of political instability scared off investors, the facility faltered and so did its employees. Cite Soleil is now a maze-like shantytown. Caracol's proponents argue they have spread investments in multiple communities in the north in an effort to prevent such an outcome. The projects range from not only housing and infrastructure but also agriculture. "The idea was really to do development differently and to break with the development that Haiti has seen in the past," said Jean-Louis Warnholz, senior adviser to Mills, who is counselor and chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

By Juan Belt and Steve Olive
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A key constraint to agricultural development in Fond Baptiste, Haiti, is the poor condition of rural roads. Above, members of the community carry out labor-intensive road maintenance. Though roads improve commerce, facilitate services and open up an array of other opportunities, Haiti’s rural poor are often stymied by lack of infrastructure. With careful planning and an eye on sustainability, USAID is helping improve access in the Caribbean nation. Twenty-five years ago, Marie Lucienne Joseph abandoned needlework in favor of agriculture. “Last season was so terrible, I regretted my decision,” recalls Joseph, now 50 years old. Constant logistical challenges in Fond Baptiste—including heavy rains and seasonal flooding that sometimes made the mountain road impassable—often impeded transport of her potato crop to markets. “When it rained, only the bravest took the road, and often came back with injuries. We suffered sprains and strains—even the donkeys would fall,” she said.
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A key constraint to agricultural development in Fond Baptiste and throughout Haiti is the poor condition of its rural road infrastructure. Without sufficient planning and proper maintenance, a rural road is not useful beyond a couple of harvests and may not survive the first rainy season after rehabilitation. The relationship between rural road infrastructure and well-being is clear throughout the Caribbean nation. It impacts access to schools, health centers and other key services, as well as economic livelihoods for the 5 million people who live outside of cities. Physical access to markets is crucial to improving life for the country’s approximately 6 million agricultural workers. Access to basic services in rural areas is very limited, as only 10 percent of those living in rural areas have access to electricity and less than 8 percent have access to potable water. Poor road conditions lead to damaged products and increased post-harvest losses. In a nation where 88 percent of the rural population lives under the poverty line, these losses often come as devastating blows.
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A development approach that incorporates community participation and regular maintenance can extend the life of a road and justify future infrastructure investments. “Our work on improving roads in Haiti is an important step toward strengthening markets in selected development corridors,” says James Woolley, senior agronomist at USAID/Haiti. “A well-built road that is regularly maintained by communities is a strategic investment that reduces post-harvest losses, increasing farmers’ incomes. It really means a way forward for the people struggling to survive in these communities. “We have estimated that reducing spoilage that results from poor roads has the potential for increasing gross farm income by between 10 and 30 percent, and contributes to greater food security. Improved roads can also increase school attendance and visits to health facilities.”
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To benefit farmers like Joseph, the U.S. Government’s flagship food security initiative, Feed the Future, is testing innovative models to select the most effective roads to rehabilitate and to increase regular maintenance by involving communities in the process and raising awareness of the benefits. Jacob Greenstein, a senior engineer at USAID’s Washington, D.C. headquarters, says that the selection of roads should be based on multiple criteria, including agricultural potential, population density, status of accessibility, and potential for increasing access to health and education facilities. “Involving the communities in the selection of roads and in maintenance lowers unit costs, and more importantly, makes them feel real ownership of the road,” he says. The positive effects of this approach can now be seen along La route de Fond Baptiste in the Matheux region—one of the high-impact areas selected. As a preliminary condition for rehabilitating the 18-kilometer Fond Baptiste road, which bridges more than 500 small farms, USAID signed an agreement with the Arcahaie municipality and two local farmers associations with a total of 1,230 members—over half of them women. Under the agreement, USAID will work with a local engineering firm to perform the rehabilitation work, while the municipality will provide maintenance materials and permits. The farmers associations have committed to devoting 15 days per year to maintenance work after each rainy season and to plant vetiver grass along the road to stabilize the banks of drainage ditches. Vetiver grass is a hardy plant used to protect soil against surface water runoff and erosion.
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Jannius Delice, a local association coordinator, remembers what the road used to look like after each heavy rain. “Access to the road was completely blocked after the rain would fall. Whether on foot or by horse, it was basically impossible to travel on the road because of the rocks, soil and mud that would come down from the mountain and cover the passage. Now, even when the rain causes some damage in the zone, the road does not become blocked like it used to.” Joseph agrees. “Now after heavy rain, we only need to do small reparations to the road, something that the people from the region can do themselves. My husband is one of the community members committed to participating in this maintenance work.”
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For farmers worldwide—including those in rural Haiti—poor infrastructure and other barriers to markets not only affect their participation but also their motivation. “Fond Baptiste farmers lost interest in agricultural production because their products could not reach the market because of bad roads. With this road rehabilitation work, we believe [they] will see some improvement in their lives,” Delice said during the project’s inauguration in November of last year. Six months after the project began, Delice’s prediction has come to fruition. The Fond Baptiste community associations volunteered to maintain the road during the current rainy season, which runs roughly from May to November, rehabilitating drainage canals at critical points.
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In doing so, communities were socialized to the long-term benefits of consistent road quality. Prior to the rehabilitation, which was accompanied by distribution of improved seed varieties to people along the road, crops were primarily consumed by farm families. There was often not enough surplus to spare, and markets were hard to reach. When farmers did try to reach market, their crops would often spoil on the way, discouraging farmers from taking the risk. “I live much better now,” says Joseph, “I do not have to wake up at 1 a.m. to go sell my goods to market.” The road has reduced transportation costs from $15 to $5 per potato crate because of fewer damaged crops. These cost savings further increase the competitiveness of Fond Baptiste’s goods in the market. "Now we have enough to eat and to sell!” exclaimed Joseph when asked how her life has changed. The road rehabilitation has also enabled her to send food and other supplies to her children who live in the capital, allowing her to feel more confident that her children are eating well and are taken care of. “Confidence in the farm sector among rural Haitians will only increase with expanded road rehabilitation,” said USAID’s Haiti Mission Director Carleene Dei.
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According to the World Bank, only 5 percent of the rural population in Haiti has access to paved roads, while 33 percent use dirt roads. “With so much need, perhaps the most innovative part of this program is its concern for sustainability and making the best use of limited resources to benefit the most people,” says Haiti Deputy Mission Director Tony Chan. A key aspect of this strategy in Haiti was improving the selection of rural roads to be rehabilitated, according to Woolley. “This selection not only includes cost-benefit analysis but also consultations with the affected communities—an international best practice—and the creation of a rural road maintenance fund,” he said. In line with reform efforts designed to bolster local capacity in the countries USAID works in, the Agency will contract directly with local businesses and organizations to repair rural roads in Feed the Future target areas—the country’s potential agricultural breadbaskets. The development corridors selected by the U.S. and Haitian Governments have strategic production areas that will then sell better quality products to Haitian and international markets.
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In addition, hiring members of the community for maintenance will provide additional income to rural households, while farmers reap the benefits of improved market access. Meanwhile, non-farm-related benefits show up in increased access to basic services. In order to ensure sustainability, the Agency is working with the Ministry of Agriculture to create a maintenance fund and hire local partners to continue the upkeep and repair of rural roads beyond the life of the program, and ensure that farmers like Marie Lucienne Joseph will better endure the wear and tear of many rainy seasons to come.

7/9/2012
Boston.Com
By Brian MacQuarrie
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MONTROUIS — John Gibson, a 40-year-old Oklahoman, leans back in a beach chair and watches his two children frolic in the crystalline water that laps the fine sand at his feet. “Do I look like a towel?” he asks with a laugh as the children, 10 and 8, run toward him, dripping, shaking, and squealing with delight. In a moment, after Gibson has failed to fend off the spray, the children sprint back to the ocean on a balmy, cloudless, sun-streaked day. Behind him, bartenders stock liquor at an outdoor cabana. On the far side of a large pool, lunch is served on a patio. Just off the beach, a fishing boat with a russet-colored sail makes its leisurely way along the coast. If a visitor had parachuted into this place, a resort called Club Indigo, the amenities would seem indistinguishable from hundreds of upscale retreats that dot the Caribbean Sea. But this is desperately poor Haiti, and the leisure comforts of Club Indigo are only 40 miles north of the impoverished and wildly chaotic capital of Port-au-Prince. Gibson did not visit Club Indigo for the night life. Instead, he is using its beaches for a short-term breather during a religious mission to Haiti. Nearby, Lucille Hill of Atlanta, a nurse who had come to Haiti with a US medical team, curls her hands around a rum punch.
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Besides these guests, the club’s expansive, manicured grounds are nearly deserted. Two years after an earthquake is believed to have killed more than 100,000 people in Haiti, its people continue to struggle to rebuild the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Tourism will help, they hope, but even the most boosterish officials know that dream is in need of more than good intentions. The earthquake publicized Haiti’s plight around the world through indelible images of suffering; cholera remains a serious, often fatal problem; and an overwhelmed government fails to provide adequate sanitation, public safety, medical care, and transportation. Simply traveling from Port-au-Prince to Club Indigo, less than an hour’s ride in the United States, can take more than three tortuous, rib-rattling hours in which battered cars and trucks fight for room on a crumbling road with pedestrians, trash, and the occasional goat.
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When Joseph Zaiden, the club’s general manager, said he routinely makes the trip in 45 minutes, I rolled my eyes and wondered, how, by helicopter? Traveling anywhere in this country is an adventure, and almost always not in the positive sense of that word. “Over the last 25 years, every time we mentioned tourism, people would say, ‘Tourists? Haiti?’ ” said Richard Buteau, vice president of the Haiti Tourism Association. Now, because of the devastation caused by the earthquake, the notion seems even more preposterous for a country where US visitors routinely prepare for the trip by protecting themselves against typhoid, hepatitis, and malaria. “Wishing for tourism and making it possible are two different things,” said Vick Ulysse, 34, a video production manager who also works as a driver, or fixer, for visiting foreigners. Still, Buteau sees potential for an industry that, since the 1970s, has declined precipitously amid a high rate of HIV and AIDS, the migration of Haitian boat people to Florida, military coups, and other political instability. In its heyday in the late ’60s to early ’70s, the country was attracting about 300,000 tourists a year, and even about 100,000 before the 2010 quake.
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“We have one advantage because we are starting from scratch, and we can learn from the mistakes,” said Buteau, who is general manager of the Karibe Hotel, one of the best in the country. “Changing the image of Haiti is something we have started working on.” That makeover will be daunting, but the country’s leaders are pitching tourism as one of the four pillars of its redevelopment, along with agriculture, manufacturing, and education. The government recently launched a tourism campaign called Vivez l’Experience, or Live the Experience, whose logo features a red hibiscus, the national flower.
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Haiti currently has only about 800 quality hotel rooms, according to a report in the Caribbean Journal, but has set an ambitious goal of 3,000 new rooms by 2015. Five hotels and 763 rooms are moving toward development, including a $45 million, 173-room Marriott hotel in Port-au-Prince, the Journal reported. To pitch the country’s potential, Haitian tourism officials have begun attending travel conventions in Miami and elsewhere to tout their tropical beaches; the French colonial architecture in Jacmel, a city that influenced the look of New Orleans; and the Citadel, a fort near Cap-Haitien that is the largest in the Americas and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Elsewhere, Royal Caribbean cruise line has been taking passengers since 1986 to Labadie, a private beach resort in the north. Haiti also has connections to the pirate captain Henry Morgan, who in the mid-1660s established a base at Ile a Vache, an island off the southern coast; and to Christopher Columbus, who visited Haiti on his first voyage to the Americas in 1492. Well-known and well-meaning Americans on humanitarian visits have given Haiti, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic, some adventurous appeal. They include Bill and Hillary Clinton, who honeymooned in Haiti; celebrities such as Sean Penn, Oprah Winfrey, and Matt Damon; and thousands of medical volunteers who have brought their time and skills.
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As a result, Buteau said, the country has experienced a boomlet in a certain kind of overseas visitor. “We have a huge increase in humanitarian tourists. They are tourists with a purpose,” Buteau said. “Now, we are not targeting the average American tourists. We are targeting the more adventurous tourists, the more sophisticated tourists.” For the foreseeable future, Haiti’s logistics will be a big deterrent for casual visitors who simply want to relax. Navigating the streets of the capital is a slow-moving nightmare of few traffic rules and stop-and-go congestion that will tax nearly everyone’s patience. Locally hired drivers who know the shortcuts and the detours are a must.
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Port-au-Prince has daily air connections from the United States, particularly Miami, which puts this country much closer to Americans than its Third World difficulties make it seem. Once in the country and out of the capital, the effect is otherworldly. Poverty is stark and widespread, and remnants of the earthquake are still apparent in damaged buildings and piles of rubble. But the farmland is often beautiful, the vegetation lush, the mountains imposing, and the people friendly. The staff at good hotels such as the Karibe speak English, but most regular Haitians speak only Creole or French. A Haitian driver who can translate is indispensable for US tourists who want to explore the countryside and interact with merchants and others. Tourism officials know they have a deep, ready-made pool of customers: the hundreds of thousands of Haitians who have left the country to start new lives in places such as Boston, New York, and Montreal. But even they will want a certain comfort level when they revisit their homeland, Buteau said.
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“The diaspora will be our first target market,” Buteau said, “but you must not forget that a lot of them have been living in the United States, or Europe, or Canada, and they have become used to those standards.” Lowering expectations is essential for any trip to Haiti, where even the airport, which opened in 1965, can be an anxiety-laden maze that requires patience, guesswork, and a high tolerance for frustration. Haiti is maddeningly primitive and seemingly directionless, but its unexpected visual gifts — a rickety truck teetering with towering piles of bananas; a long, solemn funeral procession on a dusty road; a collage of vibrant color in a makeshift market — leave a lasting, profound impression. This is a country that is hard to navigate and hard to understand, but it is a country that teems with life in all its disarming simplicity and harsh complexity. Brian MacQuarrie can be reached at macquarrie@globe.com.

Support for strengthening the Haitian government’s institutional capacity in the energy sector and increasing the efficiency of its state power utility is coming in form of a $12 million Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) grant. This was announced today (June 14) by the Washington-based IDB in its bid to support efforts to increase the availability and affordability of energy in Haiti. According to the announcement, this grant is the second of a series of three policy-based grants designed to provide budget support as the Haitian government works to establish a legal and regulatory framework for the energy sector and strengthen the Ministry of Public Works, Transportation, Energy and Communications to carry out its policy planning and oversight duties. These reforms are also backed by the international donor community.
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The grant will support Haiti’s efforts to turn the power utility Electricité d’Haïti (EDH) into a viable and operational company through a management contract, aiming at increasing its revenues and customer base as well as reducing its commercial and technical losses. EDH’s shortfalls constitute a major burden on the government's finances, costing as much as 2.8 percent of GDP in FY2011. In addition to budget support for energy policy reforms, the IDB has provided Haiti investment grants totaling more than US$46 million to help restore the generation capacity of the Péligre hydroelectric plant and to upgrade the power transmission line to Port-au-Prince and key circuits of the capital region’s electricity distribution network. “This new grant underscores the significant progress Haiti has made toward transforming its energy sector,” said IDB Energy Division Chief Leandro Alves, in the statement on the IDB website. “Coupled with the investments Haiti is making in infrastructure and systems, the policy measures covered by this operation will be critical to achieving a sustainable reform.”
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The IDB is Haiti's leading multilateral donor. Since the 2010 earthquake, the IDB has approved grants totaling $546 million and disbursed nearly $390 million to assist the Haitian government in making investments in energy, water and sanitation, transportation, education, agriculture and private sector development. Click here to receive free news bulletins via email from Caribbean360. (View sample)

Press Release No. 12/223
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A mission from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) headed by M. Boileau Loko visited Port-au-Prince from June 4 to 8, 2012 for discussions related to the Fourth Review under the Extended Credit Facility (ECF) arrangement.1 The mission met with Prime Minister, Laurent Lamothe, Minister of Economy and Finance, Marie Carmelle Jean-Marie, Minister Delegate responsible for human rights and combating extreme poverty, Marie Carmèle Rose Anne Auguste, Governor of the Bank of the Republic of Haiti Charles Castel, other senior government officials, and representatives of the banking sector and development partners. The mission would like to thank the authorities for their warm hospitality and the climate of close cooperation and frank discussion that prevailed throughout its stay. At the end of its visit, the mission issued the following statement:
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“The economy continues to grow, albeit below the levels projected in the ECF-supported program, which remains broadly on track. The slowdown in public investment, associated with the process of political transition over the recent months, was offset by sustained dynamism in the commercial sector and manufacturing industries as well as by a good harvest. Inflation slowed to 5.4 percent in April in line with easing international food and energy prices. The fiscal position firmed as a result of strong domestic revenue collection and lower capital expenditures than initially forecast in the budget. Credit to the economy picked up and gross foreign reserves exceeded the equivalent of five months of imports at end-March.
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“The government of Haiti and the mission reached agreement ad referendum on the broad outlines of a macroeconomic and structural reform program covering the remainder of 2012 and the new 2013 budget year. The authorities’ program will continue to focus on preserving macroeconomic stability, supporting economic recovery, and further reducing poverty.
“The new government would need to accelerate the pace of reconstruction against the backdrop of political stability and security. With the expected upturn in public investment, real economic growth is expected to range between 4.5 and 5.5 percent in 2012. Raising poverty-reducing expenditures and investment levels will remain key fiscal policy objectives. An appropriate combination of macroeconomic policies should help maintain inflation at around 5 percent, while the external position is set to remain strong.”
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“The structural reform program will focus mainly on: (i) strengthening domestic revenue collection; (ii) improving public financial management and economic governance; (iii) strengthening institutional capacity to enhance public investment management; (iv) reinforcing liquidity management and monetary and foreign exchange operations to bring them more closely in line with market conditions; and (v) reforming the business environment. Close coordination between the new government and the donor community is important to ensure the success of the program.
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The IMF staff will recommend that management request the completion of the fourth review under the ECF, to be taken up by the Executive Board in July 2012.”
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1 The Extended Credit Facility (ECF) has replaced the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) as the Fund’s main tool for medium-term financial support to low-income countries by providing a higher level of access to financing, more concessional terms, enhanced flexibility in program design features, and more focused streamlined conditionality. Financing under the ECF currently carries a zero interest rate, with a grace period of 5½ years, and a final maturity of 10 years. The Fund reviews the level of interest rates for all concessional facilities every two years.

Lodging Hospitality
By Carlo Wolff
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A Best Western Premier with service designed to set a Caribbean standard is scheduled to open in suburban Port au Prince in November. It will be the first U.S.-branded hotel on the island, says Rich Cortese, vice president of Aimbridge Hospitality, the Dallas-based firm that will manage the property. The seven-story, 106-room Best Western Premier Petionville will cost its developers, The Carabimmo Group, more than $10 million to build. Designed by Dallas company Studio 11, it will be staffed by Haitians exclusively. Cortese predicts it will be “the hottest thing not only in Haiti but known throughout the Caribbean.” Best Western development executive Mark Williams believes in Haiti’s tourism potential, noting the beaches near Port au Prince are “gorgeous and pristine and undeveloped.”
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Mark Williams, vice president of North American development for Best Western, says the Petionvillle deal has been in the works since 2008. “We were about to lead the way to breaking ground when the earthquake hit and obviously that pushed everything back a couple of years,” he says. This will be the fifth Best Western in the Caribbean and its first in Haiti. And, Williams notes, since the 2010 earthquake, Best Western has developed “descriptors,” including Premier for its high-end affiliates. “The service will be five-star, four-diamond,” he says, noting the property will have two lounges, a spa, 24-hour doormen and concierge service, as befits a hotel designed to facilitate business. Funding for the project is local, so the hotel will be Haiti-financed and largely Haitian-owned, says Williams. It will feature 2,000 square feet of meeting space.
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Aimbridge executive Cortese says the project came about after a Carabimmo partner who had worked for a real estate investment trust that uses Aimbridge learned of Aimbridge’s work. Aimbridge manages 65 hotels representing nearly 11,000 rooms. Aimbridge executive Rich Cortese believes the Best Western Premier Petionville will make quite a statement. “I’ve been in the Caribbean for 20 years and it’s very exciting to me personally to get involved in a project that’s going to create 150 direct jobs at the hotel for Haitians,” Cortese says. With a big lobby bar on the ground floor and an upstairs restaurant and bar with a great view of Port au Prince, “it’s definitely going to be the meeting place, the place to be in Haiti.” Each room will feature 40-inch flat-screen televisions, and there will be free Wi-Fi throughout, as well as 24-hour laundry service. Rates will be $170-$235; rates at comparable hotels on the island start at around $130, Cortese says. The hotel will target business travelers, aid workers, contractors and friends and family returning to Haiti, particularly from nearby Miami, with its large Haitian population. While there isn’t tourist traffic, he says there will be “down the road.”
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Haiti is “a third-world country, one of the poorest countries in the world,” but Cortese says he feels safe there. So does Williams, who visited Haiti for the first time this month. “It’s just like any other country that you don’t know about and you take precautions,” Williams says, noting there is activity, including banks and grocery stores, within two blocks of the hotel site, a former parking lot. The hotel is expected to draw government and NGO business, as well as business from the United Nations, “and the new government is taking steps to drastically improve tourism in the country.” Apparently, the economically and politically volatile country is recovering from a Jan. 2, 2010 earthquake that registered 7.0 on the Richter scale, “disappeared” 300,000 and rendered homeless up to 1.5 million people. The earthquake also led to a loss of some 500 hotel rooms. While the Best Western may well be the first U.S.-branded hotel in Haiti, it may not be the only one. A 150-room hotel near Port au Prince’s Toussaint Louverture Airport is in the works, now that developer Dominique Carvonis has secured financing. She plans to build it to augment the nearby, 40-room Visa lodge she and her partners developed 11 years ago. All Carvonis has to do is lock down the brand—and negotiations are well under way.

The Cortez Journal
By MARTHA MENDOZA
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Its capital is blighted with earthquake rubble. Its countryside is shorn of trees, chopped down for fuel. And yet, Haiti's land may hold the key to relieving centuries of poverty, disaster and disease: There is gold hidden in its hills - and silver and copper, too. A flurry of exploratory drilling in the past year has found precious metals worth potentially $20 billion deep below the tropical ridges in the country's northeastern mountains. Now, a mining company is drilling around the clock to determine how to get those metals out. In neighboring Dominican Republic, workers are poised to start mining the other side of this seam later this year in one of the world's largest gold deposits: 23 million ounces worth about $40 billion. Haiti's annual budget is $1 billion, more than half provided by foreign assistance. The largest single source of foreign investment, $2 billion, came from Haitians working abroad last year. A windfall of locally produced wealth could pay for roads, schools, clean water and sewage systems for the nation's 10 million people, most of whom live on as little as $1.25 a day.
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"If the mining companies are honest and if Haiti has a good government, then here is a way for this country to move forward," said Bureau of Mines Director Dieuseul Anglade. In a parking lot outside Anglade's marble-floored office, more than 100 families have been living in tents since the earthquake. "The gold in the mountains belongs to the people of Haiti," he said, gesturing out his window. "And they need it." Haiti's geological vulnerability is also its promise. Massive tectonic plates squeeze the island with horrifying consequences, but deep cracks between them form convenient veins for gold, silver and copper pushed up from the hot innards of the planet. Prospectors from California to Chile know earthquake faults often have, quite literally, a golden lining.
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Until now, few Haitians have known about this buried treasure. Mining camps are unmarked, and the work is being done miles up dirt roads near remote villages, on the opposite side of the country from the capital. But U.S. and Canadian investors have spent more than $30 million in recent years on everything from exploratory drilling to camps for workers, new roads, offices and laboratory studies of samples. Actual mining could be under way in five years. "When I first heard whispers of this I said, `Gold mines? There could be gold mines in Haiti?'" said Michel Lamarre, a Haitian engineer whose firm, SOMINE, is leading the exploration. "I truly believe this is our answer to taking care of ourselves instead of constantly living on donations." On a rugged, steep Haitian ridge far above the Atlantic, brilliant boulders coated with blue-green oxidized copper jut from the hills, while colorful pebbles litter the soil, strong indicators that precious metals lie below. "Just look down," said geologist John Watkins. "Where there's smoke, there's fire." Nearby, 8-year-old Whiskey Pierre and his barefoot buddies stared at a team of sweat-drenched men driving a narrow, shrieking diamond bit 900 feet into the ground. "That is a drill!" shouted Whiskey, bouncing on his toes. "The man drill to get gold!"
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The workers periodically pulled up samples and knocked them into boxes. The first 40 feet yielded loose rocks and gravel. About 160 feet down, cylinders of rock came back peppered with gold. At 1,000 feet down, rocks were heavily streaked with copper. Geologists extrapolating from depth and strike reports estimate at least 1 million ounces of gold at two sites. In April, prospectors found the first significant silver ever reported in Haiti: between 20 million and 30 million ounces. And in the end, it may be copper that is the most lucrative: geologists suspect that more than 1 million tons lay in just one of many areas under exploration. The prices of precious metals have been volatile in recent years, with copper selling for about $8,000 per ton, silver at $30 an ounce, and gold at $1,600 per ounce. "Ultimately, I think mining is going to dwarf anything else in Haiti," says Michael Fulp, an Albuquerque, N.M.-based geologist who visited the drill sites. "Usually you've got about a one-in-1,000 chance of making a mine from the exploratory stage, but those odds are much better in Haiti because of the lack of any previous modern-day exploration and very, very promising samples."
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Gold was last gathered in Haiti in the 1500s, after Christopher Columbus ran the Santa Maria onto a Haitian reef. Spaniards enslaved the Arawak Indians to dig for gold, killing them off with harsh conditions and infectious diseases. When the Spaniards learned of even more lucrative deposits in Mexico, they moved on. In the 1970s, United Nations geologists documented significant pockets of gold and copper, but foreigners weren't willing to risk their cash in a country where corruption and instability has long discouraged outside investment. Ironically, it was only after the catastrophic 2010 earthquake that investors saw real opportunity. Fifteen days after a seismic jolt brought down much of Port-au- Prince, a Canadian exploration firm acquired all of the shares of the only Haitian firm holding full permits for a promising chunk of land in the northeast. "Investors want to get in at the bottom," said Dan Hachey, president of Majescor Resources, the Canadian company, "and I figured after that earthquake, Haiti was as low as it could get."
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Hachey was also betting that the $10 billion in foreign assistance promised for earthquake recovery would force change and accountability. "The eyes of the world will not allow the government to fool around," he said. Three firms are considering mining in Haiti, but so far only SOMINE has full concessions to take the metals out of the mountains. Those permits, for 50 square kilometers (31 square miles), were negotiated in 1996 under President Rene Preval and require the firm to hire Haitians whenever possible. In exchange for minimal permit fees, SOMINE committed to spend $2.25 million in the first two years. In addition, it will pay $1.8 million after a feasibility study, according to the contract. Bottom line: Haitians should get $1 out of every $2 of profits, compared with about $1 out of $3 that most countries get from mining firms. Discoveries of rich resources, whether diamonds, oil or gold, often prompt great economic booms but come with great risk of environmental, health and social problems. Chile, one of the wealthiest nations in Latin America, is the world's largest copper exporter, deriving a third of its income from the metal. Peru, with one of the fastest growing economies in the world, has privatized most of its mines in recent years, and now gets about 20 percent of its total revenues from the industry.
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Though the contractual terms are generous for Haiti, there is plenty to be cautious about. Haiti's government is repeatedly rated as one of the most corrupt in the world. The mines would ostensibly be regulated by government officials responsible for enforcing environmental, mining and corporate laws, but at this point those officials don't exist and there are neither plans nor budgets to hire them. Further, open pit mines, common around the world, are crater-like holes made up of a series of massive terraced steps that drop thousands of feet into the ground. When the resources are exhausted, usually after about 25 years, the pits can be refilled or converted into reservoirs. In many cases, the mines leave serious problems - environmental contamination, displaced communities and mountaintops torn asunder. From Papua New Guinea to the Philippines to Brazil, mining accidents have allowed tons of waste to be spilled into rivers and lakes, creating environmental disasters. "In low-income countries, the dangers are substantial," said UCLA political science professor Michael Ross. "The great irony of mineral wealth is that those countries that most desperately need infusions of mineral revenue - low-income countries with weak governments - are also least likely to manage these resources wisely, for the benefit of the country. Already, the hundreds of jobs, the new roads and the community investment in a country where two out of three people have no formal employment is much appreciated. Stone cutter Joseph Bernard, 47, says that before he got a job slicing rock samples, his family was going hungry. They had one cow. Their peanut and bean fields had gone to dust after months without rain. Today, his wife has launched a business selling seeds, and his son and two daughters have started school. "I found a job, but many didn't," he said, wiping a trickle of sweat from his deeply lined cheeks after a recent shift. "If more companies come, more people will work." In a sleepy exploration camp at sunset, Hachey and his competitor, Daven Mashburn of Newmont Mining Corp., met to talk business over bottles of Haiti's Prestige beer, bumping fists in the low-germ "cholera handshake" that has replaced the traditional palm grip after last year's deadly epidemic. The men talked labor - Newmont got 10,000 applications for 100 jobs when one project started up last month. They talked logistics - core samples are sliced in half, bagged, and flown to Santiago, Chile, where it takes 21 days to find out how much gold, silver or copper they contain. They talked hurricanes, cholera, political unrest and, yes, the earthquake - Mashburn spent four hours buried under piles of rock in Port-au- Prince, eventually pulled out with fractures from head to toe. But mostly they talked about gold. "Of all the places we work in the world," said Mashburn, whose company has operations in eight countries on five continents, "it would be really most satisfying to have success here. Haiti has great mineral wealth, and they surely could use it."

5/7/2012
Caribbean Journal
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Haiti received $181 million in net foreign direct investment in 2011, according to estimates from the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. That number was an all-time record for foreign direct investment in Haiti. That represented a nearly 21 percent increase in foreign direct investment compared to the previous year, and a 376 percent increase over the net foreign direct investment in Haiti in 2009. The only year in the last decade that came close was 2006, when Haiti received a net total of $160.6 million in FDI. Those figures come in comparison to 2001, when Haiti received just $4.4 million in net foreign direct investment.

Miami Herald
By Jacqueline Charles
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They came bearing a colorful brochure, new logo and hope that after years of disaster and crisis, Haiti will return to the tourism map. “Everyone has sand and beach,” said Elsa Baussan Noel, tourism adviser to Haitian President Michel Martelly and a third-generation hotelier. “We have a pretty interesting religion mix. We have different music. We have artisans. We have culture.” Noel was among more than 20 Haitian hotelier and wannabe hoteliers who worked the halls at the two-day Caribbean Hotel & Resort Investment (CHRIS) Summit, which ended Tuesday in downtown Miami. The Haiti delegation was by far the largest representing any one country. The third annual conference attracted more than 300 hospitality consultants, real estate developers, brand executives, chief bank economists and the biggest hotel investors in the Caribbean. Participants focused on recent tourism trends in the Caribbean, which is rebounding despite the global economic downturn. Demand for new hotel rooms is up, participants said, but they noted that securing financing remains difficult.
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Currently, there are 8,000 hotel rooms in the pipeline. And of the five biggest hotel projects currently under construction, two are in the Bahamas and two in the Dominican Republic. For Haitians, the outlook in the neighboring Dominican Republic presented both promise and challenge. “Haiti has definitely disappeared from the tourism map. But today, they are talking about Haiti,” said Dominique Carvonis, who was shopping her new 130-room hotel near the Port-au-Prince international airport. Already, Occidental, Marriott and Best Western have announced plans for hotels in Haiti. But there is room for others, Haitian hoteliers said. Still, selling Haiti as a tourism destination wasn’t easy, demonstrating the rough road Haiti still has before it seeks to re-brand its image. "Haiti is an emerging market that has tremendous potential,” said Andy Ingraham, president and CEO of the National Association of Black Hotel Owners with more than 500 hotels around the U.S. and Caribbean. “Everybody keeps saying let’s go to Haiti, but investors are looking for great infrastructure, where the investment can give a return. You can’t build a brand hotel and there is no way to get to it.” Such challenges were evident in the hallway conversations and private meetings. “More than ever, it’s a big uphill battle,” said Gregory Brandt, who was touting a beachfront hotel project north of the capital. “Perception, image is as low as ever. Nothing has changed.” But instead of being discouraged, Noel, who runs a hillside hotel in Petionville, said she remains optimistic. One reason may be that at least two other well-known brands are in discussions to operate hotels in Haiti.

By Chris Owen
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Haiti is one of the most fascinating destinations in the Caribbean but travelers still stay away, more than two years after an earthquake nearly destroyed much of what they came to see in 2010. Now, conditions are beginning to improve in Haiti and a revival of tourism is underway. A construction development now in progress in Haiti's capital of Port-au-Prince includes a recently-completed five-star Occidental Luxury Hotel. A Marriott hotel is also set to open in 2014. These are two of seven hotels on the books to be built in Haiti soon.
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"Together, the projects add up to well over $100 million in new investment and will generate several thousand jobs in a nation still struggling to emerge from years of natural disasters and political turmoil," says Bloomberg Business Week. In order to further reinforce Haiti tourism revival, major airports are also being repaired and updated. The Port-au-Prince International Airport (PAP) is currently going through a multi-million dollar reconstruction project. Another airport, Cap-Haitien International Airport (CAP), is also scheduled to be launched in 2013. These rebuilding efforts will draw funds from what is being called a "tourist card" which will be mandated to all non-Haitian vacationers and tourists. Soon, anyone without a Haitian passport will be required to purchase a $10 tourist card upon arrival. Taxes will also increase from $25 to $55 on airline tickets, similar to that in the neighboring Dominican Republic. "This approach will incorporate tax levies on various tourism prerequisites such as plane ticket prices," says Tourism Reivew.
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"Of course this would mean that tourists who wish to visit the country are expected to spend more than the usual, but the government and other tourism experts are convinced that this will eventually prove beneficial to all individuals and groups involved, especially for the people of Haiti." All this activity is the result of sustained and united efforts from the Haitian government, non-profit organizations, corporate entities, and the worldwide community. Still, its a slow road to recovery in Haiti, bogged down further by reports of brutal rape and poverty, not exactly the worldwide image that lush, tropical tourist destinations need to flourish

Associated Press
By TRENTON DANIEL
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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Glimmers of hope are coming to this devastated capital and its surrounding cities, as the concrete Royal Oasis hotel rises over a metropolitan area still filled with displaced-persons camps housing hundreds of thousands. Signs of Haiti's comeback can also be seen in the 105-room Best Western hotel being built within blocks of shanty-covered hillsides. At least seven hotels are under construction or are in the planning stage in Port-au-Prince and its surrounding areas, raising hopes that thousands of investors will soon fill their air-conditioned rooms looking to build factories and tourist infrastructure that will help Haiti bounce back from a 2010 earthquake that officials say claimed 300,000 lives. Some damaged hotels are undergoing renovations. Together, the projects add up to well over $100 million in new investment and will generate several thousand jobs in a nation still struggling to emerge from years of natural disasters and political turmoil.
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In fact, the new hotels are the first significant private-sector construction in Port-au-Prince in the two years since the quake. "Cautious optimism and deep skepticism" is how economist Claude Beauboeuf describes Haiti's hotel boom. For people to fill the hotels, he said, it's important that President Michel Martelly address the problems facing his government, which include an illegal force of armed men openly roaming the country, a string of mysterious police killings and strife with the opposition-controlled Parliament. He also needs a prime minister to replace the outgoing one who resigned after clashing with the president over priorities. "If he doesn't address these things, investors will withdraw," Beauboeuf said, citing Club Med and the Holiday Inn as earlier examples of franchises that left Haiti because of political instability. The planned hotels in the capital are not aimed at tourists, who avoid gritty Port-au-Prince. Instead, developers are targeting the contractors, foreign aid workers and diplomats for whom finding a room can be a challenge. The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, led by the previous two U.S. presidents, identified new business-class hotels as key to attracting foreign investors looking for opportunities in Haiti. Similarly, President Martelly has said he wants to make Haiti less dependent on foreign aid and friendlier to outside investments. One of the biggest foreign investments in Haiti is an industrial park under construction in the north that's scheduled to begin garment production in September. The giant $300 million Caracol industrial park will be run by South Korean manufacturer Sae-A Trading Co. Ltd. and is expected to bring an initial 20,000 jobs to the remote area. And there are smaller efforts to help Haiti improve production so farmers can better export mangoes, cacao and coffee.
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The Haitian capital, which includes several overlapping cities such as Petionville, lost nearly 850 hotel rooms in the quake, according to Tourism Minister Stephanie B. Villedrouin. For more than a year after the disaster, it was often impossible to find a room without months of advance notice. Villedrouin said all of those hotel rooms will have been replaced by the end of the year. Several hotel projects are also under way outside the capital, including in the sleepy, picturesque fishing village of Jacmel on the southern coast, and are aimed at what Villedrouin and other government officials hope will become a growing market for tourists willing to overlook the capital and its troubles "Haiti is not Port-au-Prince," the tourism minister said. "Haiti is not the earthquake." Even before the catastrophe, only a handful of hotels met international standards of comfort, including the Hotel Montana, the Hotel Villa Creole and the newer Karibe Hotel. These would often fill with journalists, international observers and others during elections or times of crisis, becoming hubs of activity in a city with little in the way of entertainment and where few foreigners venture out at night.
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The quake largely destroyed the Montana, though part of it has since re-opened, and extensively damaged the Villa Creole, which remained open after the disaster and is now being renovated. The Karibe was largely unscathed. Villedrouin said Port-au-Prince officially has a 60 percent occupancy rate but many of the hotels are too rustic for international travelers. The better rooms in the city quickly fill up, with huge demand for the relatively few places with better amenities. "Right now there's such demand that the market can absorb several hotels," said Alejandro Acevedo, an executive for Marriott International, which is building a $45 million, 174-room hotel in partnership with mobile phone company Digicel Group. Acevedo said even he had to share a room with his boss on a recent visit because of the dearth of hotel space. "There's nowhere to stay," Acevedo said.
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Other projects include the $15.7 million Best Western in Petionville that's due to open this summer. Also in Petionville is the Royal Oasis, a 10-story building that will include an art gallery, three restaurants, a commercial bank and high-end shops. Construction on the Royal Oasis began before the earthquake and is expected to finish by the end of the year.

The project received a $2 million equity investment from the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund along with $275,000 from the Oasis Foundation, a nonprofit group set up by the hotel, to train workers in the hotel industry. It'll be run by the Spanish firm Occidental Hotel & Resorts. "This is going to be one of the most palpable signs of modernity emerging from the ashes of the earthquake," Jerry Tardieu, President and General Director of the Royal Oasis, said from the hotel's leafy courtyard amid the clang of construction. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies is mulling building its own hotel on land it quietly purchased for $10.5 million several months after the earthquake. The money came from donations raised by national Red Cross agencies for quake recovery, causing some to wonder if the money would be better used to house displaced people rather than aid workers. The Red Cross has said little about the project since it was reported in recent weeks, saying only that it is under consideration. Many people in Haiti welcome the new hotels just as they do any new investments that will bring jobs to a country where more than half the adult population is unemployed or underemployed and survive on less than $2 a day. But some say Haiti should first care for the 500,000 people still living in makeshift camps.
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"It's nice to build hotels to bring tourists but first you need to think of your citizens," said Ben Etienne, a 36-year-old resident of a hilly encampment in Peguyville that fills with mud during Haiti's rainy season. "I don't have a problem if the tourists come but the money needs to come into the country for the people." Tardieu said the new hotels will help more people get out of the camps by giving them jobs to pay for rent on homes being rehabilitated by government and nonprofit organizations. He noted that 600 people have been employed in the Royal Oasis' construction and that another 250 to 300 full-time jobs will be created after it opens. "There need to be Haitian women and men who dare to invest," he said, "who dare to have a vision of modernity for their country and do not cave in to the cliche that Haiti is only a country where efforts have to be geared toward short-term relief humanitarian work."

Haiti is undeniably one of the most fascinating destinations in the Caribbean. Unfortunately, the country's tourism industry suffered immensely from the earthquake that has ravaged its islands back in 2010. The said earthquake had caused the loss of a large number of properties, and worse the lives of hundreds of Haiti nationals. The world became witness to the debilitating tragedy which then triggered various movements and cause-driven initiatives, all in support of the country's recovery. Now a couple of years after the aforementioned natural calamity which had destroyed much of the country's capital's infrastructure and livelihood, things are finally looking hopeful for Haiti and its people. This is the result of sustained and united efforts from the government, non-profit organizations, various corporate entities, and worldwide community. Moreover, this revival is also vastly attributed to the sheer audacity inherent to the Haitian people who have already seen various atrocities - whether political or natural - in the past.
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A construction development is now underway in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince. Amidst the rubbles, the Occidental Luxury Hotel has recently been completed. This hotel serves as a testament to Haiti's unwavering initiatives to rekindle its previous glory. The Occidental Luxury Hotel is replete with all the essentials for a five-star accommodation: comfortable rooms, lifestyle amenities, and even an infinity pool strategically situated on the building's rooftop. The Marriot is also set to be launched sometime in 2014. Aside from the Occidental Luxury Hotel and The Marriot, other infrastructures are also in their conceptual phase. For instance, the worldwide organization, The Red Cross, is bent on emulating the project enacted by the Kenya Red Cross Society which had established the four-star accommodation The Red Court Hotel in Kenya. Haiti's Red Cross organization is planning to erect a hotel near the national airport. This prospect, as viewed by the organization, poses a lot of benefits both to tourists and Haitian residents.
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Other tourism efforts are also being polished such as the so called Cruise with a Cause. This is said to be Port-au-Prince's first ever cruise vessel after more than two decades of cruise inactivity in the capital. According to several meetings and discussions, this project is set to "sail" in the year 2013. In order to further reinforce the country's tourism revival, its major airports are also being rehabilitated. The Port-au-Prince International Airport is currently under reconstruction. This project is costing the country of Haiti millions upon millions of dollars, but the authorities believe that this expense is a rather practical investment. Another airport, Cap-Haitien International Airport, is also scheduled to be launched in 2013.
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These rebuilding efforts will draw funds from the so called "tourist card" which will be mandated to all non-Haitian vacationers and tourists. This approach will incorporate tax levies on various tourism prerequisites such as plane ticket prices. Of course this would mean that tourists who wish to visit the country are expected to spend more than the usual, but the government and other tourism experts are convinced that this will eventually prove beneficial to all individuals and groups involved, especially for the people of Haiti.

By the Caribbean Journal staff
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Haiti’s Gross Domestic Product is projected to grow by 7.8 percent in 2012, according to the recently-released World Economic Outlook from the International Monetary Fund. Haiti’s projected growth comes after a reported 5.6 percent growth rate in 2011, according to the Fund. The rate comes largely from reconstruction efforts following the devastating earthquake in the country in 2012. That number represents the highest projected growth of any country in the Caribbean. Suriname, with a projected growth of 4.9 percent, has the second-highest projected number. The projection is in line with a United Nations report from December which pegged the country’s 2012 growth rate at 8 percent. The IMF’s Regional Economic Outlook for the Western Hemisphere, released Wednesday, projects growth for the region at 3.75 percent this year, before returning to about 4 percent in 2013. According to the fund, the Caribbean “finally turned the corner” in 2011 after a long recession, although high debt levels and tourism dependence continue to constrain the region’s economic outlook.

The Miami Herald
By Jacqueline Charles
jcharles@MiamiHerald.com
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Josephine Elizee Legros sold her Weston home, emptied her retirement and savings accounts, and poured all the money into the construction of a 22-room boutique hotel in the north of Haiti. A labor of love, the project has been anything but easy. The construction has taken four years; getting the hotel name registered took three months and a local Haiti bank recently demanded additional paperwork for her to open an account. “Helping Haiti requires personal sacrifice,” said Legros, who hopes to welcome her first guest in Mole Saint-Nicolas this December. Legros was among dozens of Haitians living in the diaspora who attended the first day of a two-day Haiti investment conference in Miami Beach Monday. Organizers hope to get Haitians in the diaspora to invest in their quake-battered homeland. “Haiti has problems, but we still do business through those problems,” Herve Denis, president of Haiti’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry, told attendees. “There are some success story. There are people doing business and making profits.”
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Still, Haiti needs more investments, especially from its sons and daughters in South Florida and elsewhere if it’s to achieve social change, organizers said. Accomplishing this, however, requires an honest and somber conversation about not the opportunities — and challenges. “The diaspora isn’t going to disengage with Haiti,” said Johnny Celestin, executive director of the Haitian Diaspora Federation, which partnered with Sustainatopia — it holds a regular conference on global and social change — to sponsor the conference. “We know that we are being milked,” Celestin said of the diaspora, which is already contributing to education through a remittances and telephone tax instituted by President Michel Martelly’s year-old administration. “The question is: ‘What are we going to get out of it?’ We can’t just sit on the sidelines and not take chances.” Among the 30 speakers who addressed the 2012 Investment Forum on Monday were Denis, as well as Haiti’s outgoing prime minster, the head of its investment center and the chief of cabinet for the ministry of commerce. U.S. Congresswoman Frederica Wilson also addressed the group, which also organized a discussion on advocacy.
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Celestin said the goal of the conference is to try and get the Haitian diaspora to think about how you engage differently to get better outcomes. Conille, who worked in Africa for the United Nations before accepting the job as prime minister, said there are a number of models that Haiti could use to get more bang out of its diaspora dollars. Among them, offering long-term bonds to Haitians living abroad who currently send about $1.4 billion in remittances to Haiti annually, and investing the proceeds in reconstruction and other projects. “Investments are a leap of faith; a leap of faith in the country’s economy, in its government, resources and a country’s ability to keep stability,” Conille said. Haitians, he said, continue to make that leap regardless of circumstances. Now, the challenge for Haiti, he said, is to modify its laws and policies “to improve the effectiveness of diaspora remittances.”

3/26/2012
Washington Post
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The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies is considering building a hotel and conference center in Haiti on part of a $10.5 million property that it bought after the 2010 earthquake. The hope is that profits could sustain the work of Haiti’s local Red Cross in the coming years, the head of the international group’s Haitian delegation said Monday. The 10-acre compound, known as the “Hilton Property,” was purchased from Comme Il Faut, Haiti’s local cigarette company, in the months after the quake, Eduard Tschan told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. The charity paid in a single payment, using funds donated by national Red Cross agencies for quake recovery. At the time, Haiti’s recovery was the largest operation in the organization’s history, with 3,000 people working here. Now that its work is winding down, the international Red Cross is putting together an exit strategy and as part of that process is trying to figure out what to do with this property. The Haitian Red Cross, which works closely with the Haitian government as almost a branch of its health department, has a rebuilt headquarters on the property and that will remain.
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It’s a valuable spot, near the international airport in a growing city. Tschan said two ideas are being studied: selling the acreage not being used by the Haitian Red Cross or finding a business partner and building a hotel and conference center that would provide profits to sustain the Haitian Red Cross. “There is great potential with this property,” Tschan said. He said that if a marketing feasibility study determines a hotel or conference center seems viable, the Red Cross will open the project to bidders. “Ideally it would be a local company,” he said. CharityWatch president Daniel Borochoff, who evaluates nonprofit organizations, said the hotel plan is risky and highly unusual. More typically, charities invest in low risk securities, he said. “It’s not clear it would work,” he said. “And if they lose the money it’s going to be a problem.” Borochoff said a hotel and conference center could tie up funds that might be needed quickly in future disasters, and noted donors hadn’t been informed.
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“What would happen if donors learned that instead of giving money to treat cholera or build shelters, it’s going to build a hotel? I understand it’s an investment, but that takes some explaining,” he said. Raymond Joseph, a former ambassador to the United States, welcomed the project, saying it would expand the number of hotel rooms in Haiti and create employment opportunities in a country where there are few. “I’m applauding what they’re doing,” Joseph said by telephone. “It will help Haiti by creating jobs for quite a few people.” Should the hotel happen, it would join other efforts to build hotels and lure visitors to Haiti in the aftermath of the quake, which devastated the capital and other cities in the south. Best Western International Inc. is building a seven-story hotel with 105 guest rooms, a restaurant and lounge, a full spa and a swimming pool. The inn, aimed at business travelers, bankers and diplomats, is scheduled to open this summer in the heart of Petionville, a hillside city southeast of the capital. Similarly, Marriott International Inc. is planning to build a $45 million, 173-room hotel in partnership with the Digicel mobile phone company. The hotel is slated to open in 2014 in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. There is precedent for the Red Cross building a hotel. The Red Court Hotel, a four-star hotel in Kenya, is owned by the Kenya Red Cross Society and all proceeds go toward the charity. The international Red Cross has spent $754 million in Haiti since the earthquake, with an additional $114 million spending planned for 2012. Other Red Cross organizations also have their own relief operations in Haiti.
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Associated Press writer Martha Mendoza reported this story from Santa Cruz, California, and Trenton Daniel reporting in Port-au-Prince.

3/26/2012
Miami Herald
By Jacqueline Charles
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The World Bank’s private sector arm is investing up to $10 million in Haiti in hopes of spurring jobs and economic growth in the quake-recovering nation. The investment by the International Finance Corporation is being made into Leopard Capital’s Haiti Fund, a new group that plans to invest in small and medium-size businesses after similar success in Cambodia. This is the first time the IFC is making a private equity investment in Haiti. “Private sector investment is vital to building a strong and stable Haiti, and this transaction can help put the country on the path to economic stability—by supporting local businesses and showcasing Haiti’s potential,” IFC Executive Vice President and CEO Lars Thunell said. “This fund will work with companies that are critical to job creation, economic growth, and the country’s continuing recovery from the 2010 earthquake.” Lawrence Mackhoul, an associate with Leopard Capital, said the fund’s goal is to raise $75 million -- $20 million of which it hopes to raise in the next three months. In addition to the IFC, two other development banks have expressed an interest in investing in the fund, he said. The money will then be invested in four main sectors in Haiti’s southern corridor: renewable energy, low- and medium-income housing, agribusiness and hospitality. There is already a team on the ground in Haiti, reviewing possible investments, he said. Leopard Capital was founded by Douglas Clayton an American, who had lived in Thailand for 25 years. Five years ago, in the middle of the recession, he successfully raised $34 million and created an initial portfolio of 12 investments in privately-held companies in Cambodia. Both Clayton and Mackhoul first visited Haiti last March around the run-off elections where they immediately saw opportunities, Mackhoul said.

UN News Service
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United Nations economists have provided the Haitian Government with advice on a new investment strategy to help the country attract financing to rebuild infrastructure and boost economic development. The experts from the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) were among the participants at this week’s meeting in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, which focused on boosting investment and growth in the country – the poorest in the Western Hemisphere and recovering from a devastating earthquake in January 2010. They advised the Government to carefully reform regulations and institutions dealing with investment, focusing on, among other actions, attracting financing to rebuild and improve national infrastructure such as roads and ports. The Government requested UNCTAD to provide technical assistance to Haiti, including carrying out an Investment Policy Review – a comprehensive study of national rules and practices that has already been done for 30 developing nations.
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“Governments implementing the recommendations of previous investment policy reviews have often managed to attract higher levels of foreign direct investment,” the agency pointed out in a news release. Chantal Dupasquier, Chief of Investment Policy Reviews at UNCTAD, encouraged the Government to adopt a phased and selective approach to regulatory and institutional reform, infrastructure development and investment promotion, so as to avoid a dispersion of efforts and resources. The priority should be for government measures that have a high impact on attracting investment that can fund improved infrastructure and create jobs, stressed Ms. Dupasquier, who was among the UNCTAD experts participating in the 12 to 14 March meeting. A number of Haitian Government officials participated in the meeting, including President Joseph Martelly, who said the country must tackle constraints to investment and growth. “It is time to stop looking for excuses and start working,” Mr. Martelly told the meeting.

Prensa Latina
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The ministers of tourism of Haiti and Dominican Republic Stephanie Balmir and Francisco Javier Garcia, respectively, Friday discussed the terms of an agreement on collaboration and institutional technical work, announced sources of that sector. The agreement plans that Dominican Republic offers the collaboration Haiti needs in the tourist sector, so that country can start developing as a tourist destination.The Dominican minister said that they will offer t he Haitian tourism ministry all their technical knowledge, logistic support, accumulated experience, and tourist planning. Garcia said that he will visit the neighbouring country soon accompanied by a group of Dominican communicators and businesspeople so that they learn about the Haitian tourist reality and invest in that country. The Dominican oficial said that tourism is a sector in which Haiti can develop.