30444: Durban (reply): to 30431 Leiderman's USAID-Haiti Environmental Report (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

Lance Durban (Lpdurban@yahoo.com) responding to Leiderman's posting of
that USAID study on Haiti's environmental vulnerability (Corbett
#30431)...

My complaint with this USAID study is not so much with the rather banal
analysis and conclusions, but rather why USAID would bother to fund
such nonsense in the first place.  Seriously now, how much did it cost
to drag these various experts to Haiti?  I'm sure it took considerable
time tramping around the country to ask all the mundane questions
needed to pull together this rather obvious "analysis".  And now that
it's finished, what will become of "this first major report of its kind
since the middle 1980's", to quote Leiderman?

One has to wonder what USAID could possibly be thinking, paying for
this claptrap... until one realizes that USAID is largely composed of
such "experts", many of whom are old-timers who have long since done
their time "in the field", and are now more into writing, reading,
reviewing, and filing their share of similar studies... studies which
subsequently gather dust on untold numbers of bookshelves in Washington
D.C.

But wait a minute, surely some money must occasionally filter down to
an actual physical project, doesn't it?  Regrettably, results are
usually pretty hard to find.  Just last year there was a lot of talk
about a job creation grant of some $87 million won by CHF, a Washington
consulting group.  Has anyone heard anything about this project since?
Has a single job been created, other than office and household staff of
the foreign consultants?   Who knows... low profile seems to be the
byword, but I'll bet that the money is being spent...  with a very good
chunk of it ending up in Washington D.C.

I regularly take a certain outrageously unpaved city street in
Port-au-Prince that must see several thousand vehicles a day, every one
of them picking its way slowly over piles of broken pavement, deep
ditches, mountains of garbage.  I mean, it is bad!   For a fraction of
the cost of the report Leiderman directs us to, this pathetic stretch
of city street could have easily been resurfaced with those concrete
paving blocks the Haitian government has very occasionally seen fit to
lay.  It would have hired real Haitians for a couple months and by
displaying a "USAID-financed" sign nearby, such a project might
actually create some goodwill for the U.S.

In short, it is my belief that ALL U.S. government foreign aid to Haiti
should go to (1) education and/or (2) visible bricks and mortar
projects.  What is not needed are more USAID-financed studies and U.S
agricultural surplus giveaways.  The former are a waste of money; the
later are actually disruptive to the local agricultural economy of
Haiti.  How can a Haitian peasant ever hope to compete with free food
distributed by Uncle Sam?  (P.S.  Don't let me get started on the
various democracy-promoting projects/schemes USAID has thrown U.S.
tax-payer money at over the years.

L. Durban