Very few cemeteries and little suitable land ... a man surveys hundreds of bodies outside the Port-au-Prince morgue. Photo: AP

The devastation in Haiti from the 7.0 earthquake is the latest example of what happens when the exploitation of a nation and of a people knows no end.

In May of 2009, Former US President Bill Clinton was appointed UN Special Envoy to Haiti. While Clinton underlined his passion for Haiti, a country which he “first fell in love with when he and Hillary traveled there 35 years ago,” very little has been made of his not-so-discreet political and economic maneuvering which helped further impoverish the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation.

Time Magazine’s blog, Swampland, sums up the Clintonian relation with Haiti as such:

… Haiti was the first place that Bill Clinton intervened abroad as President. Reading his memoir, you get the sense that he considered it an unfinished piece of business for his administration — and his legacy. He had sent the U.S. military into Haiti to put President Jean-Bertrand Aristide back in power, and later handed that operation over to a UN multilateral force. But it was far from an unblemished success. Aristide stumbled. Clinton also blamed Republicans in Congress for refusing to give Haiti the financial assistance that he believed could have made a difference. After Aristide was sent into exile amid renewed strife in 2004, Clinton reflected on the words of Hugh Shelton, the commander of the American forces: The Haitians are good people and they deserve a chance.

Yet, when Clinton assisted ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide back to power, it was with a ‘minor’ caveat: Haiti would implement the IMF’s rigid ‘austerity adjustment‘ in an effort to redefine the country’s economic outlook. The website GlobalExchange.org, in its effort to highlight international injustices perpetrated by the IMF, writes:

In Haiti, the government was told to eliminate a statute in their labor code that mandated increases in the minimum wage when inflation exceeded 10 percent. By the end of 1997, Haiti’s minimum wage was only $2.40 a day.

On top of this, the Haitian market was flooded with subsidized American rice which plunged the already poor Haitian rice-farmers into an even deeper chasm of poverty:

Over the past two decades, a period of growing IMF tutelage over the Haitian economy, exports of American rice to Haiti have grown from virtually zero to more than 200,000 tons a year, making the poverty-stricken country of 7 million people the fourth-largest market for American rice in the world after Japan, Mexico and Canada. According to U.S. and Haitian economists, the result has been a massive shift in local consumption habits, with many Haitians now choosing cheap imported rice at the expense of domestically grown staples, including rice, corn and millet.

In his essay 30 Years Ago Haiti Grew All the Rice It Needed. What Happened?, Bill Quigley confirms that Haiti ‘has become one of the very top importers of rice from the U.S.’ while rice is one of the most heavily subsidized American commodities, receiving an average of $700 million a year by 2015:

The result? “Tens of millions of rice farmers in poor countries find it hard to lift their families out of poverty because of the lower, more volatile prices caused by the interventionist policies of other countries.”

Naomi Klein would identify this as Shock Doctrine economics 101.

So, you may ask, what do Clinton’s mistakes from 16 years ago have to do with today’s rescue efforts and humanitarian relief? Or, rather: Isn’t it callous to attack the UN Special Envoy to Haiti in the midst of that country’s worst national crisis?

The answer is simple: No. Especially as he may very well be responsible for said crisis.

In a story on the quality of building in Haiti, The New York Times writes:

“In Haiti, most if not all of the buildings have major engineering flaws,” [in quoting Cameron Sinclair, executive director of Architecture for Humanity]. Most houses and other structures are built of poured concrete or block, there being very little lumber available due to mass deforestation, said Alan Dooley, a Nashville architect who designed a medical clinic, built of reinforced concrete, in Petite Rivière de Nippes, a fishing village 50 miles west of Port-au-Prince.

Concrete is very expensive — much of the cement for it comes from the United States, Mr. Dooley said — so some contractors cut corners by adding more sand to the mix. The result is a structurally weaker material that deteriorates rapidly, he said. Steel reinforcing bar is also expensive, he said, so there is a tendency to use less of it with the concrete.

The LA Times takes the discussion one step further, giving a comparative example of what such an earthquake can do in an impoverished nation and what it can do in a country like the U.S.:

Kate Hutton, a seismologist at Caltech, [...] said that the Haiti quake was almost the same size as the 1989 Loma Prieta quake in Northern California. That quake, she said, “caused a lot of damage, but it wasn’t a disaster like this in terms of the number of people injured and killed.”

High-quality construction and strong building codes (in countries which have the governmental authority and integrity to enforce them) appear to be determining factors in keeping earthquake casualty counts and overall destruction low. In April 2009, in L’Aquila, Italy, a 5.8 earthquake killed 307 people and caused significant damage to buildings and homes for the mere reason that building codes had been violated, and governmental complacency had allowed for such flawed construction to continue. Haiti’s endemic poverty, however, is what led to the building of such flawed structures. Without being able to afford proper materials, Haitians built their homes, schools and hospitals with weakened concrete and no steel reinforcement bars. The result is the current humanitarian disaster.

So, if we accept the premise that the devastation caused by Haiti’s 7.0 earthquake was largely due to poor building practices born out of the very same poverty created by the IMF and Clinton, it can then be deduced that Clinton and the IMF are largely responsible for Port-au-Prince’s casualties.

All things considered, one must now ask, is Bill Clinton really the right person to help Haiti?