Yesterday Haiti suffered a massive earthquake, which registered a 7.3 on the Richter scale, just outside the capital city of Port-au-Prince. Initial reports are beginning to pour in on the devastation to both people and property. Grassroots International has set up an “Earthquake Response Fund for Haiti” to support our partners and meet the urgent needs of the population.
We picked up the phones as soon as we heard of the earthquake to speak with Haitian partners like Chavannes Jean Baptiste of the Peasant Movement of Papaye (MPP). Like the thousands of Haitian families in the U.S. trying to find out who was still alive, we quickly found that communication lines were broken or overtaxed. Eerily, our partners’ phones just ring and ring - no answer. In Chavannes’ case, we were able to reach his brother in New York who confirmed that he is still alive. For that we give thanks. But in truth, we are working with very little direct information.
Over the years, Grassroots International has had an opportunity to talk about rethinking emergency aid with our partners, including those in Haiti. Now, in the wake of a devastating earthquake in Port-au-Prince, those conversations and our funding principles continue to guide relief efforts.
I stopped in Gonaives to follow up with last year’s hurricane victims while traveling with Grassroots International’s partner the Peasant’s Movement of Papay (MPP) from Port-au-Prince to Haiti’s Northwest last week. Last year, hurricanes Fay, Gustav, Hannah, and Ike ravaged the entire island causing immense suffering. The coastal low-land city of Gonaives -- which was almost entirely underwater during the disaster – witnessed more loss of life and livelihood than anywhere else during the storms.
Below is a blog by Salena Tramel, Grassroots International Program Coordinator for the Middle East and Haiti. It originally appeared on Huffington Post.
Here in Haiti, a country all too often characterized by internal instability, the biggest scandals of all have external origins. Just ask the Haitians.
My colleague, Saulo Araujo, Program Coordinator for Brazil & Mesoamerica, and I are in Trinidad for the 4th People's Summit of the Americas (April 15-18, 2009). Being held in conjunction with the 5th Summit of the Americas, the People's Summit was coordinated by local Trinidadian social movements and civil society organizations, particularly labor unions (for e.g. the Federation of Independent Trade Unions and NGOs and the Oilfield Workers Trade Union), as well as transnational networks such as the Assembly of Caribbean Peoples and the Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA).
Grassroots International's partners in Haiti have joined with their Global South counterparts to demand an end to forcing countries to pay exorbitant debt to Northern countries whose failed economic policies helped cause the crisis in the first place.
The following is a summary of the Declaration of the Assembly of Movements struggling to overcome Debt domination put forth in Belem, Brazil:
We will be posting updates from the Dessalines Brigade in Haiti. Stay tuned.
Last month, a small delegation of four representatives of Via Campesina-Brazil arrived in Haiti. Their mission is to help the Haitian peasant movement in their efforts to build local sustainable agriculture practices and a popular education curriculum on food sovereignty. Besides solidarity and technical expertise, the delegation also brings agro-ecological seeds produced in agrarian reform settlements in Brazil to share with local families.
Peasant organizers in Haiti - including Grassroots International's partners and allies - are uniting their efforts to collaborate in rebuilding their country. These organizers plan and mobilize across the island, linking issues such as environmental degradation and food scarcity to failed agricultural and economic policy and demand political action. Their advocacy and education activities are centered on reducing prices of food by increasing natural production and warning that the international financial crisis could have a deadly impact on Haiti if economic and agricultural policies fail to change.
As Haitian waters recede - at least for now - aid and relief efforts are also diminishing for the nearly one million people who are in desperate need of emergency food. The wounds of this reality are particularly raw in the countryside where the majority is struggling to survive.
The Artibonite region is Haiti's rice bowl, and it could not be clearer as I traverse this lush valley. The rice fields rival those of Southeast Asia, spanning a breathtaking distance and then finally dissolving into a steep ring of mountains. A peasant working the fields is an understandably common sight around here. The more disturbing (and even more common) sight, however, is the rice imported from the US ("Miami rice") that is sold to Haitians in local marketplaces. It is unthinkable that Haitians would be forced to buy rice from the North at prices that they cannot afford in the very place they grow it.
From Jacmel on the tropical blue Caribbean coast we drove up into the southern mountains to Cap Rouge. The main road had been washed away by floods and the route we took was a deeply potholed mix of dirt and gravel making for a very bumpy ride. We were in a rented SUV but saw scores of mopeds (mini motorcycles) carrying anywhere from 3 to 5 people along with their goods navigating the steep climb up the mountains with far more dexterity and speed than us.
Panel Food Sovereignty Perspectives on Crises and Conflicts
More than 300 peasants from the departments of the South, the West, the Center and the Artibonite were assembled the 22 of August, 2005, in Petite Rive, Artibonite for the 214th anniversary
On July 14, the body of Haitian journalist and activist Jacques Roche was found. Roche had been kidnapped, tortured and killed. (Read the Reuters report here.)
This week, a coalition of human rights organizations, alternative development groups, public health advocates, women's groups and other civil society organizations have issued a statement emphasizing Roche's contributions as an activist--for example, he organized traveling art and photography exhibitions to educate communities and to encourage resistance to privatization and free trade schemes like Haiti's Zona Franca on the border of the Dominican Republic, which replaced some of the last productive, fertile land on the Maribahoux plain with sweatshops.
Haitian civil society organisations' declaration on the Interim Cooperation Framework process
14 June 2004
A new country is being born within Haiti.
