Haiti - what going on and what went on

[kounty]

we have men from haiti on this site...Aristide get removed because? what does haiti economy run on?  split parliament?  anything you want to add?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080413/wl_afp/haitiunrest_080413012617

 Haiti PM ousted over soaring food prices

by Clarens Renois 39 minutes ago

PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) - Haiti's prime minister was ousted Saturday in a no confidence vote after more than a week of violent demonstrations over rocketing food and fuel prices.


Just as President Rene Preval unveiled a plan to cut the price of rice by 15 percent, 16 senators in the upper house of parliament voted unanimously to censure Prime Minister Jacques-Edouard Alexis over the crisis, costing him his job leading the government.

With the 10 senators in Alexis's own party absent, the legislators reproached the prime minister for failing to respond to the needs of Haiti's 8.5 million people, 80 percent of whom live on less than two dollars a day.

The move came amid reports that UN peacekeepers fired tear gas at protesters in central Port-au-Prince and that a UN policeman dressed in civilian clothes was shot dead by unknown assailants near the capital's cathedral.

"He was a riot policeman from Nigeria," said Sophie Boutaud de la Combe, spokeswoman for the Minustah force.

Earlier Preval said that he would not block any attempt to remove Alexis. He agreed to work with senate and lower house chiefs to find a replacement.

"If parliament fires the prime minister, I will do what the constitution demands -- I will consult the two parliamentary leaders to name a new prime minister, because no party has a parliamentary majority," Preval said.

Flanked by food importers, Preval announced his plan to bring down rice prices following more than a week of protests and riots that left at least five people dead and 200 injured, according to an unofficial count.

He said the plan would cut the cost of a 50 kilogram (110 pound) bag of rice, which had doubled to 70 dollars within a week, by eight dollars (15 percent).

"It is a move the government has agreed to thanks to the three million dollars in aid provided by the international community," Preval said, adding that the government would also work to encourage more food production.

He defended Alexis as having done what he could in the face of global increases in food prices, and said it was "unfair" to place all the blame on him.

Thousands of people took to the streets around Haiti last week after the latest jump in food and fuel prices, in sometimes violent demonstrations that forced United Nations troops deployed here to intervene.

Blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers were called in to protect the presidential palace, using tear gas and firing into the air to repel demonstrators, radio reports said, while there were also reports of looting.

Preval's government was formed in 2006 after elections that followed two years of turmoil sparked by the departure of president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Preval named Alexis as his prime minister, and Alexis won a vote of confidence in the lower house of parliament as recently as a month ago.

However, pressure had grown on the government in the current crisis.

Senator Jean Judnel, who backed Saturday's censure motion, said lawmakers would now "work with the president to chose a new prime minister."

"We will size up that prime minister to see if he can respond to the needs of the population," he told AFP.

"He must be able to listen to the cries of the people," Judnel said.

Meanwhile, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced that Caracas would send Haiti 364 tonnes of emergency food aid, including beef, chicken, milk, cooking oil, lentils and other foods.

Chavez, in Caracas, said the decision was aimed at helping "to ease a crisis that is enormous."

   

[zuluwarrior]

The idea of the starving masses driven by their desperation to take to the streets and overthrow the ancien regime has seemed impossibly quaint since capitalism triumphed so decisively in the Cold War. Since then, the spectacle of hunger sparking revolutionary violence has been the stuff of Broadway musicals rather than the real world of politics. And yet, the headlines of the past month suggest that skyrocketing food prices are threatening the stability of a growing number of governments around the world. Ironically, it may be the very success of capitalism in transforming regions previously restrained by various forms of socialism that has helped create the new crisis.

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Haiti is in flames as food riots have turned into a violent challenge to the vulnerable government; Egypt's authoritarian regime faces a mounting political threat over its inability to maintain a steady supply of heavily subsidized bread to its impoverished citizens; Cote D'Ivoire, Cameroon, Mozambique, Uzbekistan, Yemen and Indonesia are among the countries that have recently seen violent food riots or demonstrations. World Bank president Robert Zoellick noted last week that world food prices had risen 80% over the past three years, and warned that at least 33 countries face social unrest as a result.

The sociology of the food riot is pretty straightforward: The usually impoverished majority of citizens may acquiesce to the rule of detested corrupt and repressive regimes when they are preoccupied with the daily struggle to feed their children and themselves, but when circumstances render it impossible to feed their hungry children, normally passive citizens can very quickly become militants with nothing to lose. That's especially true when the source of their hunger is not the absence of food supplies but their inability to afford to buy the available food supplies. And that's precisely what we're seeing in the current wave of global food-price inflation. As Josette Sheeran of the U.N. World Food Program put it last month, "We are seeing food on the shelves but people being unable to afford it."

When all that stands between hungry people and a warehouse full of rice and beans is a couple of padlocks and a riot policeman (who may be the neighbor of those who're trying to get past him, and whose own family may be hungry too), the invisible barricade of private-property laws can be easily ignored. Doing whatever it takes to feed oneself and a hungry child, after all, is a primal human instinct. So, with prices of basic foods skyrocketing to the point that even the global aid agencies — whose function is to provide emergency food supplies to those in need — are unable, for financial reasons, to sustain their current commitments to the growing army of the hungry, brittle regimes around the world have plenty of reason for anxiety.

The hunger has historically been an instigator of revolutions and civil wars, it is not a sufficient condition for such violence. For a mass outpouring of rage spurred by hunger to translate into a credible challenge to an established order requires an organized political leadership ready to harness that anger against the state. It may not be all that surprising, then, that Haiti has been one of the major flashpoints of the new wave of hunger-generated political crises; the outpouring of rage there has been channeled into preexisting furrows of political discontent. And that's why there may be greater reason for concern in Egypt, where the bread crisis comes on top of a mounting challenge to the regime's legitimacy by a range of opposition groups.

The social theories of Karl Marx were long ago discarded as of little value, even to revolutionaries. But he did warn that capitalism had a tendency to generate its own crises. Indeed, the spread of capitalism, and its accelerated industrialization and wealth-creation, may have fomented the food-inflation crisis — by dramatically accelerating competition for scarce resources. The rapid industrialization of China and India over the past two decades — and the resultant growth of a new middle class fast approaching the size of America's — has driven demand for oil toward the limits of global supply capacity. That has pushed oil prices to levels five times what they were in the mid 1990s, which has also raised pressure on food prices by driving up agricultural costs and by prompting the substitution of biofuel crops for edible ones on scarce farmland. Moreover, those new middle class people are eating a lot better than their parents did — particularly more meat. Producing a single calorie of beef can, by some estimates, require eight or more calories of grain feed, and expanded meat consumption therefore has a multiplier effect on demand for grains. Throw in climate disasters such as the Australian drought and recent rice crop failures, and you have food inflation spiraling so fast that even the U.N. agency created to feed people in emergencies is warning that it lacks the funds to fulfill its mandate.

The reason officials such as Zoellick are sounding the alarm may be that the food crisis, and its attendant political risks, are not likely to be resolved or contained by the laissez-faire operation of capitalism's market forces. Government intervention on behalf of the poor — so out of fashion during globalization's roaring '90s and the current decade — may be about to make a comeback.

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[Dutty]

we have men from haiti on this site...Aristide get removed because? what does haiti economy run on?  split parliament?  anything you want to add?


   

boy dais ah serious quagmire oui...ah combination of powerful business interests from inside and outside the country decide that debacle..throw in the flag flappers to the north who pullin strings behind the scenes and de soup too thick too see what really goin on


Every haitian I talk to does paint aristide in a different light

[zuluwarrior]

Whats  going on people whats going on , jus now yuh go have money and cant buy the food and those who have the food people will

be comming to take it .

[warmonga]

dem fackers lazy how de fack yu living innah Tropical Island and yu a starve fi food? Someone who feal sorry fi dem tell mi nuh..
war

[Dutty]

dem fackers lazy how de fack yu living innah Tropical Island and yu a starve fi food? Someone who feal sorry fi dem tell mi nuh..
war

war, you is ah madman or wha?
dais like sayin de poor people in jamaica and trini lazy too

Tropical or not..haiti have ah unique set ah circumstances..it have no fertile land to plant nuttn.....all the fertile land privately owned
even if dey get ah patch ah land..whey de money commin from for seed or plough or ox..a government start up loan?

it eh hard to google ah half decent objective look as 2 why haiti so poor and get at least 3,5,10 different perspectives on how dat place drop to that level.



look ah start
http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1995/01/mm0195_10.html

[asylumseeker]

[Midknight]

dem fackers lazy how de fack yu living innah Tropical Island and yu a starve fi food? Someone who feal sorry fi dem tell mi nuh..
war

WDMCDRBWWSP ?

[kounty]

]http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article_news?id=161313111

Caricom responds to Haiti's cry for help
...while priests call for peace
Rickey Singh Bridgetown

Tuesday, April 22nd 2008

   

THE FOOD CRISIS and general "miserable living conditions" facing the people of Haiti have evoked separate responses from the Caribbean Community (Caricom) and Roman Catholic Jesuit Priests working in that impoverished and conflict-prone state.

Yesterday, the Caricom Secretariat was pushing ahead with arrangements to mobilse financial and humanitarian aid for the Haitian people, in consultation with member governments of the Community of which Haiti is a part.

Secretariat officials confirmed that some US$10 million (TT$60 million) are expected to be approved for release from Caricom's Trinidad and Tobago-facilitated Petroleum Fund for a mix of short-term humanitarian assistance as well as enabling agriculture development to boost food production.

Consumer products for immediate use, including rice and sugar from Guyana and other commodities from other Caricom states are being sought for shipment to Haiti.

While a statement is expected shortly from the Secretariat, the community of RC priests working in Haiti, have released a "Declaration" with appeals for urgent humanitarian aid and "appropriate" political/diplomatic responses from Haitian, regional and international authorities, as well as religious and non-government organisations.

In the words of the priests' "Declaration", the "courageous, suffering people of Haiti can take no more...Racked by misery, thousands, many of them youths, are roaming the streets, and expressing their misery in (at times violent) demonstrations...'

The "Declaration" has varying appeals to (a): Those responsible for governance (President Rene Preval's administration) and political responsibilities (ruling and opposition parties) as well as civil society; (b) private sector (merchants, industrialists and bankers); and (d) the international community "especially those countries that are identified as 'friends of Haiti'..."

To the Haitian people themselves, the Jesuit priests, whose work extend to communities across Haiti, including poverty-stricken areas worse affected by the escalating food prices and deteriorating living conditions, the Declaration, bearing the names of the signatories, offered the following appeal:

"People of Haiti, continue to call, to cry out and to summon those you have chosen to serve you. Your strength will be organised and sustained by non-violence. For violence is never effective..."