Catastrophe in Haiti - Poverty is at the root of this tragedy

JUST over 20 years ago – on October 17, 1989 – an earthquake registering 7.0 on the Richter Scale hit California’s Bay Area. Sixty-three people died.

This week, an earthquake, also measuring 7.0, devastated Haiti. Up to 50,000 people were killed.

Looting of food warehouses has begun, violence simmers around ever scarcer water and food supplies. Those spared by the earthquake are fighting, literally, to stay alive.

This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about sub-standard buildings, infrastructure that’s not fit for purpose and terrible public services. It’s about a dysfunctional and exploited country. It’s about a country riven by corruption and stymied by a culture of non-achievement.

The tragedy facing Haiti is just the latest in a long list of natural disasters exacerbated because the victims, despite active aid programmes, are too poor to respond effectively.

Maybe this time the tragedy might provoke a few hard questions about the relationship between our world and the world where survival is an everyday issue: Haiti, Somalia, Chad, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Angola, Zimbabwe and as many more counties as you care to wave a United Nations flag at.

The first might be if we really know how to use aid to reduce poverty. Over the past few decades trillions have been spent to try to generate growth in the developing world. Countries that have not received much aid – China and India – have seen huge growth and millions escape poverty. Countries that have received aid, like Haiti and Somalia say, have not.

Another is the uncomfortable question on the role local culture plays. Haiti has experienced terror, slavery and brute colonialism. But so did Barbados, and Barbados is a far better place to live. Haiti has endured ruthless dictators, corruption and foreign invasions. So has the Dominican Republic. Haiti and the Dominican Republic share one island, yet the border between the two offers one of the starkest contrasts on earth – trees and progress on one side, deforestation and poverty and early death on the other.

Our mores value all cultures equally, but even that dishonest convention cannot ignore that fact that some cultures are more progress-resistant than others. In Haiti, a horrible tragedy has been exacerbated by one.

This may not be the perfect day for theorising, it is rather a day to put our hands in our pockets to help Haiti. But we might best help all the Haitians by asking harder questions about how and why poverty persists despite committed efforts to eradicate it.

Sadly, if we do not ask these questions today it is unlikely that they will ever be asked as within days, certainly weeks, the horrors of Port-au-Prince will be a fuddled memory for most of us.

The chasm between our world and the poverty-stricken world grows deeper every day and our inability to close that gap is one of the great failures of our time. As if to underline that failure American bank JPMorgan Chase yesterday reported that it earned $11.7 billion last year, more than double its profit for 2008.

JPMorgan has earmarked $26.9 billion to pay staff, up 18% on 2008. JPMorgan staff earned $272,000 on average. Top performers, however, will collect multimillion-dollar pay cheques.

The world is indeed a confusing, unfair and divided place.