The ecology of poverty

Waterbury Republican-American ^ | Sep 25, 2004 | Editorial

[Graybeard58]

between 1,000 and 2,000 killed by hurricane Jeanne and massive destruction of homes, businesses and government buildings.

In February, independent journalist Gwynne Dyer described Haiti in stark terms. "Eighty percent of Haiti's 10 million people are unemployed, and the average income is $3 a day," he wrote. "The trees are long gone and the rich soil is eroding away into the sea at a frightening rate.

"Much of the population survives only because of food aid. Average life expectancy is 53, the rate of HIV/AIDS infection is the highest outside Africa, and most Haitians would like nothing better than to leave their country and live elsewhere." And that was before the onslaught of hurricanes rolled over Haiti's denuded landscape.

A succession of Western nations have tried and failed to help since a series of slave revolts in the late 18th century left Haiti free but utterly lacking in capacity for self-government. Perhaps Haitians finally will acknowledge the need for vigorous international intervention, if not outright occupation, as a prelude to reconstruction.

But Haiti's plight also contains a warning for Western nations that allow ignorance and extremism to threaten their capacity to generate wealth.

Haiti is a hellhole not because it lacks resources, but because it's poor and badly managed. When European explorers arrived there in the 15th century, Haiti was a tropical paradise. It remained lush and grew prosperous under the stewardship of colonial planters. Twenty-one decades of poverty and mismanagement have turned it into the environmental disaster zone where erosion, flooding, poor water quality and failed sanitation systems are the rule.

In America and other Western nations, environmental and social extremists blame "the rich" for all manner of offenses, especially poverty, pollution and income disparity.

Perhaps they should take a good hard look at Haiti, a country with little wealth save for foreign aid subject to skimming by the nation's kleptocracy.

"Wealth, not poverty, supplies the means to conserve wildlife, forest, seashore and ocean," writes "Hard Green" author Peter Huber. "The charge that the rich are the despoilers, the exhausters, the expropriators of the planet's biological wealth is altogether false. Wealth, not poverty, is what limits population, by allowing parents to raise fewer, more robust children. Wealth, not poverty, is what gives people the means and the will to conserve the wilderness."

Haiti therefore is an object lesson in what happens to a country's environment in the absence of productive people and the wealth they generate.

[Restorer]

When the French Revolution started, Haiti was perhaps the greatest generator of wealth on the planet, the Saudi Arabia of its day.

[BenLurkin]

BUMP
for the

[Drango]

France is to blame.

[T'wit]

Huber makes a powerful point. It is only wealthy nations that can AFFORD environmental protection laws. And over time, the only wealthy nations are free-market nations. Bureaucrats in socialist countries who attempt to impose "green" regulations will simply kill what little business there is -- and thus kill their country.

[snopercod]

I'm glad someone finally wrote an article about this, although this one was less than satisfying. The author's use of "badly managed" implies that an economy must somehow be "managed" by a central government to be successful.

All a government can do is to impartially enforce a system of laws then step aside and let Adam Smith's "invisible hand" do the rest.

I asked my wife last night after the news of all the dead in Haiti, "Did you notice that there are no reports of anybody dying on the other half of the island - the Dominican Republic? That's because they are capitalists and the Haitians are communists".

(She hates it when I rant.)

[nothingnew]

That's because they are capitalists and the Haitians are communists".

Well put. These marxist countries are pathetic. More citizens killed by a TROPICAL STORM, not even hurricane strength, than soldiers lost in a two year war. Just look to NK, the Sudan, the list is endless. Pathetic.

FMCDH(BITS)

[PistolPaknMama]

South Africa and Zimbabwe's epitaph will read like this one day as well.

[Twinkie]

Ping.

[PatrickHenry]

Haiti isn't the only island nation to be deforested by incompetent inhabitants.

It's modern technology that has allowed us to eliminate the use of trees for fuel and shipbuilding. And the enviros hate modern technology. If the enviros get their way, we'll all be starving in a world that looks like one big Easter Island. Or Haiti.

[searchandrecovery]

You'd think Voodoo could play a bigger role in helping to turn Haiti around. Maybe it doesn't work on entire countries.

[JasonC]

"grew prosperous under the stewardship of colonial planters"

Um, err, no not quite. It was a sugar plantation. It produced obscene profits for the planters, yes. But not because the island was prosperous. The fields were worked entirely by slaves. They had to be slaves because the work was so hard and the conditions so lethal, those working the fields had a life expectancy of about 10 years. The average age at death was 29, and thousands of slave had to be imported every year to replace them (a quarter of those died on the voyage as well). When slavery was abolished by independence, the yield from the cane fields fell dramatically. Voluntary labor would not work to death, and sugar worked by it was only marginally profitable.