Tuesday, July 25, 2006

by Clarens Renois

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AFP): International donors and lenders met Monday in Haiti, whose government aimed to raise some five billion dollars for one of the poorest countries in the Americas.

Haitian President Rene Preval also welcomed International Development Bank President Alberto Moreno at the presidential palace of Haiti, battered by 20 years of upheaval.

"The ministerial donors conference will be an occasion for governments to show their priorities regarding sustainable development, public safety and stability," said a statement from Prime Minister Jacques-Edouard Alexis' office.

"We hope that the international community will agree to finance the government's priorities," conference coordinator Anthony Dessources told AFP after a technical session that paved the way for a ministerial meeting Tuesday.

Represented at the conference are Canada, France and the United States, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the Inter American Development Bank.

The European Commission recently announced that Haiti itself would benefit from at least 233 million euros (295 million dollars) in European Development Fund aid between 2008 and 2013 for repair of infrastructure on Haiti's portion of Hispaniola, the Caribbean island it shares with the Dominican Republic.

"We are ready to support Haiti," European Development Fund chief Jose Manuel Barroso said recently in announcing the donation, adding that funding could grow depending on Haiti's compliance with proper finance appropriation.

The United States and Canada have also recently vowed to boost their assistance to Haiti, where 70 percent of the working-age population is unemployed and more than 60 percent of its eight million citizens live on less than one dollar a day.

Haiti hopes to win new aid to help rebuild the country's devastated roads and revive its crumbling education and health care systems, said the Planning and External Cooperation Minister Jean-Max Bellerive.

The government has already drafted a five-year plan on how to spend the new financial assistance, Bellerive said.

"We have entered an era of good governance," said Haitian Finance Minister Daniel Dorsainvil, who also committed the government to expanding its fight against corruption and smuggling.

A Haitian anti-globalization group said it would lobby the governments to write off Haiti's unmanageable foreign debt, which has risen to more than one billion dollars.

Maxine Waters, the Democratic US lawmaker from California, recently proposed a resolution in the US House of Representative to write off Haiti's debt.

The donors' conference is the sixth organized since the fall in February, 2004 of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, but the first one to be staged in Haiti.

  Most popular articles: viewed, printed and e-mailed

  Printable version