Thursday, July 27, 2006

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AFP): International donors and lenders agreed Tuesday to extend to Haiti 750 million dollars over the next 15 months as they wrapped up a conference on aid to the Western Hemisphere's poorest state.

"The donors committed themselves to providing help in budgetary support of 750 million dollars," said the two-day conference's coordinator Anthony Dessources.

Haitian leaders pronounced themselves satisfied with the 15-month commitments, although they had hoped for five billion dollars in longer-term lending.

"Their response was beyond our request," said Haitian Prime Minister Jacques-Edouard Alexis at the signing ceremony.

Haitian officials said the aid will help rebuild the country's devastated roads and revive its crumbling education and health care systems -- all battered by 20 years of upheaval.

However, no debt write-off was announced, despite lobbying by Haitian anti-globalization groups and even US lawmakers for such a deal.

Haiti's foreign debt of more than one billion dollars is a crippling burden on the Caribbean nation where more than 60 percent of its eight million citizens live on less than one dollar a day.

Cash is needed to pay back salaries of restive demobilized soldiers and of former civil servants, and to create jobs in an effort to forestall the growth of gang violence.

Representatives from Canada, France and the United States, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank attended the conference.

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

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