Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-01-19-Speech-2-014"
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"en.20100119.4.2-014"2
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"Mr President, High Representative, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, this new humanitarian crisis that Haiti is enduring is perhaps on a greater scale than all previous ones, so much so that I doubt that it is possible to find the right words to talk about the victims, to speak to the survivors and to reach out to families in order to tell them how much we share their pain and are aware of our responsibility.
However violent the earthquake was, it alone does not explain the extent of the damage. The latter is also linked to the chronic poverty that Haiti has endured for many years. Until now, the international community has been incapable of changing anything there. Worse, by imposing policies on Haiti that we now know did not work, international institutions, Europe and its partners have exacerbated the fragility of its social fabric, its economy and its institutions.
In the 1970s, Haiti was almost self-sufficient where food was concerned. It used to produce 90% of its agricultural needs. Today, it imports more than half. This must surely have had a detrimental effect on local production. Before this earthquake, Haiti was a country without resources because it was deprived of the resources to which it was entitled.
We must therefore firstly provide Haiti with as much support as possible in order to deal with emergencies. From this point of view, we cannot but lament the fact that international aid has been very difficult to put into place. In future, we must improve our procedures. However, we must, above all, be aware that long-term development aid will not be effective if we impose what we consider to be the right priorities while everyone on the ground is telling us that we are wrong. We must proceed by calling our own methods into question, and that will not work unless we increase the funds that we are putting aside for development policies in the long term. The European Union has announced the amount of aid that it will release for Haiti, and the Member States have done the same. We are talking about EUR 130 million in the short term, and EUR 200 million for long-term needs.
I would like to compare these figures to other figures, to the USD 155 billion that the banks of the City and Wall Street are getting ready to pay to a few thousand people who work in the banks. That raises the question of the development model that we want to promote at global level.
Urgent humanitarian aid is necessary, but it alone is not enough. It must not, under any circumstances, supplant development aid, which itself must not be experienced by the countries that are supposed to benefit from it as a veritable diktat. The first way of assisting countries in great difficulty is to continue to respect them, to allow them to benefit from their own resources. We must cancel Haiti’s debt and pay off our debt to that country.
Mr President, High Representative, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, it is our duty to the victims of Haiti to help them rebuild a country that was devastated even before a natural disaster turned it completely on its head."@en1
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