"There hasn't yet been is a concerted project of investment in the local agricultural system, and that’s the key priority. If they did that Haiti could meet its own food needs very easily and quickly. It would meet its own food needs if it wasn't for foreign interference."

Peter Hallward teaches at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University London, and is the author of Damming the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment (2007), Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (2006), Badiou: A Subject to Truth (2003), and Absolutely Postcolonial (2001). He is currently working on a project entitled 'The Will of the People'.

Peter Hallward

State of Nature: What is the situation in Haiti now since the earthquake?

Peter Hallward: The earthquake killed probably 200,000 people. It left about 1.5 million homeless and destroyed maybe70% of the schools and much of the infrastructure. It created massive levels of need on multiple levels. The international response was woefully inadequate, and privileged 'security needs' over urgent in fact overwhelming medical and emergency needs. Half-hearted attempts to coordinate relief over the course of a month and a half or so culminated in a donor conference at the end of March, intended to provide a framework for fundraising and come up with a plan for the reconstruction. This UN conference did manage to raise in principle up to $10 billion or so over the next several years, but let's see how long it actually takes to get the money together. The reconstruction plan called for some useful things like investment in roads and infrastructure, but is full of serious problems.

SoN: So this is money donated from other countries.

PH: Yes, and from charities as well.

SoN: But you mentioned in your talk that it's been very slow.

PH: That's right. A fraction of that has actually been raised. The only country that has actually contributed its full amount is Brazil, which contributed $55 million. The US has hardly made a start, I think. They're still arguing about the conditions in Congress - even a couple of days ago, they were still arguing about this. But in principle they are committed to something like $1.5 billion. Only a very small fraction of the money raised has been spent. Again it's been hard to get reliable statistics, but somewhere in the region of 10 to 20% has actually been spent, in the face of overwhelming need. At least a million people still have no proper homes to live in. Of that number, according to Shelter Cluster and various other groups, 220,000 have received nothing, not even a tent or tarp. The others are living in tents or tarps, scattered wherever they can find room to pitch them. There are 1200 camps altogether, and some of them are very large, others are small, and the conditions are pretty indescribable from everything that I have seen and heard. It is the rainy season now, and the rain comes lashing down almost every night, and flooding the place with an inch or two of rain most nights. In the camps it leaves a permanent layer of mud, and you've got masses of people living very crowded together; sanitation is often catastrophic. There are public latrines in some places, but with the rain they can overflow. In other places there is no sanitation whatsoever, so people are living in shit, basically.

SoN: You said that the money raised is not going to the Haitian government.

PH: Right, it's mainly through NGOs. They have put in place some public latrines; they've done some work on distribution of water through water trucks. But there's a huge number of urgently need things that need to happen on a national level: basically a massive programme of national investment in public services, open to all. One of the things Haiti needs, for instance, is a decent and affordable water distribution system, but that's not happening yet. Mainly people have been relying on water trucks, which are very expensive and they really disadvantage the poor in particular. So there's been some provision of water, and there's been some investment in temporary school rebuilding; NGOs have helped with these things. There's certainly been some emergency food distribution, and from what I hear I don't think there are many people starving now. But it's very chaotic and badly organised, so people have to spend most of their time queuing up for food. There's basically a system of coupons, and it requires spending a day in the queue to get your rice and then someone has got to go out and get cooking oil the next day, it's extremely laborious and inefficient. And of course the influx of free food undercuts the local agricultural system.

There hasn't yet been is a concerted project of investment in the local agricultural system, and that's the key priority. If they did that Haiti could meet its own food needs very easily and quickly. It would meet its own food needs if it wasn't for foreign interference. That's a fundamental point. The poverty is man made. If Haiti was free to do so then it could easily move from absolute misery to a dignified poverty (as Aristide used to say), for starters; that would be within reach and it would make a huge difference from the brutal destitution that people live in now.

SoN: And that's all due to foreign interference?

PH: Very largely. Foreign interference with local elite cooperation.

SoN: What is Bill Clinton's involvement in Haiti now?

PH: He is one of the two co-presidents of this interim recovery commission. And he is the UN's special envoy, and as such he does mainly fundraising and PR. The overall policy he's pushing is the same old neoliberal emphasis on sweatshops and trying to structure the Haitian economy in ways that will make money for foreign and local corporations, rather than investing in local agriculture, small scale agriculture in particular. He has not compromised on that. On the other hand, he's qualified it a little bit. He's working with some people who are more progressive. He has in fact appointed one of the most prominent progressive voices in international Haitian activist circles, Paul Farmer, of Partners in Health, who understands the situation as well as any foreigner does.

He apologised recently for the negative consequences of some of the neoliberal trade measures he imposed on Haitian farmers in the 1990s and he's not oblivious to some of the consequences of policies he himself implemented when he was President, but there is no clear sign yet he's prepared to take significant steps to really reverse them. I imagine if you asked him directly, he'd say if you did that it would be counterproductive, it would scare people away, you've got to be more pragmatic, you've got to work within the constraints of the international system. And that is what Clinton is. He is the incarnation of compromise and willingness to sell out principles in order to achieve a small amount within the constraints as they are. I think on that basis you're going to make very slow progress, whereas what Haiti needs is revolutionary change. In my opinion, Cuba and Venezuela have much more to offer Haiti than the US, Canada or France.

SoN: You've mentioned the importance of NGOs. You actually referred in your talk to NGOs as the ideological state apparatus (or ISA) of today. What did you mean by that?

PH: As you know, ISA is Louis Althusser's phrase. He talks about schools and education systems under a certain liberal version of capitalism or churches under a feudal mode of production. They help to legitimate the general order of things. And the NGOs help to legitimate a global system that is fundamentally structured in grotesque disparities of opportunity, income and privilege. They help to justify this in terms of something like humanitarian and benevolent regret about poverty and 'under-development'. Rather than address the fundamental structural causes for this disparity in power, opportunity and wealth and so on, NGOs effectively legitimate it. They may try to limit some of its more flagrant effects, but they generally discourage people from taking the political steps necessary to confront the underlying causes.

SoN: It's a cycle that reproduces itself as well.

PH: That's right. And like any ISA, they self-conceal. By definition, so long as it's working properly, you don't see ideology as ideological. It seems self-evident, in a big disaster like this of course you need to help. There's an urgent need for disaster relief and some of the NGOs do provide essential services - and I am not denying that the services aren't necessary, they're desperately necessary. (Likewise, children need education...). But the way that it's done via NGOs is very complicated and it perpetuates the disparity that is the root of the problem and the ideology of a benevolent power on the one hand and a more or less powerless victim on the other. That's precisely the dynamic that needs to change. There's a reason why people in e.g. the UK or Canada mobilised to create a public and national health system - not an eclectic range of charitable services (or at least, not until Cameron came along with his 'big society' privatisation plan).

It's also no accident that in Haiti a lot of the work that's done has a religious inflection; sometimes it's flagrant, sometimes it's somewhat indirect. Often NGO charity is targeted at people who are precisely weak and vulnerable - handicapped children, orphanages or services for the needy. These are important services, of course, but again they should be provided by assisting Haitian strengths - by investing in a strong Haitian government, in public services open to all, etc. Some of these self-evidently necessary services, though, aren't quite as self-evident as they might seem. Take the orphanages run by CARE and various other groups, often with a religious sense of mission. In reality there are very few orphans in Haiti, but there lot's of orphanages. It's been well described by Tim Schwartz in his Travesty in Haiti: there is basically a small 'charity industry' here, a certain number of people go looking for orphans because you can make a lot of money fundraising to support orphans. But there are very few orphans in Haiti because the people are so poor they need the children to work. When you have a system where there's no running water, where there's no machinery, and you live on a very small farm where your only source of water might be a few miles away, well then you need someone to go and get the water and bring it back. And the only workers available are children. So children are valuable assets and families do not readily let go of them. If the parents die then usually the children will be taken in by members of the extended family. So, the NGOs work on these kinds of models because it reinforces again their fundamental purpose which is one of benevolent humanitarian power. But they don't tend to support the Haitian strength, the capacity to organise and mobilise.

SoN: Part of the ideology is that the Haitians are victims.

PH: It's always easier to blame a victim for the 'misfortunes' that befall them. Haitians are presented as victims of their own government and corruption. By definition, NGOs present themselves as an alternative to the government and to national public services; where I would say that these are services which should be public, they should be state run or at least state facilitated, with massive levels of popular participation. There's no point in reinventing the wheel. The state is there to in my opinion to provide and act as a conduit for progressive, public, collective, inclusive services. And in Haiti there are NGOs that have bigger budgets than the national ministries they shadow. They have different agendas, they're fragmented, they're not coordinated, they do very little of value with the money they raise, and much of it goes to their own staff and associates; they are not responsible to the Haitian people, and they're highly problematic.

SoN: You mentioned the aid that some left leaning in governments, such as Chavez in Venezuela, are providing for Haiti. To what extent is that balancing what you call on the other hand this appropriation of Haitian sovereignty?

PH: I don't actually know the latest figures on this, but so far Venezuela has helped somewhat, but it hasn't been enough. Venezuela was one of the first countries to arrive with a disaster emergency team after the earthquake. Through its Petro Caribe scheme, Venezuela has been selling oil at preferential rates to Haiti. Cuba's helped with a literacy programme and they have around a thousand medical personnel in Haiti, and have done for many years. And they play a very important role, they are often the only doctors that work in the countryside and they also helped train Haitian medical staff. They've also worked to set up a new medical school that was shut down in 2004 and during the 2004 coup was used in fact as barracks for US troops. Cuba took in around 250 medical students from that medical school, and they've all graduated now and gone back to Haiti. Cuba's international solidarity work is exemplary. I think they're one of the most helpful and genuine partners for Haiti, but of course on they're not in a position to fund massive aid and investment in public services and infrastructure. Cuba & Venezuela and the ALBA group more generally have played an important role, but so much more needs to be done; I think it would be a great step forward, if Haiti was able to distance itself more from the US, and to work more closely with its genuine friends.