The long delays in the delivery of aid to Haiti have forced that country’s prime minister to publicly criticise international donors for slow progress in meeting pledges. Ironically, some aid agencies have blamed the less than promised disbursements on the incompetence and corruption of the Haitian authorities.

Mr Jean-Max Bellerive has defended his Government’s efforts to rebuild one of the poorest countries in the world during the year since the devastating earthquake, which caused damage requiring at least US$7.8 billion.

The Haitian PM, at the launch of the report from the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) which is helping to co-ordinate reconstruction, remonstrated: “While we need to move quicker, we can’t move quicker than the funds. We are encouraging donors to do a lot better.”

His complaint is justified because only one-fifth of the US$5.6-billion pledged by donors last March for 2010-11 has been disbursed, and particularly egregious is the fact that only two-thirds of the US$2-billion specifically earmarked for expenditure during the past year has been disbursed.

The IHRC report, Haiti One Year Later, published on January 12, provides condemnatory evidence of the mean-spiritedness and duplicity of the international community. It reveals that a year after the cataclysmic earthquake there are one million Haitians still living in tents, a euphemism for a piece of plastic sheeting. The share of people with access to potable water is two per cent and only 27 per cent have access to sanitation. Less than 20 per cent of the funds pledged for 2010 and 2011 have actually been disbursed.

Caricom’s Special Envoy Mr PJ Patterson describes the task in Haiti as moving from rehabilitation to renaissance. Renaissance, he explains, means “a rebuilding of institutions of health, education and social service, the building of a strong, competitive economy, a revitalised Haiti that is sustainable, just and equitable”.

The wisdom of institution building is that disbursement is limited by the absorptive capacity of Haiti, which is severely constrained by weak administrative systems, inadequate human resource capability in the public sector, chaotic politics and weak governance institutions. The converse is however also true, that institutions urgently need external resources and technical assistance to be strengthened.

It is against this background that we note with concern that not even a disaster of the magnitude of that in Haiti can galvanise the actions of the world into a unity sufficient for purposive humanitarian intervention sustained after the TV cameras have moved on to the next tragedy.

The failure of the rich countries of the so-called international community to deliver humanitarian and development aid is not new and therefore the inadequacies of the aid delivery to Haiti comes as no surprise.

Indeed, funding for the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals is suffering a similar fate. The rich countries at the UN General Assembly in 1970 pledged to devote 0.7 per cent of the GNP to development aid. They have never attained this target, despite repeatedly recommitting themselves to it.