PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — The deadliest earthquake in more than 200 years not only flattened homes and stole hundreds of thousands of lives. It also collapsed an economy that was nearly in need of life support before the tragedy.

Although exact numbers are not known, Haiti’s Chamber of Commerce estimates that total losses from the earthquake could reach US$1 billion.

Rebuilding for many will be close to impossible without significant help: Only 30 per cent of the nation’s businesses are covered by insurance, said Chamber president Reginal Boulos.

“Many of these people have pending bank loans,” Boulos said. “Some will be unable to repay. An economic collapse could happen.”

President Rene Preval’s administration is working with the United Nations Development Program and other aid groups to restore electricity and telecommunications, reopen banks, businesses and money-transfer houses, and to provide at least low-paying jobs to Haitians desperate for income.

Banks opened their doors in outlying villages Thursday and agreed to open those in Port-au-Prince on Saturday — with a US$2,500 daily limit per person on withdrawals in order to avoid a run on the institutions, he said.

Telecommunications are operating at about 70 per cent, while at least 30 per cent of the 150 gas and diesel stations in Port-au-Prince are now up and running. Station owners expect to have fully half open by this weekend.

But it will take as long as three or four months to restore electricity in Port-au-Prince, which is now using generators, Boulos said. To completely rebuild, the dirt-poor nation will need years or decades — and billions of dollars in international aid. Dominican President Leonel Fernandez has said Haiti would need US$10 billion over five years.

In the middle of the disaster and amid a scarcity of goods, prices have tripled for some products in Haiti, a poor Caribbean nation where 80 per cent of the people survive on less than US$2 a day.

In the capital, Port-au-Prince, a pound (half-kilo) of rice that used to cost four Haitian dollars (US$0.50) now goes for eight (US$1). A pound of black beans, once worth seven Haitian dollars, is now 11. And a bag of bread has jumped from six Haitian dollars to 15.

“Inflation is eating them alive,” said UN Development Program worker Eliane Nicolini.

The first steps to recovery are small ones.

In Port-au-Prince, nearly 400 Haitians are earning US$3 or more a day cleaning streets, disposing of trash — and now after the quake, clearing the rubble of downed buildings as part of a program run by the UN Development Program.

One of those workers, 36-year-old mother of seven Ginette Sejour, earns US$15 in cash for five days of work sweeping streets in the southern Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Carrefour-Feuilles. Home to 150,000 people, the neighborhood lost at least half of its humble residences in the quake, along with the church, school and other buildings.

“My life was difficult,” said Sejour, perspiring after a day’s work and still dressed in black boots and a blue uniform bearing the initials of the UNDP. “I had no job. … I was stressed. But now with this job, it’s different. … If they (the children) ask me for something, now I can say, ‘After I get paid,”‘ said Sejour, whose kids range in age from 5 to 22.

Like thousands of others in Port-au-Prince, Sejour is sleeping in the street with her children and what few possessions she managed to salvage from the rubble of her Carrefour-Feuilles home following the 7.0-magnitude quake that devastated Haiti on Jan. 12.

The UNDP has at least US$4 million of its own funds to finance the sanitary-jobs program, and is asking donors around the world for at least US$35 million more to be able to pay 200,000 workers throughout Haiti, UNDP representative Eric Overvest said.

One of the keys to jump-starting the economy is resuming the flow of remittances from Haitians living in the US and other countries. Totaling US$1.5 billion a year, remittances are the chief source of income in a country of more than 9 million people, 70 per cent of whom are unemployed and 90 per cent of whom live in poverty.

Marie Elza Antoine, 46, was one of more than 100 people forming a long line outside a remittance-distribution center in the downtown Nazon shantytown Thursday.

The US$30 to US$100 a month she receives from her older sister Clena, a hair stylist in New York, is what keeps her family going. She, two brothers and various nieces and nephews all live in the same house in Nazon, most of which was destroyed in the quake.

With the money her sister sends, “I can buy food,” Antoine said. “She is responsible for all of us.”

Antoine waited in line from 5 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the exchange house — only to discover there was no money waiting for her that day.

“Maybe I’ll come back tomorrow or later,” she said dejectedly. “I can’t live without that money.”