by Avelino Maes­tas, Com­mu­nity Man­ager at OpenCongress.org

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/avelino-maestas/haiti-and-debt-cancellati_b_423930.html

Despite the the con­stant focus of our national media and polit­i­cal blogs on the big trends (namely, health care for the past six months), mem­bers of the United States Con­gress still man­age to intro­duce and debate leg­is­la­tion on a myr­iad range of issues. With the num­ber of con­stituen­cies and inter­ests rep­re­sented by the 541 Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, Sen­a­tors and Del­e­gates who can intro­duce leg­is­la­tion, it’s not hard to find leg­is­la­tion related to the topic of the day. And this week, of course, the topic is Haiti.

One of the most intrigu­ing pieces of leg­is­la­tion I found is H.R.4405, the Jubilee Act for Respon­si­ble Lend­ing and Expanded Debt Can­cel­la­tion of 2009. As you may have heard, Haiti is gen­er­ally viewed as the least devel­oped coun­try in the hemi­sphere. Haiti’s long road to this posi­tion is a tale of eco­nomic hard­ship for its pop­u­la­tion, start­ing with its inde­pen­dence from France in the 19th Cen­tury. in 1852, France demanded Haiti pay 150 mil­lion francs (which would be about $21 bil­lion today) in repa­ra­tions for war. It took 95 years for the coun­try to pay off that debt and other asso­ci­ated loans. Haiti wasn’t in the black yet–between 1957 to 1986, a father/son dic­ta­tor­ship stripped the country’s cof­fers dry, with addi­tional loans taken out in the country’s name. Cou­pled with other debts, by 2008 Haiti owed $1.4 bil­lion to lenders includ­ing the Inter­na­tional Mon­e­tary Fund, World Bank, and US gov­ern­ment (for a thor­ough exam­i­na­tion of Haiti’s prob­lems, you can do worse than this Times Online piece from back in May).

There’s been a move­ment afoot to lobby for can­cel­la­tion of Haiti’s debt, led here by the Jubilee USA Net­work. The IMF added Haiti to its pro­gram for Heav­ily Indebted Poor Coun­tries–man­dat­ing domes­tic changes regard­ing cap­i­tal, finance and gov­er­nance. Even after four hur­ri­canes ham­mered the coun­try in 2008, the René Préval-led gov­ern­ment was mak­ing strides in meet­ing those require­ments. In June, the IMF final­ized a $1.2 bil­lion debt can­cel­la­tion for Haiti.

That leads us to Tuesday’s earth­quake, and H.R.4405. Jubilee is advo­cat­ing that the remain­der of Haiti’s debt be can­celed (you can read their most recent Haiti update here). In addi­tion, they’re still advo­cat­ing on behalf of the Jubilee Act, which would have an impact on dozens of other coun­tries that are ser­vic­ing high lev­els of debt (a sim­i­lar effort in the 110th Con­gress, H.R.2634, was approved in the House, and made it through the Sen­ate Finance Com­mit­tee). To be eli­gi­ble for the pro­posed relief offered under the Jubilee Act, coun­tries would have to meet a sep­a­rate set of require­ments: For instance, avoid­ing “exces­sive” lev­els of mil­i­tary expen­di­tures and coop­er­at­ing on inter­na­tional nar­cotics con­trol efforts. In addi­tion, coun­tries would not be allowed to par­tic­i­pate if they pro­vided sup­port to ter­ror­ists or dis­played a pat­tern of human rights violations.

Other require­ments for par­tic­i­pat­ing coun­tries would include bud­get allo­ca­tions to alle­vi­ate poverty (funded in part by money that would oth­er­wise be spent ser­vic­ing the debt), and mak­ing gov­ern­ment reforms to pro­mote trans­parency and democ­racy. The Act would also ini­ti­ate steps to pre­vent preda­tory lend­ing to impov­er­ished nations and pro­mote the use of grants in place of loans.

The full scope of Haiti’s lat­est cat­a­stro­phe remains unknown, and will likely stay that way for some time. But one thing seems cer­tain: The recov­ery effort will begin from an incred­i­bly low base­line. The exist­ing Hait­ian infra­struc­ture was poorly devel­oped, and there seems to be broad agree­ment that the long-term debt was a large rea­son for that.