Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies
As the only country that has maintained a resident aid mission
in Haiti since the 1970s, the United States has made significant
contributions to the country's economy through USAID.
USAID's efforts have concentrated on such programs as nutrition,
family planning, watershed management, agro-forestry,
and improving rural conditions through soil conversion.
USAID also has pursued narcotics interdiction, migration control,
and political reform. United States assistance between
1982 and 1987 accounted for 35 percent of Haiti's total external
aid and 60 percent of its bilateral aid.
USAID was credited in 1982 with setting a new trend of distributing
larger amounts of its assistance through NGOs rather
than through Haitian ministries. By the late 1980s, other
donors followed suit, and more and more humanitarian aid
was distributed through a network of NGOs. When Haitian officials
complained about lack of coordination among these organizations,
USAID financed the creation of the Haitian
Association of Voluntary Agencies (HAVA), an umbrella NGO
whose function is to coordinate all aspects of humanitarian aid
and whose membership exceeds 100. As a result, in the late
1990s most aid continued to be distributed through NGOs.
Labor
Haiti's labor force was estimated to be 2.94 million in 1992,
according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of
the United Nations. About two-thirds of the workers are
engaged in agriculture, despite the shift to services and manufacturing
over the past several decades. More than two-thirds of
Haitians are still not part of the formal economy, however, and
continue to live by subsistence farming. Assembly plants, most
of which are concentrated in the Port-au-Prince area, provide
the bulk of manufacturing employment. Approximated
150,000 manufacturing jobs were lost after the military coup of
1991. Although some thirtv plants were reopened after Aristide's
return to power in 1994, unemployment in the late 1990s
was estimated at between 60 percent and 70 percent, compared
with 49 percent in the late 1980s. As with other statistics, unemployment
figures vary, depending on the methodologies used
in gathering such data.
Figures vary widely as to the numbers of Haitians living and
working in the Dominican Republic (see Haitians, ch. 2). Two
United States analysts believe there were some 500,000 Haitians
and Dominico-Haitians (Dominicans of Haitian ancestry)
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