IADB forgives Haiti's past debts

Last night the Inter-American Development Bank announced that they world forgive Haiti all of it's past debts. The IADB held $479 million of the earthquake ravaged country's debt.

From this Associated Press article that we found at Forbes, we read more about the announcement.

Bank President Luis Alberto Moreno said the bank's board of governors voted to forgive the debt and will offer $2 billion in financing to the Caribbean nation over the next 10 years.

"This commitment is good news for all Haitians, and will help heal the wounds caused by the earthquake," Moreno said at the inauguration of the bank's annual meeting in the Caribbean coast resort of Cancun.

The IADB debt was the biggest single chunk of the $1.2 billion Haiti owed as of late January, according to figures of the International Monetary Fund.

US Congress moves on Haitian debt relief

Haitian President Rene Preval will be in Washington DC tomorrow to meet with President Barack Obama. Ahead of the meeting, the U.S. Congress is moving to get the big lending banks to forgive all of Haiti's debt.

The Inter-American Development Bank actually holds the most Haitian debt out of the big lending organizations. The IADB holds 420 million dollars, followed by The International Monetary Fund with 165 million.

Haiti will need every single dollar it's been given to rebuild the country instead of paying off debts. Most of those loans were made to Haiti for prior disaster recovery efforts from recent floods and hurricanes.

From the IPS, writer Jim Lobe reports on the debt relief efforts.

The Senate Friday approved a resolution urging the U.S. representative at major international lending institutions to push for the cancellation of all of Haiti's outstanding multilateral debt – about 700 million dollars – or about two-thirds of the country's total outstanding debt of some 1.2 billion dollars.

The resolution also calls for Washington and other donors to provide significant assistance to help the country recover and rebuild from the earthquake, in which more than 200,000 people are estimated to have died.

In early projections based on other recent natural catastrophes released last month, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) estimated that reconstruction costs in Haiti are likely to range from eight billion dollars to 14 billion dollars. The same study predicted that the earthquake "is likely to be the most destructive natural disaster in modern times, when viewed in relations to the size of Haiti's population and its economy."
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Meanwhile, the House of Representatives is planning to vote on a similar resolution during Preval's visit here Wednesday morning, according to Congressional staff members.

The House's subcommittee on International Monetary Policy and Trade approved the pending measure by voice vote last Thursday, and the House leadership has put it on a fast track for a floor vote, which is expected to be bipartisan.
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Preval's visit, his first here since the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake, comes as U.S. troops have accelerated their withdrawal from the country where they helped deliver humanitarian assistance and maintain security, along with some 10,000 U.N. peacekeepers who were already stationed in Haiti and will remain there.

At their peak in early February, more than 16,000 U.S. soldiers and sailors were deployed in and around Haiti. "Our mission is largely accomplished," said Gen. Douglas Fraser in a press call Monday. He said less than 8,000 troops will remain in the area – most of them off-shore – by the end of this week.

Wednesday's White House meeting is designed in major part to demonstrate continued U.S. interest in the recovery of what was already, before the quake, Latin America's poorest country.

Haiti earthquake caused 14 billion dollars in damages

A new study says that the Haitian earthquake caused 14 billion dollars in damage, and some experts are calling that estimate conservative. The Inter-American Development Bank says it is the most devastating natural disaster for any country since World War II. The bank compared the earthquake to 17,000 other natural disasters.

The Bank terms the Haitian earthquake the most devastating because of the proportion of damage it did to the country's total economic output. 117 percent of Haiti's annual economic output was damaged. For the tsunami of 2004, only four percent of Indonesia's economic output was damaged.

From the Washington Post, writer Mary Beth Sheridan gets some reaction to the study.

The U.S. government has committed over $500 million for relief efforts in Haiti since the Jan. 12 earthquake, and the Obama administration is expected to soon ask Congress for special funding for reconstruction there. Officials said the exact amount of the request hadn't been determined. But congressional sources said they expected it to be $1 billion or more.

Mark Schneider, who coordinated the American response to Hurricane Mitch in Central America in 1998, said $14 billion was "a relatively conservative figure" in estimating Haiti's reconstruction costs, since new structures cost more than old ones did.

He noted that about $6.3 billion was spent on rebuilding areas hit by Mitch, which killed about 10,000 people. The Haiti quake left at least 200,000 dead.

"You have the central political and economic core of the country essentially destroyed," said Schneider, who is now vice president of the International Crisis Group.

He said the U.S. government provided about $1 billion in aid to countries battered by Mitch, and should commit $3 billion to Haiti as part of a long-term commitment.

The development-bank study found that the death toll in the earthquake in Haiti dwarfed the toll in other natural disasters on a per-capita basis. Roughly 25,000 of every million Haitians died, compared with 772 deaths per million Indonesians in the 2004 tsunami, the report said.

IDB Forgives Debt of 5 Nations

from The Guardian

By NESTOR IKEDA

Associated Press Writer

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) - The Inter-American Development Bank announced Friday it would forgive $4.4 billion in debt owed by five of the poorest countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The bank excused the foreign debts of Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti and Guyana in an announcement ahead of its annual meeting, which starts Monday.

``This is a historic opportunity that will give these countries a fresh start,'' bank president Luis Alberto Moreno said.

Honduras shed $1.4 billion in debt, Bolivia $1 billion, Nicaragua $984 million and Guyana $467 million. The initiative is retroactive to Jan. 1, 2007.

Haiti, which is part of the International Monetary Fund's Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, will be able to get rid of $20 million of its debt by 2009, and after that it can shed the entire $525 million.

Under the deal, the IDB will forgive some $3.4 billion in principal payments and $1 billion in interest.

Moreno said in a statement that the agreement was backed by ``all our members,'' in an apparent attempt to quiet suggestions that some Latin American countries, including Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, had resisted the move.

Moreno said the bank would also provide funding to Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Paraguay and Suriname to let those countries free resources for education, health care and other services.

Also Friday, civil organizations called on the IDB to abandon what they called ``failed policies'' such as the privatization of water utilities.

``In much of Latin America the water and sanitation systems are in desperate need of basic maintenance, rehabilitation, and expansion'', said Wenonah Hauter, director of Washington-based Food & Water Watch.

Meanwhile Amazon Watch, also based in Washington, urged the IDB to halt financing for a pipeline in Peru, which it said would harm that country's rain forest.