On Thursday, a food distribution voucher campaign that launched last Sunday, "hit all 16 fixed distribution points around the capital" of Port-au-Prince, CNN reports. "So far, 600,000 people affected by the devastating January 12 earthquake have been able to collect food under this plan, said Marcus Prior, spokesman for the United Nations World Food Programme [WFP]. 'We're encouraged by the way the system is working to get food out into the city to those in need, but still have a long way to go,' Prior said" (Basu, 2/5).
Even though the distribution of food to earthquake survivors has improved, it has "not stopped badly needed food aid from falling into the hands of black-market sellers," Reuters reports. "In one Port-au-Prince neighborhood where 12,000 people live in tents made of bedsheets in a valley below their collapsed hillside slum, vendors at makeshift stands sell cups of rice from food-aid bags for about 22 gourdes (55 cents) each." Prior said, "It is too early to say how much ends up on the black market. We never like to see it happen. The object of this scale-up is far-reaching to help stabilize the food situation in the city." The article also looks at why food aid ends up on the black market (Rosenberg, 2/4).
Meanwhile, former President Bill Clinton plans to travel to Haiti Friday after being tapped to oversee the aid effort, CNN's "Political Ticker" reports. "I will return to Port-au-Prince for the second time since the disaster to unload supplies and talk to Haitian officials to ensure assistance continues to be effective, coordinated, and sustained in the weeks and months to come," he said (2/4).
"On the eve of Friday's meeting by G7 finance ministers in Iqaluit, Canada, 94 members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner that also called for 'the provision of assistance to Haiti in the form of grants so that the country does not accumulate additional debts,'" Inter Press Service reports in an article about efforts that aim to get the international community to cancel Haiti's debt.
"That call was echoed by a several non-governmental organisations (NGOs), including Oxfam, Jubilee USA, and Avaaz, which said they plan to deliver hundreds of thousands of individual signatures on petitions appealing for debt cancellation from across the world to this weekend's ministerial meeting" (Lobe, 2/4).
In related news, Reuters examines the World Bank's role in Haiti's reconstruction. "The Haiti Situation Room at the World Bank contains materials assembled by thousands of volunteers from 103 organizations including universities, government and private aid agencies, and companies helping the earthquake-devastated nation. The software specialists, scientists and technicians from around the world have joined disaster experts and urban planners at the World Bank, the poverty-fighting institution that will ... play a major role in helping Haiti recover" (Wroughton, 2/4).
Plight Of Haiti's Children Examined
"The recent arrest of U.S. missionaries for allegedly trying to smuggle children out of Haiti has shed light on a longstanding issue that appears to be escalating after last month's earthquake: Many children in orphanages here aren't orphans at all, but have been given up by their desperately poor families," the Wall Street Journal writes in a story about children in Haiti.
"Before last month, Haiti already had 380,000 children in orphanages. That was certain to grow in the aftermath of the Jan. 12 quake, which wiped out what little most people here had. In the past few weeks, some orphanages say they have seen relatives hoisting children over the walls and running away. … The plight of Haiti's children raises difficult questions for child advocacy groups, which must grapple with moral trade-offs made more difficult by the recent quake. One issue is how few children are actual, rather than 'economic,' orphans," the newspaper writes (Gauthier-Villars et al., 2/3).