By all definitions, the earthquake disaster in Haiti is a true catastrophe. 

The Red Cross' current estimate of the number of people killed is 100,000, but that number could rise in the weeks to come.  With Haiti's feeble infrastructure almost totally destroyed, including most all government buildings, the response over the next few weeks will be a logistical nightmare. 

For many Haitians circumstances will get much worse before they get any better.  Victims who have not seen any assistance are becoming increasingly desperate and angry, and unspeakable horrors and violence will be unleashed in the streets of Port-au-Prince.  The country is on the edge of chaos and anarchy.  Only the most tightly knit communities and neighborhoods will weather this disaster well, but even wealthier Haitians were pushed down Maslow’s famous “hierarchy of human needs,” including Haiti’s president, René Préval, whose home was destroyed.  One-third of Haiti’s population of 9.7 million is struggling to satisfy the most elemental requirements for life: water, food, shelter, and safety.

The island of Hispaniola sits between two major faults and, in 2008, a team of seismologists detected signs of increasing stresses, indicating an increasing probability of a major earthquake in the near future.  Of course, Haiti did nothing to prepare for such an eventuality.  Haiti’s extreme poverty, really a kind of socioeconomic disaster, was behind the country’s vulnerability.  However, it was not just poverty.  Decades of political misrule and corruption had essentially gutted the Haitian government’s capacity to manage a disaster, and it’s not as though disasters are something new to Haiti.  The country is frequently hit by hurricanes and tropical storms.  In 2008 four major hurricanes -- Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike -- dumped heavy rains on the island nation, deforesting 98 percent of the country and causing widespread flooding.  More than 1,000 people were killed or went missing and 800,000 people were affected.  Damage was estimated at over $1 billion. 

Indeed earthquakes are different from hurricanes.  You can see a hurricane heading your way.  Earthquakes occur suddenly and with no warning.  Nonetheless, Haiti really had no emergency management system in place when other poor countries -- for example, Bangladesh, Cuba, Mozambique, Nicaragua and Haiti’s neighbor, the Dominican Republic, have dedicated some of their limited resources to disaster preparedness.

Many Americans are shocked, shocked to find there’s so much poverty going on here.  Just a little over an hour flight from Miami, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.  The Failed States Index ranks Haiti as the 12^th most failed state in the world, and according to the 2009 Human Development Report, Haiti ranks 149^th out of 182 countries, the GDP per capita (PPP $US) is $1,155, 42 percent of Haitians do not have regular access to safe drinking water, and 72 percent live on less than $2 a day.

Very little foreign direct investment goes to Haiti and the Haitian economy is largely dependent on aid, loans and remittances.  Indeed Haiti has been virtually saturated with development NGOs for decades, and many communities have become wholly dependent upon them.  The country has also been the recipient of millions of dollars in official development assistance from the United States and other countries.  However, the annual per capita amount of assistance is relatively low: only $73. 

Yet, on the other side of the island of Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic, which has suffered its fair share of disasters, is relatively much better off.  Still a poor, developing country, the Dominican Republic is 90^th on the United Nation’s ranking, the GDP per capita is $3,772, and only 15 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day.  Moreover, the Dominican Republic has an emergency management system in place to deal with disasters.  The National System for Prevention, Mitigation and Response to Disaster lays out a set of guidelines, policies, activities, resources, programs, and institutions to implement disaster risk reduction and prevention activities and to respond to large-scale emergencies.  Haiti’s emergency management system is virtually non-existent, and the country has depended on foreign assistance in all of its crises.

Evidently, the island of Hispaniola is a real-world social science experiment where we can compare two very different socioeconomic, political, and cultural realities, controlling for geography.  It seems it mattered significantly who did the colonizing and how independence was won from either the French or the Spanish.

Nothing could have been done to prevent the earthquake, but Haiti’s extreme poverty has exacerbated the situation and has once again demonstrated the disaster-development connection.  In Haiti, the complex interaction of population pressures, rapid urbanization, mass poverty and high inequality, environmental degradation, poor land use, shoddy building practices, and weak social and governmental institutions put millions of people at risk.  And the 2010 earthquake exposed, rather quickly and dramatically, Haiti’s chronic social, economic, and political vulnerabilities.  Simply put, more people died in Haiti than should have, but this is the pattern in most of the developing world.  More people die in weaker, poorer countries than they do in stronger, wealthier countries because disasters are inextricably linked to levels of socioeconomic development.  However, disasters can be development opportunities, and there’s hope that Haiti’s vulnerabilities will not be rebuilt.

As a researcher who focuses on the “politics of disasters” and as a consultant for the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, I’ve seen how disaster experts and humanitarian agencies better understand the disaster-development nexus than do politicians and policy makers.  For example, CARE International, OXFAM International, World Vision, Catholic Relief Services, and Save the Children embed the concept of disaster vulnerability and disaster risk reduction within their overall development strategies.  Like disaster researchers, they see disasters as having three phases.

The first phase is Pre-Impact, before the trigger event.  For low-probability, high consequence events, like the Haitian earthquake disaster, this might be an incredibly long time period.  Since resources are limited, especially in the developing world, there are very few incentives to mitigate, plan, and prepare for the unlikely occurrence of a trigger event.  However, for societies regularly inflicted by tornadoes, hurricanes, or earthquakes, a trigger event is always near.  A simple cost-benefit analysis makes it logical to mitigate, plan, and prepare for the event’s next probable occurrence.  Hopefully, then, there are fewer casualties and less structural damage.

Unfortunately, more attention is paid to a disaster’s second phase, Impact and Response, than to Pre-Impact.  The trigger event itself and the response, when emergency management organizations and civil defense authorities kick into high gear, receive the most media attention.  Initially, search and rescue missions, needs assessments, and aid distributions make for heart-wrenching, human interest stories, but inevitably questions arise: Why were so many people killed?  Why were the losses so high?  Why were there no early warning systems and emergency evacuation plans?  Who is to blame?  This is when things really start to become political. 

Logically, Impact and Response is followed by the third phase: Post-Impact (Recovery, Rehabilitation, and Reconstruction), which then flows into a new Pre-Impact phase.  This is when the “window of opportunity” opens to mitigate, plan, and prepare for the next event and ask even more difficult political questions: Should we rebuild in the same place?  Should we build structures that are more resistant to natural forces?  Should we forcefully prevent people from building in risk-prone areas?  Should we strengthen our emergency management capabilities?  Should we install early warning systems?  Unfortunately, the straightforward answers will not be forthcoming because politicians and policy makers will be faced with resource limitations and competing demands and because they rarely understand that disasters are development opportunities. 

The 2010 Haiti earthquake disaster will be known as the first big disaster of the social networking age.  Right now, the networks are buzzing, and the media spotlight is shining brightly on Haiti.  People are paying attention, and the international community is working feverishly to provide humanitarian relief.  The challenge, however, is maintaining the focus on Haiti for the next few years and weaning Haiti off its dependence on foreign aid.  Only long-term, sustainable development projects will pull the country up from its sorry status as the least developed, most vulnerable country in the Western Hemisphere. 

Vincent T. Gawronski is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Birmingham-Southern College. He can be reached at