POVERTY
Haiti remains the poorest country in the Americas and one of the poorest in the world, with a 2012 gross annual per capita income of $760, according to the World Bank. Over half of its 10.17 million people live on less than $1 a day, and approximately 80 percent live on less than $2 a day.
NATURAL DISASTERS
Natural disasters have plagued the small Caribbean country. It is vulnerable to hurricanes and tropical storms and is still feeling the effects of the 7.0 earthquake that struck in January 2010.
The earthquake killed more than 230,000 people and injured at least 300,000, according to a 2011 U.S. State Department report. More than 1 million people were displaced or rendered homeless.
The earthquake caused $7.8 billion in damages and losses, which amounted to 120 percent of Haiti’s 2009 gross domestic product, according to a 2010 World Bank report.
Four years later, the Haitian economy is still recovering from the earthquake, which is considered the worst humanitarian and economic disaster recorded in the Western Hemisphere, according to the U.S. State Department. Today, nearly 172,000 Haitians – about 45,000 households – remain internally displaced in 306 camps.
DEFORESTATION
Haiti suffers from severe deforestation, says Paul Macena, an agronomist for Caritas Internationalis, an international Catholic organization that provides aid and development in rural and oppressed areas, as well as a former agriculture professor. He attributes the loss of forest cover to the production of charcoal – a major energy source in the country – and natural disasters.
In 1923, forests covered nearly 60 percent of the country, according to 2006 report from the U.S. Library of Congress. As of 2006, forests covered less than 2 percent of the country.
EMIGRATION
Many Haitians who are educated and professionally trained choose to use their expertise in foreign countries because they believe there are more opportunities outside Haiti, says Macena, also a technician for Fondation Nouvelle Grand’Anse, a nonprofit organization that fosters socio-economic development in Haiti’s Grand’Anse department. This emigration of skilled workers has diminished Haiti’s ability to develop economically.
Many of Haiti’s most valuable workers have immigrated to the U.S. and Canada because of political turmoil, according to a 2006 report from the U.S. Library of Congress. The 500,000 Haitians living in New York City and the 380,000 living in Miami as of 2006 represent a loss of training and expertise that Haiti has been unable to replace.
POLITICAL TURMOIL
Sandra Honoré, the special representative of the U.N. secretary-general for Haiti, released a statement on April 29 expressing the international community’s concern that the Haitian government had not yet made important decisions to advance plans to hold legislative elections by the end of 2014 after more than three years of delay.
“The inability to hold elections in 2014 could lead to the dissolution of Parliament in January 2015 which would engender yet another political crisis, with unpredictable consequences for the future of Haitian democracy,” according to the statement.
Honoré is also head of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti. The United Nations became involved in Haiti in 1990 to support a provisional government after a long period of dictatorship and has stayed on throughout the political instability that has followed.