Haiti Report for December 12, 2008

The Haiti Report is a compilation and summary of events as described in Haiti and international media prepared by Konbit Pou Ayiti/KONPAY. It does not reflect the opinions of any individual or organization. This service is intended to create a better understanding of the situation in Haiti by presenting the reader with reports that provide a variety of perspectives on the situation. 

To make a donation to support this service: Konbit Pou Ayiti, 7 Wall Street, Gloucester, MA, 01930.

IN THIS REPORT: 

- Journalist Guy Delva Sentences to One Month in Prison on Charges of Defamation
- Haiti to Participate in Caribbean Single Market and Economy
- Rise in Crime Leads UN to Launch New Security Plan
- Deportations to Haiti Resume Despite Ongoing Crises
- Maternal Mortality, an Indicator of Haiti’s Healthcare Crisis
- CEPR Releases Report Calling for Urgent Debt Cancellation
- New Survey of Children’s Nutritional Health Launched
-  President Preval Promises Action after Schools Collapse in Port-au-Prince
- Congresswoman Maxine Waters Calls for Better-Funded, Systemic Approach to Hunger in Haiti
-  European Union Pledges $7.7 Million in Emergency Food Aid for Haiti

Journalist Guy Delva Sentences to One Month in Prison on Charges of Defamation:

On Wednesday, 10 December 2008 – the day of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – the Correctional Court of Port-au-Prince, under the chairmanship of Judge Emmanuel Lacroix, passed a sentence condemning the journalist Joseph Guyler C. Delva to one month of imprisonment. The sentence was passed after the judge found in favour of the charge that Delva had defamed the former Senator Rudolph Boulos. Speaking on Radio Vision 2000, Delva announced his intention to appeal the verdict through his lawyer Jean Wilner Morin. He took the opportunity to criticise Rudolph Boulos’ lawyer, Samuel Madistin who, he said, had ignored the rules of his profession by publicising the verdict and sentence in the media before he (Delva) had even been notifiied.

 Delva also stated that he himself intends to take Boulos to court if the latter returns to Haiti. “It is not reasonable that someone who refuses to cooperate with the justice system, like Rudolph Boulos, is able take other people to court,” said Delva. “Rudolph Boulos is one of the people who was in open conflict with Jean Dominique. (Translator’s note: Dominique was a radio journalist murdered in 2000. The investigation into the crime has yet to be concluded). Normally he should have appeared before the investigating judge because it is up to the judge to determine who might have benefitted from the crime. When he doesn’t appear, the suspicion falls on him”, he added. (Le Nouvelliste – 11 December 2008, translated from French by Charles Arthur for the Haiti Support Group)

Haiti to Participate in Caribbean Single Market and Economy:

Haiti is expected to participate in at least one component of the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME) by the first quarter of 2009. According to Caribbean Net News, Haiti’s participation in the CSME would increase the size of CARICOM’s market under the CSME to an unprecedented 15 million people. Director of the CARICOM Representation Office in Haiti Ambassador Earl Stephen Huntley stated on Monday (Dec. 8) that Haiti is in the process of revising and developing legislative frameworks to facilitate its participation in Free Trade in Goods under the CSME. Huntley noted that by January 2009 bureau of standards would be established in Haiti as the country prepares to participate in its first segment on the CSME. He also pointed to Haiti’s hosting of the CARICOM Commission on Youth Development as a symbol of the country’s growing involvement and active participation in the regional body. 

Huntley revealed that a comprehensive plan was being implemented by the CARICOM Secretariat in partnership with the Canadian Inter-Development Agency (CIDA) to support Haiti’s development, re-integration in the Community and full participation in the CSME. As part of this programme, the CARICOM Secretariat is also conducting training in several aspects of Haiti’s public sector to strengthen the country’s ability to participate fully in the CSME. The Haitian CARICOM Office will spearhead the implementation of a public education programme that will help Haitians to gain a clearer view of the regional grouping, and which will also allow other CARICOM member states to understand the reality of Haiti. ”We are one and must work together to build the ties of brotherhood between Haiti and the rest of the region…ties that history had severed,” Huntley asserted. (SKNVibes.com, 12/11)

Rise in Crime Leads UN to Launch New Security Plan:

Haitians beset by a staggering rise in acts of banditry, including kidnapping, are set to benefit from a new United Nations-backed urban security plan launched by the national police, including an increased presence and nighttime patrols. Under Operation Blue Shield of the UN Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), UN peacekeepers are expected to make up a substantial part of the patrolling force and will also double the number of mobile checkpoints. The Mission says Operation comes in response to the staggering rise in banditry, which has soared by some 40 per cent in recent months, especially in Port-au-Prince, the capital. MINUSTAH has frequently helped in cracking down on criminal and military gangs since it was set up in 2004 to help re-establish peace in the impoverished Caribbean country after an insurgency forced President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to go into exile. (UN, 12/9)

Deportations to Haiti Resume Despite Ongoing Crises:

Deportation flights to Haiti resumed last week after a more than two-month halt, enraging activists and South Florida congressional leaders.

In September, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement stopped deporting immigrants to Haiti in the wake of four tropical storms that ravaged the country. Advocates argued that the battered country couldn’t absorb returning countrymen as it dealt with storm damage.

“We fully expected to resume deportation flights when it was safe,” said Nicole Navas, an ICE spokeswoman. “And we made a determination that it was appropriate to resume deportation based on the conditions on the ground.”

Advocates say things are getting worse, not better. Schools are collapsing. Children are malnourished. The country’s infrastructure is obliterated, they said.

“After dealing with this administration on Haitian issues for eight years, I’m forced to conclude that its policy toward Haiti is based on racism,” said Randy McGrorty, director of Catholic Charities Legal Services for the Archdiocese of Miami.

“It shocking. People are starving in Haiti. This callous disregard for human life is inexplicable.”

In a joint prepared statement, U.S. Representatives Alcee Hastings, D-Miramar, and Robert Wexler, D-Boca Raton, called the decision to start deportation again “short-sighted and inhumane.”

“Many deported Haitians simply have no communities to return to,” they said. “It is disappointing that the Bush Administration would even consider sending people back to this incredibly fragile nation.”

McGrorty said advocates plan to meet Wednesday to talk about how they may again stop the deportations. (South Florida Sun Sentinel, 12/9)

U.S. immigration authorities have resumed deportations to Haiti, ending a three-month-plus reprieve of sending Haitians back to their storm-battered country. ’’We determined that it was appropriate to resume based on the circumstances in Haiti,’’ Nicole Navas, a spokeswoman with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said, declining to comment further. “The individuals being returned have final orders of removal and the necessary travel documents.’’ The move to deport Haitians comes at a time when Haiti is still trying to recover from back-to-back storms that heaped wide scale devastation. The tempests — two of them full-fledged hurricanes — left at least 800 people dead, tens of thousands homeless, and caused about $1 billion in damages. Aside from the clearing of roads, little has improved in Haiti.

‘’The decision to resume deportations to Haiti shocks the conscience,’’ said Randolph McGrorty, executive director of Catholic Legal Services, Archdiocese of Miami. ``Deportations at this time are simply inhumane, sending people to conditions of famine and disease. The change in policy is unwarranted by reports on the ground which confirm that the humanitarian crisis in Haiti continues and worsens.’’ McGrorty added: ``It is incomprehensibly counter-productive to the U.S. government’s objective of avoiding mass migration, and so cruel and misguided that I cannot explain it by any other way than to condemn the policy as racist.’’

Immigrant advocates found hope in the suspension, issued in September. They said the halt could pave the way for temporary protected status, or TPS, a program that temporarily suspends deportations and allows undocumented Haitians to obtain work permits. Immigrant advocates expressed further relief when authorities allowed more than 50 Haitians to be released from a Broward detention center. Ankle bracelets were used to monitor their whereabouts, they said. But on Monday, immigration attorneys and Haitian authorities expressed frustration with the resumed deportations. Lawyer Randolph McGrorty sent out an urgent e-mail. ’’It’s an outrageously inhumane act,’’ said Cheryl Little, executive director of Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center in Miami. “We are attempting to do whatever we can to convince [U.S.] government officials to change their minds on this.’’ In an e-mail from the Department of Homeland Security requesting travel documents for 43 noncriminal Haitians, Haitian Consul General Ralph Latorture found out about the resumed deportations. ’’We still have thousands of cubic meters of mud being removed from Gonaives,’’ Latortue said about the hard-hit seaport of Gonaives. “There are still people in shelters, and of course people know children are suffering from malnutrition in Haiti. These are all circumstances that put the country in a difficult position struggling to recover.’’ Even before this fall’s halting, Latortue and other Consuls General had stopped issuing travel documents. On Monday, he said he wasn’t sure how his government would handle the response. It was also not clear on Monday when the first flights would start carrying Haitian nationals back to their homeland. ICE spokeswoman Navas declined to say, citing security reasons. (Miami Herald, 12/9)

Maternal Mortality, an Indicator of Haiti’s Healthcare Crisis:

Cradling her oversized belly, the expectant mother waddles into the delivery room where six other Haitian women lie with teeth clenched, their legs apart. The howls follow the woman as she makes her way toward the only empty bed. But before she gets there, gut-wrenching pain makes her drop to one knee and blood spills out, turning the tile red. On any given day at the three-story Doctors Without Borders Jude Anne Maternity Hospital, women give birth on the floor. Often, the delivery ward is so crowded that some women don’t even make it onto the sheetless plastic cots. ’’Here anybody wearing a pair of gloves will be catching a baby at some point,’’ says Dr. Wendy Lai, lead medical doctor at the hospital run by the international medical humanitarian group’s Holland contingent. Lai, a French-speaking family physician from Toronto, calls it the floor delivery index: The number of babies born on the floor, in the stairwells or in the courtyard determines the kind of day — calm, medium or busy — the staff is having.

But more than a measure of births, the floor delivery index has come to illustrate the greater struggle for life inside a country gripped by death and hammered by crisis amid a failing public healthcare system. The chaos inside the maternity ward of one of the few free round-the-clock hospitals for expectant mothers in this deeply impoverished nation of 9 million is only a peek at a far wider and more complex problem. ’’At the moment, as far we are concerned, on the level of maternal care, we are in a crisis,’’ says Hans van Dillen, chief of mission. “We have had cases where women die on our watch because we couldn’t observe them because we were all over the place.

The latest healthcare crisis began in October when doctors and nurses at the country’s largest medical center, the General Hospital in Port-au-Prince, went on strike. Haiti was still reeling from four successive storms — including two hurricanes — and just emerging from a nearly five-month-old political stalemate. Two other public hospitals that care for pregnant women in the capital also would temporarily close. Suddenly, the doctors and midwives at Jude Anne found their caseloads multiplying as women from all over the capital and countryside crowded their front gate. Last month, they logged 1,250 deliveries. October brought 1,600 — or four times the numbers initially envisioned when the maternity hospital opened two years ago to treat high-risk pregnant women in slums. ’’We can no longer manage. The women, they come from everywhere,’’ van Dillen says.

Situated at the crossroads of two of the county’s most volatile slums — Cité Soleil and La Saline — the maternity hospital is the latest international effort to help Haiti reduce its exorbitant maternal mortality rate. More women die here before, during and after childbirth than anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere. Dr. Paul Farmer, a world-renowned American physician and longtime advocate of the right to safe motherhood for poor women here, says there is no indication that Haiti’s maternity problem is worsening. If anything, he says, the frenzy at the Port-au-Prince hospital shows what happens when ‘’deadly user fees,’’ which keep poor people out of hospitals and leads to 76 percent of women delivering at home, are removed.

‘’Removing deadly user fees is making an invisible problem visible,’’ Farmer said in a telephone interview en route from Rwanda to Haiti, where his Partners in Health organization works to improve health care in the country’s Central Plateau region. ``Before, these women were dying at home. Now they are dying in front of you.’’

Earlier this year, the Canadian government with the Haitian Ministry of Health launched a $6.5 million program to fight maternal mortality. The program reimburses institutions for deliveries and transportation costs for participating pregnant women and compensates traditional birth attendants who walk clients into the doors, rather than risk an at-home delivery. Some 61 medical facilities, including Farmer’s, are part of the network, known as SOG. ’’Safe motherhood should be a right, not a commodity,’’ Farmer said. With little access to proper healthcare, most pregnant women here rely on traditional birth attendants to help deliver their babies. But they often can’t handle complications such as pregnancy-induced high blood pressure or preeclampsia, which Haitian women develop at high rates. ’’They just aren’t skilled or have the training,’’ Farmer said of the birth attendants.

‘’We need to make sure we can link safe motherhood to family planning,’’ Farmer said. ``We need to have bold family planning.’’ Haiti’s new health minister, Dr. Alex Larsen, agrees the country needs to rein in its exploding birth rate. He says SOG is an excellent program but worries what the government will do when the funding runs out and whether such subsidized care also serves as an incentive for pregnancy because of the attention provided. Farmer calls such thinking medical folklore and says the best way to encourage family planning is to deliver safe, healthy babies. Meanwhile, the ministry of health has reopened all hospitals, but strikes and a lack of resources continue to threaten operations. For instance, the General Hospital has long been a cesspool of corruption, and its kitchen and pharmacy are still closed. At least one of the other hospitals, Larsen said, had to be temporarily closed because of unsanitary conditions caused by a mosquito infestation and hurricane damage. Larsen says the spike in deliveries at Jude Anne isn’t solely because of closures and strikes, but because the services are free. Even the public hospitals require payment.

‘’They prefer to go to Médecins Sans Frontières, even if it means they have to give birth on the floor,’’ he says. Van Dillen sees the Canada’s SOG program as his group’s exit strategy, saying free health services would allow them to increase survival rates of Haitian women and babies. Farmer agrees but also says international agencies are handicapping Haiti by persistently treating it like a triage case. Instead, they should provide a long-term commitment that would allow the nation to build a solid foundation for healthcare. ’’When you have a disaster relief mentality that has so plagued Haiti . . . that is not going to help,’’ he says. ``It prevents the building up of institutions. If you are really serious about reducing maternal mortality, you have to stay in the game a long time.’’ (Miami Herald, 12/9)

CEPR Releases Report Calling for Urgent Debt Cancellation: 

Following the election of Senator Barack Obama, who has supported debt cancellation for poor countries, and a recent trip by World Bank president Robert Zoellick to Haiti, the Center for Economic and Policy Research released a new report today underlining why Haiti urgently needs debt cancellation in order to address humanitarian needs and help the country withstand the effects of the global economic downturn, which is likely to inflict further pain upon the most impoverished country in the Western Hemisphere. The report, “Update – Debt Cancellation for Haiti: No Reason for Further Delays,” describes several key economic challenges confronting Haiti, while Haiti is required to make millions of dollars in debt service payments to foreign creditors such as the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank. The paper also describes the technical criteria that have prevented Haiti from receiving full debt cancellation under the IMF and World Bank’s Heavily Indebted Poor Country Initiative (HIPC).

“The whole world knows that Haiti needs all the funds it can get – now – to deal with disaster relief and also to deal with the global economic downturn,” said Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and lead author of the report. “There are millions of Haitians who simply cannot wait for their government to jump through the arbitrary hoops set by the IMF and World Bank before the debt is canceled.” Haiti’s total foreign debt currently stands at $1.7 billion (USD). Once Haiti reaches “Completion Point” under HIPC, it stands to gain $1.2 billion total in canceled debt. Haiti had been expected to reach Completion Point in September 2008, but recent disasters, economic shocks, and political developments – along with various IMF demands on technical criteria – now mean that Haiti will not reach Completion Point until mid-2009 at the earliest.

This year’s devastating hurricane season and rising food prices have underscored the urgency of Haiti’s need to free up funds currently spent on debt service payments. In August and September, Haiti was hammered by a series of hurricanes – Gustav, Hanna, and Ike – that killed some 800 people and left as many as 1 million people homeless in a country with a population of 9 million. Entire communities were flooded, and aid has been slow in coming. United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes said that only 40 per cent of a $107 million flash appeal aimed at assisting the emergency relief effort had been pledged as of October 27, 2008. Haiti would also benefit from immediate debt cancellation since it is likely to face further economic challenges due to reliance on trade with the U.S. Haiti’s exports to the U.S. were equivalent to 8.6 percent of its GDP in 2007, and the recent downturn in the U.S. economy, led by the collapse of a massive housing bubble, has led to a shrinking of the U.S. import market. U.S. imports are likely to decline further, and unless counteracted by policy changes, these changes will likely have a negative impact on Haiti’s economic growth. (Center for Economic and Policy Research, 12/8, www.cepr.net)

New Survey of Children’s Nutritional Health Launched:

As more severely malnourished children and their mothers trickled into Port-au-Prince Monday from Haiti’s southeastern region to obtain life-saving treatment, the Ministry of Health and an international anti-hunger aid organization launched a national survey of children’s nutritional health. The door-to-door survey is the first of its kind since the 1970s, officials say, and is critical to answering the lingering question: How widespread and acute is malnutrition among children in hurricane-battered Haiti? The survey also comes as the Ministry of Health seeks to open a clinic in Baie d’Orange, an isolated mountain village, where 26 children died from severe malnutrition and dozens more from the town and neighboring villages were hospitalized in recent weeks.

‘’The study is very important in the current situation, as it will give us a baseline . . . and it can guide the geographical priorities for the treatment sites,’’ Dr. Teresa de la Torre, the nutrition and health specialist for UNICEF Haiti, said in a telephone interview. On Monday, just days after Doctors Without Borders returned nine severely malnourished children to their homes in the Baie d’Orange region, a nurse with the humanitarian aid organization drove into Port-au-Prince with three more children from Mapou, a neighboring town. Max Cosci, the head of Doctors Without Borders/Belgium mission, said the children were not as close to death at the previous group “but they are malnourished.’’ For more than three weeks now, the mission has been going door-to-door in the southeast surveying the nutritional health of children after growing concern that the severe malnutrition problem may be more widespread than Baie d’Orange and its surrounding villages.

Though Doctors Without Borders have yet to come upon a case as extreme as Baie d’Orange elsewhere in the southeast, Cosci said they did find another pocket of moderately malnourished children in a town where they least expected it. ’’We were sure we were not going to find anything there,’’ he said. ``There is a town, markets for people to buy food. But we found a good group of kids in moderate malnutrition.’’ Such discoveries has sounded the alarm for Haiti’s Health Ministry and the international donor community. They agreed to do the survey even before a series of two hurricanes and two tropical storms pounded the country in less than a month this summer. The county was already realing from a food crisis that sparked days of deadly rioting when the first storm hit in August. Now, the compounded crisis makes it more urgent to find out how children are being impacted, officials say. By surveying Haiti, province-by-province, the plan is to have a complete ‘’nutritional picture of the country,’’ said Olivier Le Guillou, country director for Action Against Hunger, which is conducting the survey in cooperation with the Ministry of Health.

The survey is being paid for by UNICEF and the European Community Humanitarian Aid Office. Le Guillou said it will provide a more accurate picture of the rapid assesments a number of aid groups have done in recent weeks. Those assesments show that the malnutrition rates have skyrocketed in hurricane-affected areas, with severe rates five to six times higher in isolated hardest-hit communities like Baie d’Orange. ’’We are not saying that what they are doing is not good, but it’s less accurate for sure,’’ Le Guillou said. Mari Tolliver, spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy, said the U.S. Agency for International Development “is aware of differences in the methodologies used during the rapid assessments to assess the impact of food insecurity. “However, we do not think that these differences diminish the gravity of the situation in certain areas of the country that were particularly hard-hit by the storms.’’ (Miami Herald, 12/1)

President Preval Promises Action after Schools Collapse in Port-au-Prince:

The rumor shot like electricity through the Haitian capital: Another school was falling. Desperate parents and would-be rescuers ran through alleys, leaped over walls and wrestled with police to reach the scene. Emergency crews arrived to find the school intact – vibrations caused by wind or traffic had simply sparked a panic. But at least a dozen students were injured rushing out of the building. A 19-year-old female student suffered heart failure and died in the hospital. Such panics have been reported across the capital since the collapse of the College La Promesse killed nearly 100 people and injured 162 more. Though based on false rumors, they reflect a very real and well-founded fear. Port-au-Prince Mayor Jean-Yves Jason estimates 60 percent of buildings in his city are unsafe, built shoddily and now standing on ground weakened by a torrential hurricane season. Petionville lawmaker Steven Benoit said 2 million people need to be relocated nationwide.

“There are no studies for these buildings. They aren’t built by engineers,” said Claude Prepetit, an engineer and geologist with Haiti’s Bureau of Mines and Energy. “They just buy any materials they can find and have no respect for building rules.” In a decade fraught with violent upheaval, little attention was paid to building codes as Haiti’s population grew from 6.8 million in 1998 to about 9 million today. Families fleeing rural poverty and eroded fields have settled in slums in the hills that ring Port-au-Prince. Pressed for space, they built upper stories onto homes, churches and schools out of chalky local cinderblock, held together with what little iron reinforcement and mortar they could afford. One of those builders was the Pentecostal preacher and self-professed civil engineer Fortin Augustin. Despite having been denied a permit, he built his La Promesse church and school in a slum a short walk from the sturdy homes of foreign diplomats and wealthy Haitians in the suburb of Petionville.

Even after a partial collapse eight years ago, the school continued to operate and was even visited by the staff of previous education ministries – who came to assess the curriculum, not building safety – new Education Minister Joel Jean-Pierre told The Associated Press. Last year, Augustin constructed a second school, La Promesse College Evangelique Annex, which still stands on a remote hillside across Petionville. Its sloping concrete roof is held up by a temporary iron bar, and pieces of cinderblock wall crumble at the touch. Jean-Pierre said his office was not aware of the annex until almost a week after the first school collapsed. Augustin is in police custody awaiting an investigation into likely charges of involuntary manslaughter and could not be reached for comment.

For days after La Promesse fell, parents and students were consumed with bloody images of the dead and frantic rescue efforts on Haitian television and in newspapers. Then, five days later, a back-alley house containing a church school partially fell, injuring at least seven students and a teacher. Thousands of bystanders raced ambulances, U.N. peacekeepers and Red Cross vehicles to the scene. Pushed back by U.N. and Haitian police, the crowd’s nerves jumped to panic amid false rumors that a third school had collapsed nearby. Two children were injured in the melee that followed.

President Rene Preval has pledged to crack down on lawless construction. Three public schools were closed after the collapse for emergency renovations because of concerns over building safety, Jean-Pierre said. But with a struggling education ministry unable to even catalog the schools that line dusty hillsides or fill bullet-pocked downtown districts in the capital, officials face a daunting task. ”Things have gone so far it’s very difficult to say we have the right answers,” said Prime Minister Michele Pierre-Louis. But she added that the government would pursue a combination of financial incentives for schools that meet building standards and punishment for building owners who do not comply. (Miami Herald, 11/27)

Haiti President Rene Preval says authorities will demolish unsafe buildings and improve urban planning following a school collapse that killed nearly 100 people. Radio Metropole is reporting that Preval will hold three days of meetings with mayors next week about widespread, lawless construction in fast-growing slums. Preval spoke Wednesday at a presidential palace tribute to victims of the Nov. 7 collapse of the K-12 College La Promesse. The mayor of Port-au-Prince has estimated that 60 percent of the city’s buildings are unsafe. Many are the homes, schools and churches of families who fled rural poverty to shantytowns.

Underfunded government ministries have been unable to catalog all the churches and schools. (Miami Herald, 11/27)

Congresswoman Maxine Waters Calls for Better-Funded, Systemic Approach to Hunger in Haiti:

A prominent U.S. congresswoman called on Wednesday for a better-funded, systemic approach to fighting hunger in Haiti following an Associated Press report that child malnutrition is worsening. California Democrat Maxine Waters, a veteran member of the Congressional Black Caucus, urged the U.S. Agency for International Development to locate Haitian children in danger of starvation, citing a Nov. 21 AP report that malnutrition had contributed to the deaths of at least 26 children in the southeastern area of Baie d’Orange. USAID needs to make sure malnourished children are receiving appropriate therapy and evacuate them to hospitals or cities if necessary, she said. ”The idea that children are dying of starvation right here in this hemisphere” is unacceptable, Waters said by phone. The U.S. Congress already pledged about $100 million in relief from the August and September tropical storms and hurricanes that hit Haiti, killing at least 793 people and causing $1 billion in damage. But Waters said not enough is being done. ”We are going to follow up with a combination of our ambassador and (President Rene) Preval and see if we can help to orchestrate something that’s a little more extensive,” she said.

Aid workers discovered the pocket of malnutrition after nearly all of the children had died, and officials are still investigating to determine the exact causes of death. At least 65 more severely undernourished children were evacuated to hospitals or treated in tent clinics on site. USAID is taking the matter seriously and had already stepped-up ongoing programs to deliver food and health aid to the region, said Mari Tolliver, a U.S. embassy spokeswoman in Port-au-Prince. (Miami Herald, 11/26)

 European Union Pledges $7.7 Million in Emergency Food Aid for Haiti:

The European Union says it will send $7.7 million in emergency food aid to Haiti. The European Commission says funds are meant to provide food for around a million people. The aid will also be used to pay for public health measures to provide clean and safe drinking water, sanitation and promote better hygiene. The EU has already sent some $25.8 million in humanitarian aid to Haiti this year following a series of hurricanes and storms that resulted in more than 800 deaths and destroyed thousands of homes and farms. The EU said Friday that about 3 million Haitians are facing acute food shortages, and that 23 percent of Caribbean nation’s population suffers from malnutrition. (Miami Herald, 11/28)