Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Box 4.2
(continued)
Chile received signifi cantly less international support than Haiti, with an
estimated US$197.5 million in aid in 2010 (World Bank
2013
). Yet its
response and recovery were much stronger. The Chilean government's initial
response to the earthquake was criticized for being delayed (Moehle et al.
2010
), its inadequacy blamed largely on an impending handover of govern-
ment 12 days after the event. However, relative to Haiti, the overall response
of the government was effective. The incoming president immediately formed
an Emergency Committee to oversee the nation's response and recovery, and
assigned it three tasks: fi rst, to ensure that everyone's basic needs of food,
power, and sanitation were met within one month; second, to ensure that
everyone had shelter before winter (June 1); and third, to deal with housing,
debris removal, demolition, and restoration of basic services. The fi rst two
targets were met (Kovacs
2010
). The government provided food boxes to
those in need, utilizing a bulk distribution system that was established prior to
the earthquake to provide food for the poor. Where road access was blocked,
helicopters were used. The government also provided 65,000 temporary
wooden cabins, which the army and nongovernmental organizations helped to
manufacture, transport and assemble. The majority of individuals were
located next to the damaged or destroyed home. Others, mostly in tsunami-
affected areas, were built in temporary camps. Communal toilets and showers
were installed in the camps immediately, and electricity was provided within
months. For reconstruction efforts, the government offered grants and conces-
sional loans to those with destroyed or damaged homes (Hinrichs et al.
2011
).
As of December 2012, 59 % of the 222,000 homes repairs or replacements
were complete, and 29 % were in progress (Manning
2012
).
The PAR model provides a useful framework for understanding the underlying
forces that gave rise to the large disparities in vulnerability between Haiti and Chile.
The further back an explanation is along the “progression of vulnerability” the more
diffi cult it is to determine causality. Wisner et al. (
2004
) explained that root causes
are “distant” in one or more of the following respects: “spatially distant (arising in
a distant centre of economic or political power), temporally distant (in past history),
and fi nally, distant in the sense of being so profoundly bound up with cultural
assumptions, ideology, beliefs and social relations in the actual lived existence of
the people concerned that they are 'invisible' and 'taken for granted'.” For example,
a spatially distant root cause of the vulnerability of Haiti to an earthquake in 2010
could have been the global trend of international trade liberalization. As former US
President Clinton argued, pressure on Haiti to reduce tariffs on food imports caused
a decline in its rice production in the 1990s (Katz
2010
). A temporally distant root
cause may have been Haiti's historically dysfunctional political system. In the last
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