Factories are running again while entrepreneurs seek opportunity among the ruins, writes ADRIANA BRASILEIROin Port-au-Prince
FROM HIS office off the floor of Interamerican Wovens, a garment factory, Hector Soto watches 540 workers stitching pink and turquoise medical scrubs for the US market.
On an output chart hanging in his office, Mr Soto (41), draws a red line slashing downward.
It’s dated January 12th, the day the earthquake struck Haiti, killing about 230,000 people.
Then, with a green marker, he adds a rising line that starts January 25th.
Four weeks after the quake collapsed the economy of the western hemisphere’s poorest country, Haiti is slowly stirring to life. Factories that produced garments, which accounted for about 8 per cent of the economy, are running again, while new entrepreneurs seek opportunity amid the ruins by selling mobile phone calls or recycling building materials from the rubble.
“Haitians are very resilient,” said Eduardo Almeida, the Inter-American Development Bank’s (IADB) representative in Haiti.
“They are used to suffering all types of shocks, political and environmental. They get right up and find ways to keep on going.”
The earthquake injured 300,000 people, according to a government estimate reported by the United Nations, and left one million of the county’s nine million people homeless.
Before the quake, about two-thirds of the population lacked a formal job and 9 per cent worked in manufacturing, according to the Central Intelligence Agency. Haiti had a per capita income of about €960 a year, the hemisphere’s lowest, and a gross domestic product of $7.36 billion in 2008.
Interamerican, owned by Haiti’s Apaid family, occupies one of 49 identical concrete block buildings arrayed in an industrial park off the road to downtown Port-au-Prince from the city’s Toussaint L’Ouverture airport.
About 90 per cent of its production goes to the US, Mr Soto said, and clothing used to be shipped by sea from Port-au-Prince. The city’s port collapsed in the quake and the US army said it won’t reopen for months. Now, seaports in the Dominican Republic handle half its shipments and the other half leaves from Les Cayes, a Haitian port 140 miles southwest of Port-au-Prince.
"We are way below zero," Mr Soto said. The two-week shutdown set the factory's output back a month, he added. "I had a target to step up production to 45,000 pieces a week by March from 35,000. Now, maybe I can achieve that goal in May or June." – ( Washington Post service, Bloomberg)