How Haiti’s Future Depends on American Markets

By By Tate Watkins, The Atlantic

CARACOL, HAITI–Along the highway that parallels Haiti’s north coast, not far from the bay where Christopher Columbus’s Santa Maria is believed to have shipwrecked on Christmas Day in 1492, giant billboards with smiling faces dot the landscape of alternating crop fields and scrub acacia. The billboards carry the country’s new mantra: “Haiti is open for business.”

The cliché gains at least a little credence in this case from a $300 million industrial park, backed by the U.S. government and other donors. The single biggest investment in Haiti since the devastating earthquake of January 2010, the park symbolizes the debate about foreign-led economic development in very poor nations. Its backers say it will bring tens of thousands of jobs to a country in desperate need of them, while critics see it as merely another way for foreign firms to exploit cheap labor…

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