ap.google.com — With food prices rising, Haiti's poorest can't afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country's central plateau.
Jan 30, 2008 View in Crawl 4
alykenJan 30, 2008
This is outrageous! People in the West are eating so much they've become deformed and bed ridden. People walk around with the weight of 3 whole people around their fat bellies. Why should this happen.
slvrbullet87Jan 31, 2008
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smogerJan 31, 2008
no,.. i work hard for my money/have to feed myself.
Closed AccountJan 31, 2008
sarcasm/whoopsi... i meant third-*rate*, not third-*world*. must have been a freudian slip! ;)/sarcasm
chemamFeb 1, 2008
hahaha don't you mean "equimalito"
h3lxFeb 1, 2008
kəm-ˈpa-shən sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it.It's definitely not a bizarre notion, During Operation Eagle, I served on the Cuttership Bear part of a detachment tasked with providing security to Coast Guard retrieval teams rounding up floaters in the Caribbean and taking them to Guantanamo Bay. The people we were putting into those camps are no different that you and me save only the fact they were running for their goddamn lives. At one point we had over 29,000 Haitians in both Buckley and McCalla... the people didn't ask to be there, they weren't part of the catalyst which led them there and they couldn't go home for fear of death either by starvation or political militias. You can't fault an entire country of people for the sins of their Gov't. If that were the case, every American would be bathing in blood of a million dead Iraqis, the 800,000 Tutsi, who knows how many in Darfour. We as citizens of the world have an obligation to provide each an every one of us the right to life. Abort all the fetuses you want, but once they're here, they're in the club. I have personally walked through Somali camps where starving children run up to your HMMWV, those little snippets on TV are exaggerated for effect, the s**t really is that bad. If anything, they wash the faces of the children to remove that goddamn red packed sand so you can see what they are. It's not glowy and warm inside when I consider that so much more needs to be done and far too many of us are so disconnected from the realities on the ground that they choose not to act, not so much out of simple meanness, but willful ignorance.
consciousmanFeb 5, 2008
I don't understand how America can be so unfair to Cuba when people in Haiti living like this, I very sure this doesn't happen in CubaI made may case to end the US Embargo on Cuba
Closed AccountFeb 6, 2008
Haiti is indeed the poorest. But the Dominican Republic is nowhere near being the second poorest.First, you need to decide what you are really inquiring with your question. Do you want to know which country is poorest as a whole (ie. the strenght of its economy), or which country has the poorest citizens (they are two very different questions).Most economists use the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, the purchasing power and the % below poverty line to determine the poverty of the individuals of any given country.If we use these parameters as measure, truth is that the Dominican Republic only has 25% below the poverty line, which is lower than 17 of the 21 Latin American nations. In other words, there are 17 Latin American countries in which a higher % of the population is below the poverty line. In this category, only Chile, Jamaica and Costa Rica present stronger numbers. Yes, there is a higher population BELOW poverty line in Argentina (27%), Mexico (39%), Venezuela (38%) and even Brazil (31%), than there is in the Dominican Republic. Put in another way, the Dominican Republic is 4th best in this category (1st being richest, 21st being poorest).If you prefer to use GDP per Capita as measure, then the DR with $8,400 ranks as 8th best (ie. 13 countries having poorer GDP per Capita numbers). Under this consideration, countries like Panama ($8,200), Venezuela ($7,200), Peru ($6,600) and Paraguay ($4,800) have poorer citizens than the DR.However, if you are asking about countries with weakest economy as a whole, then you should consider total GDP and/or GDP Purchasing Parity. In this case, the DR is the 8th strongest economy in Latin America, with a GDP purchasing parity of $77.1 billion, which is stronger than Paraguay, Ecuador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Cuba, Uruguay, El Salvador, Bolivia, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Jamaica, and of course Haiti.As far as public debt goes, the DR's is 45.6% of the GDP, which is better than Brazil's 49%, Costa Rica's 53%, Bolivia's 57%, Argentina's 61%, Panama's 61%, Honduras' 67.1%, Uruguay's 70.6%, Cuba's 75%, Nicaragua's 82.7% and Jamaica's whopping 133%. Interesting enough, Haiti's public debt to GDP percentage is only 21.9%, but this is only because the World Bank and Paris Club recently pardoned nearly 75% of their debt.Furthermore, the Dominican Republic ranks #1 in GDP growth over the last few years with 10.7%. Venezuela comes in second with 10.3%, Argentina, Panama and Peru come in 3rd, 4th and 5th respectively with numbers between 8% and 8.5%.There are several other factors to consider, such as unemployment and inflation rates. But I don't want to spend another thirty minutes looking up that information.After seeing these numbers, you can see that the DR is significantly better than at least half of the other Latin American countries.In the US there is a wrongful perception that poverty in the DR is extreme, fueled mainly by three misleading causes a) because it's next to Haiti, b) because of the uneducated behavior of dominicans living in the US (but this is only true because, generally speaking, it's the lower class dominicans that migrate to the US), and c) because the US media chooses to focus on the poorest part of the DR, only to show heroic aspects of dominican baseball players that "came from the lowest end of society".To answer your initial question, the second poorest country in Latin America in terms of the purchasing power and income level of its citizens is a close battle between Honduras, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Cuba. In terms of the strenght of their economy as a whole, then Honduras, Nicaragua, and Bolivia have the weakest economies.Please note that this analysis does not include the smaller countries and commonwealths such as Belize, the Guyanas, Trinidad Tobago, Aruba, etc. It only includes the larger 21 Latin American nations.Source(s):The CIA factbook located at <a class="user" href="https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html">https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world ...</a>Via Yahoo! Answers: <a class="user" href="http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071018105626AAtmHTr">http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=200710 ...</a>
orca94Feb 8, 2008
Congratulations you just encouraged a blatant racist. Not surprised seeing as how you're a Paul fan.
wiredclimberMar 24, 2008
He has a good point here. The upper 10% of the Haitian population consume 47% of it's goods.