A good first question is, which “we”? But we’ll leave that aside for now.

Annie Lowrey of Foreign Policy suggests that we should. Normally I’d be skeptical of this kind of claim, as many countries in the developing world have tragic histories that contributed to vast public debts. Yet Tunku Varadarajan makes a convincing case that Haiti is different: Haiti’s debt is a direct consequence of French policies dating back to the early 1800s.

So rather than forgive Haiti’s debt, Varadarajan suggests that France should pay it off.

Haiti’s chronic impoverishment began at its birth in 1804, when, having overthrown its French rulers in a bloody, 12-year slave revolt, the new-born nation was subjected to crippling blockades and embargoes. This economic strangulation continued until 1825, when France offered to lift embargoes and recognize the Haitian Republic if the latter would pay restitution to France—for loss of property in Haiti, including slaves—of 150 million gold francs. The sum, about five times Haiti’s export revenue for 1825, was brutal, but Haiti had no choice: pay up or perish over many more years of economic embargo, not to mention face French threats of invasion and reconquest. To pay, Haiti borrowed money at usurious rates from France, and did not finish paying off its debt until 1947, by which time its fate as the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country had been well and truly sealed.
France must now return every last cent of this money to Haiti. In 2004, at the time of the 200th anniversary of Haiti’s independence, the Haitian government put together a legal brief in support of a formal demand for “restitution” from France. The sum sought was nearly $22 billion, a number arrived at by calculations that included a notionally equitable annual interest rate.

If anything, $22 billion sounds small. Lowrey writes:

This September, Haiti qualified for the cancellation of $1.2 billion of its $1.9 billion in external debt. To ensure the recovery of the nation and the livelihoods of its 9 million citizens, the IDB and any other lenders should fully cancel any remaining debt obligations.

Moreover, as Tyler Cowen notes, it is possible that the earthquake has well and truly doomed Haiti as a viable state.

In what sense does Haiti still have a government? How bad will it have to get before the U.N. or U.S. moves in and simply governs the place? How long will this governance last? What will happen to Haiti as a route for the drug trade, the dominant development in the country’s economy over the last fifteen years? What does the new structure of interest groups look like, say five years from now?
Is there any scenario in which the survivors, twenty years from now, are better off, compared to the quake never having taken place?

The scary thing about this is that Haiti has a population of 9 million. Some kind of rescue mission that would involve allowing large-scale migration seems like the only solution. My guess, however, is that Americans are not in the mood to accept millions of refugees, and the same goes for other countries in the region.

While we rightly worry about Haiti, there are dozens of other similarly vulnerable societies that are an earthquake or other natural disaster away from chaos. How’s that for uplift?