Haiti Now

One of the poorest and least developed countries in the world, Haiti in recent years has struggled with problems ranging from near-constant political upheaval, health crises, severe environmental degradation and an annual barrage of hurricanes.

On Jan. 12, 2010, a massive earthquake struck Haiti, reducing much of its capital to rubble. It was the worst earthquake in the region in more than 200 years, with an untold number-- estimates range from 50,000 to 200,000-- feared dead. The devastation created serious obstacles to those attempting to deliver promised foreign aid.

Huge swaths of the capital, Port-au-Prince, lay in ruins, and thousands of people were trapped in the rubble of government buildings, foreign aid offices and shantytowns. Schools, hospitals and a prison collapsed.

United States Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told NBC's "Today" program that 3 million people - about a third of Haiti's population - had been affected by the quake, and that "there will be tens of thousands of casualties - we don't have any exact numbers."

Haiti occupies an area roughly the size of Maryland on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Nearly all of the 8.7 million residents are of African descent and speak Creole and French. The capital is Port-au-Prince.

The country is, by a significant margin, the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, with four out of five people living in poverty and more than half in abject poverty. Deforestation and over-farming have left much of Haiti eroded and barren, undermining subsistence farming efforts, driving up food prices and leaving the country even more vulnerable to natural disasters. Its long history of political instability and corruption has added to the turmoil.

During the 18th century the western portion of Hispaniola, called Saint-Domingue, was one of the richest colonies in the French empire, known for its lucrative sugarcane and coffee plantations. (The rest of the island was controlled by Spain.) In 1791 the African slave population revolted, eventually winning independence from Napoleon Bonaparte's France and becoming the second country in the Americas to free itself from colonial rule and the world's first black republic. The country was renamed Haiti.

resource