International businessman Yves Savain says he can look five years down the road in Haiti and see tens of thousands of workers earning $4 or more an hour producing everything from shirts and socks to electronics.
Mr. Savain, who left Haiti as a teenager in 1963, says Haiti's large, willing, low-wage workforce will become a major investment draw if what's left of the Haitian government and the international community come up with an effective long-term recovery plan that doesn't repeat past mistakes.
"I'm very optimistic. The resources are there. The talent is there," said Mr. Savain, president of KeyBridge International, a U.S.-based company that provides moving and logistical support for companies doing business in the Caribbean.
In short, Mr. Savain says, the time has come to produce a plan that finally will replace international "charity" as quickly as possible with income earned from Haitians producing something people want to buy.
"We have to find a way to make it possible for people in Haiti to earn a decent living."
Mr. Savain said he believes up to 70,000 assembly jobs will be created outside Port-au-Prince within five years if companies in China, the U.S. and elsewhere are satisfied the country will soon have stronger infrastructure, including functioning ports, and that government corruption and red tape is being reduced.
"We're talking about setting up in empty spaces," he said. "That's how the Chinese did it. The vast [industrial] zones were created essentially out of open spaces. The Chinese did not put factories in downtown Shanghai."
But Mr. Savain has trouble imagining a major revival of the agriculture sector, and says previous reforestation projects have been failures.
"Its all very well and good to pay small farmers to tend trees and make a little money from other crops," he said. "But at the end of the day, charity has its limits."
Ludovic Comeau Jr., a former senior economist with Haiti's central bank, supports the idea of pursuing light, labour-intensive manufacturing businesses as a fast way to create jobs.
"We must not make Port-au-Prince the promised land," said Mr. Comeau, proposing economic poles or zones inside or near Haiti's other towns and cities to house stores, schools and health-care facilities.
The pitch is a cautious echo of a push in the 1980s by banks and donors to turn Haiti -- where women once stitched baseballs for 10¢ apiece -- into the "Taiwan of the Caribbean."
The idea of making Haiti a cheap-labour assembly zone enjoyed modest success. Plants for electronics, garments and sporting goods sprang up mostly in Port-au-Prince, creating more than 60,000 jobs at the peak.
By last year, however, the number of jobs had shrunk to fewer than 25,000, a decline traced to competition from Asia, political and social instability in Haiti and inadequate services for everything from electricity to roads and ports.