Thank you for appearing here today, Dr. Shamsie and Dr. Thompson.
I'd like to make a comment first about your comments, Dr. Thompson, because both of these issues are certainly interrelated. You made comments on the need to reform the judiciary and the police force; in other words, to bring security to the country at a point in time where we have one of what I would call the poster symbols of Haitian civil unrest, the Cité Soleil, an area that's not under control by the government at all. When you add that to the other complexities, the security problem and the civil rights problem, I think it had been mentioned before that past regimes have in fact taken away money and funds from the manufacturing sector, which didn't go to the government for good governance and for continuing society. There was quite a bit of interreaction that was detrimental to even the future of the manufacturing sector.
We're talking about the agricultural sector too. I agree with Ms. Lalonde that an important consideration is the environmental aspect. It's very difficult to begin agricultural improvement and reform without addressing the problems of serious erosion.
My question will be in and around that. I certainly recognize that we need to increase food production in the country for all of society.
In the manufacturing sector, you identify 60,000 workers who are really producing $2 to $4 per day in today's money, and you've identified a poverty level of less than $1 a day. I would think it would be a dramatic increase and it would bode well to try to rework it to encourage more in the manufacturing sector rather than to abandon it. Is it your feeling that you would really want to abandon that type of economic input? At one point in time, 25% of the country's economy could be returned. Why would we not want to concentrate on bringing that back and renew it--and reform the judiciary and the other parts of society that obviously made more profit on that than did the citizens of the country?