"You don't want to look like you're profiteering off situations like these," Derrell Griffith, project director at Sabre International, said. "But there is a need and the people need it quick."

The conference was organized by the Association of the Stability Operations Industry, also known as IPOA, representing some 60 companies working in logistics and security, many of them active in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Co-organizer and IPOA president Doug Brooks said private contractors can offer aid groups and government agencies myriad services -- from translation to police training to running supply lines -- as Haiti gets back on its feet.

While critics say private contractors have run loose in far-flung crisis zones, supporters point to their larger role guarding officials and convoys, and building infrastructure.

"They go into really austere, sometimes dangerous environments, and provide services that can be quite normal, like power generation and engineering," said Brooks.

"It's not so different between essentially a war zone or an area of disaster."

Donations have flooded into non-governmental organizations offering relief following the January 12 earthquake, and as reconstruction gears up private companies are positioning themselves to get involved too.

Regine Barjon, of the Haitian-American Chamber of Commerce, pushed for streamlined loan applications for Haitian businesses trying to make a fresh start.

"Haiti is very open for business," she said, flicking through a Power Point presentation with a banner along the bottom that read, "Jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs." Another slide featured a picture of cruise ships approaching palm-fringed Haitian beaches.

One strategy for creating jobs is to bolster Haiti's agricultural sector, Barjon said, which would also make the country less reliant on food imports. Haiti used to produce almost all its own food, and now imports most of it.

"We might have to import fuel," Barjon said. "But we want to make our own chickens."

Just one of six panels at the Miami conference dealt with security issues; others focused on disease prevention, shelter and jumpstarting commerce after the devastating quake.

The two-day conference was meant to match aid groups with companies they might call on. It comes two weeks before a large Haiti summit of international donors at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

Griffith said his company's experience in Iraq meant it was poised to deliver aid to Haiti more quickly than most.

Initially focused on security, the company also installs prefabricated living units used by US troops in Iraq, and by internally displaced Iraqi families.

Some relief experts took issue with this fast-track approach.

"We need to focus on process before product," said Ian Ridley of World Vision International.

Reconstruction is successful long-term when local communities participate, he argued, and that takes time.

Security companies such as Blackwater, now renamed Xe, which has come under fire for its work in Iraq, were not present at the event.

Other strategies for jumpstarting jobs in Haiti focused on sheltering the hundreds of thousands of Haitians left homeless by the quake.

Priscilla Phelps, a finance specialist at development consultancy TCG International, said housing construction could become a huge motor for job creation in Haiti if managed properly.

She favored efforts to help Haitians stay close to their crumbled homes, in temporary structures, while the rebuilding occurs. This way communities remain intact.

"There's a lot of people offering to do reconstruction in Haiti," Phelps said. "But it won't be the best outcome if those offered solutions override local decision-making."

In afternoon roundtables, companies with no security background at all also met with non-governmental groups, pitching everything from water-purifying wands to portable medical equipment.

Ed Volkwein, president of Hydro-Photon, Inc., swirled a hand-held device in his water glass. The wand, which purifies water using ultraviolet light, is already known to backpackers.

"We've been successful in the outdoors, now we're moving into travel... and trying to figure out how to get into humanitarian," Volkwein said.

"When you don't know what you're going to get into, and these emergencies are a classic example of that, this is the product you should have."

earlier related report
Clinton, Preval urge quick Haiti elections
Washington (AFP) March 9, 2010 - US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joined Haitian President Rene Preval Tuesday in calling for new elections in quake-hit Haiti as soon as possible.

Legislative polls originally set for February and March were postponed after the January 12 earthquake that demolished the capital Port-au-Prince, killing more than 220,000 people and leaving one million Haitians homeless.

Clinton talked with Preval on the eve of his meeting with President Barack Obama and said he had "made the very important point that we must work toward elections to ensure the stability and legitimacy of the Haitian government.

"I assured President Preval that the United States would work with the international community to hold elections as soon as appropriate," the chief US diplomat said.

Alongside her, Preval said it was imperative that both legislative polls to elect a new parliament and presidential elections to choose his successor were held by the end of the year when he must step down.

"To have a provisional government in a year would be a catastrophe. This government would not have legitimacy, there would be no parliament, that would really be returning to 2004," Preval told reporters.

The Caribbean nation -- the poorest country in the western hemisphere -- has had a long history of dictatorship followed by years of political turmoil and civil unrest.

In 2004, 1,000 US Marines followed by thousands of UN peacekeepers brought order to Haiti after a bloody rebellion against president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's rule. A provisional government was then installed.

The elections call comes as quake survivors say poor governance, corruption and shoddy construction magnified a disaster that was hundreds of times less powerful than the quake in Chile but far more deadly and devastating.

Survivors also lament that Haitian government officials were virtually absent in the quake's aftermath.

Preval, 67, who also served as president from 1996 to 2001, is constitutionally barred from seeking a third mandate. His current term expires in February 2011 and presidential elections are expected in December.

The Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) recalled reports saying that 15 political parties would have been excluded from the February and March elections.

The CEPR, quoting Haitian lawyers, added that the exclusions were made by the Provisional Electoral Council, whose members were appointed by Preval, according to an email sent to AFP.

The US stepped up Tuesday its withdrawal of some 11,000 troops deployed to help the relief effort and provide security after the disaster, recalling a navy hospital ship.

Preval underscored that stability was the key to attracting badly-needed foreign investment and suggested Haiti needed to be rebuilt differently with greater economic opportunities for people outside the capital.

"Today, we are faced with a historical situation that will allow us to rebuild, refound this country," he said.

"In the past, everything had been concentrated and focused on the capital, where the political and economic elites of the country live, and the rest of the country was neglected.

"That's why so many people came to Haiti, into Port-au-Prince, in the illusory quest for work that did not exist, and that is why there is so much shoddy construction, which does not comply with standards, and that is why there were so many casualties."

Clinton said the United States has provided nearly 700 million dollars in assistance so far to Haiti, adding "progress has been made but not nearly enough" toward easing the suffering of the Haitian people.

She said US officials are "listening very carefully to President Preval and the voices of the Haitian people as to what our next steps should be," ahead of an international donors conference at the end of the month.

Clinton promised US help in ensuring that homeless Haitians get the shelter they so desperately need before the rainy season begins in earnest in a few months.

She highlighted the need to provide farmers with fertilizer and seeds and suggested that other countries join the US in extending favorable tariffs to Haiti to boost struggling Haitian factories.

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