Haiti will need help from the international community for at least 10 years to recover from the devastation of last week’s earthquake. This is the message Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive gave an international conference in the Canadian city of Montreal on Monday.

The objective of the conference was to assess what the country needed in the short term. Half a billion dollars will be needed for emergency supplies of food, drink, shelter and medicine. Half of this amount has been pledged. In March a donor conference will be held in New York.

Oxfam and the World Council of Churches have called for Haiti’s foreign debts of around 900 million dollars to be cancelled.

The earthquake is estimated to have cost 200,000 people their lives. A million people have lost their homes.

Photo: Haitian PM Jean-Max Bellerive - Flickr/United Nations Photo