In July, 57 million gourdes were distributed out of the 400 million gourdes allocated for the targeted petroleum subsidy program, Commerce and Industry Minister James Monazard told Le Nouvelliste in an interview following a meeting at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) on September 10, 2024, focused on Haiti’s economic development through private sector investment. The company Bandari, which had received 400 million gourdes to distribute fuel cards, did not receive the necessary information from the unions. The program is designed to provide 15,200 gourdes to each beneficiary, with a total of 25,000 beneficiaries expected. To date, 322 million gourdes remain available for the continuation of the program, Monazard explained. The transport unions are responsible for collecting the required information, the minister emphasized. However, some unions have reported that insecurity across the country has made it difficult to gather this information, Monazard added.

Insecurity is one of the obstacles, though not the only one, to the targeted petroleum subsidy program, said Jacques Anderson Desroches, head of the Alternative Syndicate for Modern Transportation (ASTM), in an interview with the newspaper. He pointed to security issues on national roads 1 and 2, lack of coordination within key public services responsible for gathering the information needed to issue the fuel cards, and the heightened political climate earlier in the year as additional factors contributing to the program’s slow disbursement. Desroches stressed the importance of moving forward with this initiative, as its goal is to reduce transportation costs for the public. With the start of the school year approaching, he noted, now is the ideal time to initiate a national conversation on this issue.