Haiti seeks years of aid; donors to meet in March

MONTREAL (Reuters) - Haiti needs at least five to 10 years of reconstruction help after its people were "bloodied, martyred and ruined" by the devastating earthquake this month, Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said on Monday.

"The people of Haiti will need more and more and more in order to complete the reconstruction," Bellerive told an international aid conference, intended to survey immediate needs and then begin plotting Haiti''s long-term recovery.

"I bring you the thanks of a people who have been bloodied, martyred and ruined but who are standing," he told U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and representatives of 10 other countries.

The meeting was not intended to bring specific aid promises but instead to assess immediate needs and also to look beyond to a strategy to rebuild from the January 12 quake that killed up to 200,000 people and smashed the capital Port-au-Prince.

The group decided to hold an urgent international pledging conference at the U.N. headquarters in New York in March.

"We''re trying to do this in the correct order ... Sometimes people have pledging conferences and pledge money and they don''t have any idea what they are going to do with it," Clinton told a closing news conference.

"We actually think it''s a novel idea to do the needs assessment first, and then the planning, and then the pledging."

A key theme that emerged was the importance of ensuring development and population was not so concentrated in Port-au-Prince, which sits right on a fault line.

"In 30 seconds, Haiti lost 60 percent of its GDP (gross domestic product)," Bellerive said, referring to excessive centralization in the capital. "So we must decentralize."

He noted that people have been steadily leaving the devastated city since the quake struck.

Clinton said agriculture, which can act as a magnet back to the countryside, had not gotten the attention it deserved.

"I was quite heartened to hear the prime minister say that ... we should look at how we decentralize economic opportunity and work with the Haitian government and people to support resettlement," she told reporters.