In the 1970s Haiti, like much of Latin America, was rural, made up mostly of small farmers. Its economy actually grew at a respectable 2.5% per year, and its GDP was better than that of most Central American countries. Haiti was poor, but able to feed itself.
And then US policy makers saw the opportunity to further enrich the $100 billion garment industry, while at the same time to dump heavily subsidized US agricultural products. In a cynical move, the US policy makers designed a Plan that would use International Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to help carry out their scheme to deliberately destroy Haiti's farm economy thereby harming the "poorest of the poor," the very people the NGOs are assigned to help.
As it turns out, CARE had become involved in what was a very deliberate undermining of the Haitian peasant economy, the cornerstone of a plan that the World Bank and USAID had designed. This is how it happened. (Travesty in Haiti, Pg. 107)
In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s before the American Plan went into full affect, Haiti was neither significantly better or worse off than most countries in the Caribbean and Latin America....
Per capita GDP was actually higher than most Central American countries...: Child mortality was high, but it was comparable to that of Bolivia, Honduras, and Peru, countries that today have child mortality rates less than half of that of Haiti.... Moreover, from 1967 to 1980 Haiti's real GDP grew at a respectable average of 2.5% per year. (Travesty in Haiti, P 114-5)
Haiti did, of course, have problems. According to conservationists, some of the peasants' farming practices were particularly hard on the land. Haiti was overpopulated, there was wide spread deforestation, erosion and high illiteracy rates. However, this was all within the range of other Caribbean countries.
Its proximity to the US and its cheap labor made it irresistible to US corporations. Conservationists, lobbyists for US agro-business, textile industries and the US congress all had interests in Haiti.
The USAID called Haiti underdeveloped: Haiti's roads, education and health systems were poor. Under the guise of “helping the environment” and “creating jobs for Haitian’s (in addition to promoting US agriculture and securing cheap labor for US textile industry), the US forced Haiti to enact policies that would destroy its farming economy.
The US Congress was under pressure to promote the sale of US agricultural products, especially corn, rice, wheat and cotton, which were all heavily subsidized at a rate of around 38%. Rice subsidies fluctuated during the 1980s and 1990s from 35% to 100%. The European Union EU had similar sales interests; its subsidies were even higher at 48%.
.... there were new opportunities on the horizon. The promotion of overseas sales of U.S. corn, wheat, cotton and rice was high on the US congressional agenda. From 1986 to 2000 government subsidies for these producst was 38% per year (Reid1 2004; Roberts and Jotzo 2002). There was also the EU, including France and Germany, which were also aggressive promoters of their own farm products. The EU subsidized the same grain products mentioned above at even greater rate than the US, 48% (Ibid). (Travesty in Haiti, Pg. 108)
The US had been manipulating Haiti's economy to provide cheap labor for US corporations, especially the textile industry with its $100 billion garment industry, since the 1970s. US corporations saw Haiti as an opportunity because of its poverty and proximity to the US both factors making it an ideal country for sweatshops. In 1971, when Papa Doc, Francois Duvalier, died, his son Baby Doc took power. Baby Doc made a deal with the Nixon administration: In exchange for US support, Baby Doc agreed to keep taxes low, suppress trade unions, keep the minimum wage low and allow US corporations to repatriate 100% of profits. Haiti's army, along with the Duvalier's para military, ensured these new policies were complied with.
There was also the offshore industrial sector, particularly the 100 billion dollar garment industry, something the U.S. government had begun to 'cultivate' in Haiti as far back as 1971 when the exchange for supporting the continuation of the Duvalier dictatorship from father to son the Haitian government agreed to create an environment hospitable to U.S. investors in the assembly sector. Custom taxes were eliminated, a low minimum wage guaranteed, labor unions suppressed, and U.S. companies given the right to repatriate profits. By 1980, there were some 200 mostly US owned assembly plants in the country (McGowan1997). (Travesty in Haiti, Pg. 108)
This was the beginning of a new error of "structural readjustment."
It is at this juncture that the US government, working though USAID and the planners at the world's major international lending institutions-the World Bank, the Inter American Development Bank (IDB), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), all U.S. and secondary EU controlled -- were led by USAID in adopting policies that, with perhaps the best of intentions, would destroy the Haitian economy of small farmers.
Calling it "economic development," the growth prospects of the assembly industry meant that migrants to urban areas were economically useful as factory workers, something that justified eliminating farming as an alternative livelihood strategy. The objective conveniently articulated with those of the US agricultural interests and the conservationist goal of moving peasants away from destructive hillside cultivation of bean and corn crops that caused so much of the erosion mentioned earlier. (Travesty in Haiti, Pg. 108)
The US uses various mechanisms to enact the neoliberal policy of the American Plan (described below) including: monetized aid where the NGO or government is given aid in the form of food with the condition that they sell it on the Haitian market; Privatization of state assets; flooding Haiti with cheap and heavily-subsidized imported rice; forcing the Haitian government to remove protective tariffs and placing conditions on loans and aid that restrict the amount of money and resources that Haiti could invest in agriculture.
USAID Official described it like this, USAID Administrator Peter McPherson testified before the United States Congress, [American Plan] would ultimately "make the prospects for Haiti as the 'Taiwan of the Caribbean' real indeed" (Travesty in Haiti, Pg. 109)
The American Plan
The “American Plan” was designed by the US to destroy Haiti's farm economy, thereby forcing Haitians to compete for sweatshop jobs and opening the Haitian market to heavily subsidized US agricultural products. This policy was predicated on using Haiti's "advantage of poverty” to provide cheap labor for US and International Corporations (mainly in the garment industry). The US would move their factories and sweatshop jobs to Haiti, where they could exploit the cheap labor and take advantage of the lack of regulations and unions and benefit from the minimal taxes and tariffs. The American Plan was imposed on Haiti by US policy makers and implemented by the USAID, IMF and IFI's "restructuring" programs. Supposedly this was to provide jobs for Haitians. This deliberate plan— to destroy Haiti's farm economy to open the Haitian market to US agricultural industries and to provide US corporations with cheap labor— is well documented. The US forced Haiti to reduce or eliminate tariffs. Haiti was not allowed to subsidize its farmers. The US, on the other hand, heavily subsidized its own farmers. These subsidies, along with the low tariffs, allowed US agricultural industries to sell products for much less money.
For example, rice is Haiti's staple food. The US dumped cheap rice in Haiti, and Haiti's small farmers could not compete. So Haiti went from being able to feed itself "but poor" to starving and poor. "By 1995 the subsidies provided by the US to its domestic rice industry had risen to around 40% of its retail value, but in that same year the Haitian government was forced to cut the tariff on foreign rice to just 3%. Previously self-sufficient in rice, Haiti is now flooded with subsidized American rice that trades at around 70% of the price of its indigenous competition.... Domestic production is undercut even more by the vast amounts of additional ‘free’ American rice that are dumped on Haiti every year through the ministry of USAID grantees,..." (Damming The Flood, P.5) (Clinton apologizedin 2010 to Haiti for his trade policy that destroyed Haiti's ability to feed itself. He said that his policy may have been good for the farmers in Arkansas but they hurt Haiti. However he apologized for the part of the plan, the destruction of the Haitian farm economy, only after the destruction was complete and he continues to be the face of the effort to enact the second part of the plan, i.e., sweatshops. Clinotn still advocates for and did not apologize for the sweatshop trade bills).
Once the US accomplished the destruction of Haiti's farm economy, Haitians were forced to flee from the countryside to sweatshop jobs in Port au Prince. Port au Prince became dangerously over crowded. The plan had "worked." At first it did produce sweatshop jobs, but because of the constant political problems (the army terrorizing Haitians) and China's even cheaper labor, the jobs did not last. Haiti's average wages decreased 50% between 1980-1990. The American Plan is dubbed the Death Plan by the Haitians.
A good example of the impact of the policies that came about was the Haitian rice industry. Until the 1980s Haiti was almost entirely self-sufficient in rice consumption, something made possible, in part, by protecting Haitian farmers from the heavily subsidized rice produced in the US and Europe, Twenty percent of the Haitian population was directly involved in the industry. But in the political chaos of 1986 -- the year that the last Duvalier regime was ousted from power -- USAID used the promise of continued political and financial support to negotiate a lowering of tariffs on rice from 35 to 3 percent. US rice -- subsidized at a rate that varied during the 1980s and 1990s from 35% to 100% -- flooded in to the country. By 1996, 2,100 metric tons of US rice arrived in Haiti every week, an annual loss to impoverished Haitian cultivators of about 23 million dollars per year (Webster 2006; US Department of Commerce 2006; Georges 2004). Haitians were not even left the luxury of controlling the importation process. About half of the imported rice came in under a monopoly held by RCH (The Rice Corporation of Haiti), a US corporated subsidiary with lobbyists in Washington DC....
(Travesty in Haiti, Pg. 109)
Note:
And in 2011 food aid continues...
RCH (The Rice Corporation of Haiti) is extremely powerful. “Miami Rice”: The Business of Disaster in Haiti One of Erly's subsidiaries,Chemonics, job is to monitor Haiti's food security in Haiti. Another of Erlys subsidiaries, American Rice, exports rice to Haiti. (more about RCH, American Rice bleow)
October 2011 And still BBC News - US urged to stop Haiti rice subsidies (Oxfam) Same Policy, Different Rhetoric
A leading aid agency has called on the United States to stop subsidising American rice exports to Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, because it says the policy undermines local production of food.
US and International Community (IC) corporations did provide jobs for a while. The working conditions were brutal and the pay was less than $2 a day. It was at this time when sweatshop jobs in Haiti were at their peek that the economy began to decline.
And there were jobs, with names like Disney, Levi's, and Nike, Haiti had one of the largest assembly sectors in the developing world. Estimates of the number of workers at the time run as high as 80,000-100,000 people. Wages averaged less than $2 per day; no viable pension plans, nor healthcare, nor disability, nor unemployment insurance. And it was precisely during this period that the Haitian economy began to move backward, per capital GDP declining 2.5 percent per year between 1980 to 1985; and it fell in half in the years 1986 to 1991, going from US $419 to US $225 (UN Globalis 2006). But yes, it could still be said in 1990 that the plan to transform the economy to a vigorous industrial power might be working, might. (Travesty in Haiti, P 116-117).
A Columbia University anthropologist who conducted intensive interviews in a poor neighborhood of Port-au-Prince has found that 17% of the female factory workers in her survey have been forced to have sex with their bosses, on penalty of termination if they refused.
Dismal as it may seem, proponents of the American Plan could still say that the plan might be working. Wealthy Haitian entrepreneurs and foreign investors could still make the argument that the economy was in a state of transformation, that the poor would enjoy long run benefits, indeed be saved from themselves by reducing erosion and population. The poor were, after all, moving into the cities. (Travesty in Haiti, P 117)
Because of Haiti's dependence on foreign aid, the Haitian government has had to comply with the devastating American Plan. Seventy percent of the Haitian government's operating budget (and 90% of its capital projects budget) comes from foreign aid and loans. This obviously gives the wealthy governments that dispense the aid and loans enormous leverage.
Haiti's army, along with the para military, ensured these new policies were complied with.
Above all, he [Aristide] was obliged to enforce neo-liberal economic measures that were sure to provoke the resentment of the poor, particularly in the countryside. The Austerity programme that in the summer of 1994 Aristide was obliged to accept in exchange for an end to military rule and FRAPH intimidation was designed, in the words of one of the main authors of that program "to redistribute some wealth from the poor to the rich." (Damming The Flood, P 54)
Before the "American Plan" Haitian farmers were able to feed their country and were even able to export some surplus. To justify their actions, the USAID funded reports that Haiti was at risk of massive malnutrition.
1971-1980 Dismal as it may seem, proponents of the American Plan could still say that the plan might be working. (Travesty in Haiti, P 116).
Moreover, from 1967 to 1980 Haiti's real GDP grew at a respectable average of 2.5% per year. But then, in 1980, while income for other countries in the region increased, Haiti's stagnated. From 1985 to the present it moved backward, declining at a rate of 2% per year (IMF 2005). Plummeting health and infrastructural condition echoed economic ruin. (Travesty in Haiti, Pg.115)
1980-1990 But yes, it could still be said in 1990 that the plan to transform the economy to a vigorous industrial power might be working, might. (Travesty in Haiti, P 116-117).
The USAID justified actions by funding reports that Haiti was in danger of a food crisis. While these reports make claims of Haitian farmers not being able to meet their country’s needs, there were actually no statistics to back this danger up.
To justify their actions, USAID funded reports that Haitian farmers could not feed the nation. The reports came from experts like Haitian born Harvard graduate, Tulane Professor, private consultant Augustin Antoine MD, PhD, MPH (1993, 1997) who also happened to be one of the largest owners of private clinics in Haiti, owner of major NGO that depended on charitable donations, and owner of Xaragua Resort, a for-profit enterprise that CARE contracted for lavish banquet dinners and seminars (Travesty in Haiti, P 110)
The truth is there had only been one study conducted regarding food production and the study actually showed farmers could meet the needs of Haitians.
But where the production figures come from is a mystery.... no one that is except for one group of consultants... In 1993 CARE hired a group of researchers from Auburn University. The researchers reported that farmers in the region were producing 800 kilograms of corn per hectare, translating to a calorific quantity considerably in access of nutritional needs of the average family in the area. The report was ignored (SCID1993). (Travesty in Haiti, P 110)
So, twenty years after the supposed rush to save Haiti from underproduction and five years after USAID launched a Food Security Information System to measure production, the reality was that no one know what production was.. . . . (Travesty in Haiti, P 111)
Year after year policy makers renewed the Plan, and life continued to get harder for Haitians.
In 1991 Jean-Bertrand Aristide became Haiti's first democratically elected president. Although the US and IFI approved Aristides’ budget, the USAID found the increase in the minimum wage and the government regulation of the price of basic food unacceptable. They contributed millions of dollars to the business elite’s campaign against the modest increase from 33 cents to 50 cents. The USAID suspended aid. Just to be clear, the US gave Namphy's administration $200 million in direct US aid—the administration that shot 150 people in plain view of the media. Now the USAID suspended aid to Aristide's administration—the administration that slightly increased the minimum wage and tried to keep food affordable.
The Lavalas movement, which propelled Aristide to the presidency, is an extraordinary example of what a large group of mobilized people can accomplish.The very notion of people daring to vote for politicians that represent them - poor people—terrified and disgusted the elite, the US, France, Canada and the IC. The US had to protect their own image—an image of promoting democracy—while covertly promoting destabilization. The US expanded "humanitarian" interventions. This more subtle but no less brutal expanded plan took time.
1990s Then things really started to go wrong.
The elite backed by US removed Aristide only 7 months after he took office. This caused political instability.
Plunged into renewed political instability, the years 1991-1994 were marked by repressive military rule withing Haiti and a US led international embargo from without. Assembly plants in Port-au-Prince closed. In 1994 there were only 4,000 assemply plant workers, down from a high of 100,000 three years before;... (Travesty in Haiti, P118)
Schwartz makes the case that even if the US and the World Bank Officials started off with the best of intentions, at some point realization of the resulting devastation the plan had caused would have forced well-intentioned policy makers to change course. Yet year after year the lives of the Haitian poor continue to get more difficult, so, in truth, the US policy makers and NGOs can't really “hide behind good intentions” while knowingly forcing the Haitian government to enact the same "failed" plan. Schwartz's issue with the "American Plan" is its failure. (I, however, have added issues with the Plan’s inherent disrespect of Haitian sovereignty and racism).
Moreover, the tip off that the prevailing US political interests had little if any sympathy for impoverished Haitians was that it was decided that Haiti's farmers needed not to produce food or adopt better techniques but rather, as seen, to import food from the US and Western Europe. To help get the process started they began selling it at below market prices and, indeed, giving it away. (Travesty in Haiti, P112)
The decision to use NGOs as vehicles to enact these destructive-for-Haiti policies makes it difficult for critics to confront because of the of the ironic aspect that the NGO’s, by their definition, convey a "saintly" humanitarian aid worker and altruistic organization status.
Food assistance to Haiti during the 1980s tripled reaching a yearly average of over US $50 million in gratuitous US surplus beans, corn, rice, and cracked wheat. Put in simpler terms, that was enough food to meet the calorific needs of 15% of the Haitian population. As seen in Jean Makout, this food wasn't only given away free as a type of welfare, but granting the politicians foreign aid in the form of grain brought the Haitian government into the act. Their was one stipulation however. They could only have food. And they could sell the food for money. But they had to sell it on the Haitian domestic market.
Multinational charitable corporations working in the country also received grants in the form of food. In the 1990s, for example, $5 million of CARE Haiti's $15 million annual budget cam from USAID in the form of grain and beans that it was obligated to monetize on the Haitian market. And the US was not the only supplier of food destined to be monetized. The German and French governments, also interested in the assembly sector, joined the fray and gave food to 'NGOs' from their respective countries with stipulation that the food be monetized in Haiti. The tiny agricultural country was so thoroughly inundated with surplus food from the US and Western Europe that Port-au-Prince were soon re-exporting cracked wheat to Miami retailers. (Travesty in Haiti, P111-2)
Bill Clinton's policies helped push Haiti from poor but able to feed itself to poor and starving. See How NGOs are Profiting Off a Grave Situation: Haiti and the Aid Racket or COHA Research Associate Leah Chavla,Bill Clinton’s Heavy Hand on Haiti’s Vulnerable Agricultural Economy: The American Rice Scandal. Clinton apologized for destroying Haiti's farm economy but he continues to promote the same neoliberal failed policies. Well they failed majority of Haitians but the policies did ensure that Haiti's unjust and inhumane wealth distribution remain in tact. His policies served US corporations, investors and Haiti's elite quite well. Clinton has no business running the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission.
We Made a Devils Bargain: Fmr. President Clinton Apologizes for Haiti Trade Policies
http://www.youtube.com/...
To induce Aristide to accept these things and to placate the army that had overthrown him the Bush and Clinton administrations had an equally simple strategy - they colluded in the killing of his supporters. All through the interminable negotiations between Aristide and Cedras, explains Allan Nairn, "the US had a very clear, systematic policy of supporting the forces of terror in Haiti while at the same time, back in Washington, twisting Aristide's arm. He had a gun to his head, figuratively, just as his supporters had guns to their heads literally. It was outright political extortion." (Damming The Flood Pg. 48)
Jeremy Scahill on Democracy Now! responds to Clinton being appointed as UN envoy to Haiti. Must See!
It is undeniable true that the 1994 Paris Plan forced Aristide to make some very painful decisions. In exchange for some $770 million in promised aid and loans, the list of concessions appears calamitous: tariffs were to be "drastically" reduced, wages frozen, around half the civil service to be laid off, and all nine of Haiti's remaining public utilities (telephone, electricity, port, airport, cement, flour, a cooking oil plant and two state banks) were to be sold off. (Damming The Flood, P54)
Aristide resisted privatization and threatened his cabinet members with jail if they tried to privatize. The US suspended all aid to Haiti and made sure that the IFIs suspend all promised aid and loans to Haiti. This had devastating consequences. Because Aristide was committed to helping the majority of Haitians, that were living in dire poverty, he refused to privatize any state enterprises. Ever since the mid 1980s, the US has been intensifying its demands on Haiti for structural adjustment. Aristide was determined not to repeat what happened when the state owned sugar mill was privatized in 1987 under Namphry. A single elite family (the Mevs) bought it, then quickly closed it, and laid off its employees. It had been a profitable mill and provided jobs and locally produced sugar.
Whatever the case there were plenty of other problems down on the Haitian farm. While the rice industry was crumbling, the US government also removed Haiti's sugar quota. By 1988 sugar exports had dropped to zero and by 1995 Haiti, once counted among the greatest sugar producers in the world, was importing 25,000 tons of US sugar per year. Increasingly stringent and protectionist US sanitary and phytosanitary regulations-restrictions on pests and bacteria-meant that most other agricultural exports from Haiti were also eliminated. Condemning the produce as inferior quality or contaminated, USDA inspectors forbade or severely limited the importation of Haitian cacao, sisal, essential oils, and cotton exports, all of which subsequently shrank or disappeared entirely as Haitian export. Coffee, which still comprised 70 to 80 percent of Haiti's agricultural exports in 1990, fell from 18,000 metric tons in 1987 to 6,000 tons in 1995 (Alphonse 1996). By the 1990s the domestic agriculture sector was shattered. Accounting for 52 percent of Haitian exports in 1980, agriculture comprised 24 percent in 1987; 21% in 1990; and by the mid 1990's the only produce coming out of Haiti were a few mangoes and a trickle of coffee, something for which the USAID, in bid to shore up its image, was claiming as a consequence of its own efforts (Lenaghan 2005; USAID 2006). But for the vast majority of the 70% of the Haitian population that farmed, already already among the poorest people in Western hemisphere, life got much worse.
....
There was something else going on as well. The economic destruction and deliberate drive to keep the Haitian masses poor by focusing on holding wages low and avoiding investments in alternative domestic production or services was having another effect, it ws driving the educated and entrepreneurial classes out of the country. (Travesty in Haiti, Pg. 112-3)
To any one looking back over the decades it was already clear at that point in time, 1990, that things were going terribly awry. In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s before the American Plan went into full affect, Haiti was neither significantly better or worse off than most countries in the Caribbean and Latin America. (Travesty in Haiti, Pg. 114)
The US, EU and IFI's funded the Plan, mostly with loans but it was
The designers of the plans--U.S. and E.U. government officials and employes of the IDB, the IMF, and the World Bank-- provided the development funds, much of which the Haitian government had to pay back, with interest. But as was seen in Jean Makout, it was multinational corporate charities dedicated to helping the poorest of the poor that carried out the plan, delivered the aid and executed the so-called 'development projects' that were supposed to push the Haitian population and economy in the desired direction. For many of the high level directors this was defensible: NGOs had budgets and operating costs and, the most important means of meeting costs in Haiti was far and away food aid. Donor governments gave money in the form of food; the charities sold the food on the Haitian market and then used the money to meet corporate overhead costs and to carry out programs that were supposed to alleviate suffering. But in the end, in the institutional struggle to survive and in an environment in which accountability did not exist, the world's largest multinational charities--CARE, CRS, World Vision, and ADRA--executed the political will of institutions, governments, and lobbyists that had identified Haiti's comparative advantage as low wages, i.e. poverty, and in doing so these charitable organizations dedicated to helping the poorest of the poor wound up working to make the people of Haiti even poorer....
For longer than half a century Haiti had arguably been the site of more religious missions and charities per square foot than any place on earth. Yet with the increase of aid the situation had gotten worse. What is more, what I discovered and am recounting here about food aid is not a secret. Nor is it unique to Haiti. As it turns out the US food aid was born in 1954 with the passage of PL 480 the specific goal was not principally to help people but to promote overseas sales of US agricultural produce. The consequences have been devastating throughout the world. (see Appendix D for extensive review and sources).
Why did nobody tell me this?
Could it be that they didn't know?
Could it be that employees at multinational charities such as CARE are unaware of what was going on with food aid?
The fact is many of the directors must have been keenly aware of what was going on. Most, as I recounted, admitted as much over cocktials or in private conversations. Of the dozens, if not hundreds of aid workers I spoke to during the time, all agreed that food aid damaged the market.
Yet when needed, the defense is so easy. It might be bad for the market, but the intentions must be good, why else would the US be flooding the Haitian market? Most of us buy into it, I did. Moreover, for those profiting from the food aid, if bad, must at least be well intended. To think, or perhaps I should say, to admit that the food is part of a plan to encourage poverty would be to recognize yourself as part of the plan. It would require guts and a good conscience to forsake the confortable salaries, hotels, fine meals, insurance and pension plans that came with being a professional in the service of the international institutions like CARE, CRS, ADRA, and World Vision. (Travesty in Haiti, P121-122)
Food Aid continues. "So, spurred on by humanitarian compassion, hopeful investment capitalists and the agricultural lobbies that favored subsidies and government agricultural purchases, the plan still did not change. Still the food kept coming..."
And still the same failed policies continue with Bill Clinton cheering them on and life for the Haitian poor gets worse....
US has changed rhetoric, not policy. Hillary went to Haiti promote HOPE II. However as we learn in report from 1993 USAID are well aware of disastrous effects of Plan. Haiti After the Coup - Institute for Global Labour & Human Rights.
and still no changes!!
U.S. Backed Pop Star Michel Martelly Wins Haitian Presidency
Clinton described the benefits of a planned industrial park in Haiti and announced its first committed tenant – a global textile firm. She estimated it would bring “20,000 permanent export-oriented jobs.” During his trip to Washington the Miami Herald reports Martelly also met with officials at the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Inter American Development Bank, and he attended a social gathering at the US Chamber of Commerce.
Sacrificing Food Sovereignty for Food Aid
There is also some evidence that the agriculture support that has been provided, through the USAID WINNER program, for instance, has been problematic. For starters, the WINNER program is being implemented by Chemonics, one of the largest USAID contractors, and one we have written about extensively before. Also, as Haiti Grassroots Watch has pointed out in their “Seeding Reconstruction?” series, a significant portion of agricultural aid has been in the form of seed distributions, which have turned out to not be necessary and in some cases were even harmful:
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For the full Haiti Grassroots Watch report, click here. Also see the report on Monsanto’s role in the seed distribution, available here. It should also be noted that there were alternative proposals for supporting local agriculture after the earthquake.
“Miami Rice”: The Business of Disaster in Haiti
Two subsidiaries of the same corporation, ERLY Industries, are profiting from different U.S. contracts whose interests conflict. The same company that is being paid to monitor "food insecurity" is benefiting from policies that increase food insecurity. American Rice makes money exporting rice to Haiti, undercutting farmers' livelihoods, national production, and food security. Chemonics has received contracts to conduct hunger assessments and, now, to distribute Monsanto seeds.
Learn more about Erly Industries's part in destroying Haiti's farm economy Haiti Research File Bill Clinton’s Heavy Hand on Haiti’s Vulnerable Agricultural Economy: The American Rice Scandal : The U.S. company established its Rice Corporation of Haiti (RCH) to take advantage of the economic opportunity presented by the coup, by signing a nine-year contract in December 1992 with the illegal Haitian government under interim Prime Minister Marc Bazin.
The rhetoric has changed but US policies remain the same. Will Martelly Really “Change the System” ?: Haiti Liberte
Most loans are tied to requirements by financial institutions as part of an economic policy of domination. “International financial institutions are more interested in lending money than the country requesting a loan,” Chalmers explained. “The logic is to use loans to put pressure on political leaders to force them to take actions that enhance the penetration of multinationals, the country’s dependence and control of its strategic resources, and privatization of public enterprises. One must not get it in their head that the loans are given to create development to combat poverty. They are given according imperialism’s and its transnational corporations’ agenda for global domination.”
Commentators running the gamut of the political spectrum have criticised these policies. In his essay ‘Disaster Capitalism to the Rescue: The International Community and Haiti After the Earthquake, Dupuy wrote, "even at the height of it’s operation in the mid 1980s, the assembly-line industry never employed more than 7 percent of Haitian workers and did not contribute significantly to reducing the underestimated 38 percent unemployment rate of the active urban labour force."
With unnerving foresight, Dupuy summed up Clinton and Martelly’s Wednesday meeting nearly a year ago when he said, "The dual strategy of urban sweatshops and laissez-faire agriculture, which subordinated Haiti in the 1980s, is now it’s reconstruction plan."
This is the Justice, Not Charity! Haiti book diary. RunawayRose and I are writing these book diaries because we became shocked by the truth of Haiti’s history and what really is needed to help the Haitians after the earthquake.
RunawayRose and I alternate chapters. If anyone is interested in joining our group, writing Haiti Book Diary more diary writers would be great.
This is the Justice, Not Charity! Haiti book diary. RunawayRose and I are writing these book diaries because we became shocked by the truth of Haiti’s history and what really is needed to help the Haitians after the earthquake.
Here is a review by an expert, Marguerite Laurent.com | Travesty in Haiti Ezili Danto.
Haiti diary book day posted on Sundays (biweekly) : Current book is Travesty in Haiti, by Timothy Schwartz, Chapter 7: You can see our book list is here. Have a recommendation?
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