Bill Clinton Apologizes to Haiti... Too Little, Too Late

It's good that Bill Clinton is begining to see the error of his ways (4.00 / 3)

A year or so ago I think it was, I heard him say with regard to NAFTA, WTO and other trade policies implemented or entered into by his administration that they all made a huge mistake by turning food into a commodity, because it did just what you described as far as raising the price of food to the point that people couldn't afford it. That's what I've noticed an awful lot of in the last 10 years with regard to hunger in the world.

Progress says 'move off the land, go to the city and get a job', but maybe you don't make enough in the city to buy food. So now, instead of being poor but atleast fed, you're in the city where you're poor and hungry.

When you were on the land you could grow your food and could use what money you had to purchase other things. But if you're on the land you don't buy food that's imported into your country and you won't be a cog in the manufacturing production environment. That's what cities are for, staffing industry and buying it's products.

The more people live in cities, the more consumers there are, and the more workers there are to make the products that consumers will buy.

I sincerely hope that their plan is not to increase imports of Haitian goods to the U.S. so that they can create more jobs in sweatshops, but I fear that might be the case.

This common policy model supports my premise completely. The more people working in manufacturing, be they sweat shops or nice manufacturing environments, the more money the people engaged in international trade can make, and the more cheap goods the people in the developed world can buy.

Helping the Haitians become self sufficient and independant would be counter productive to that model.

Normal people scare me.... But not as much as I scare them.

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by: JoanneRigutto @ Thu Mar 25, 2010 at 12:21:53 PM UTC

raising the price of food (4.00 / 1)

Is that true? I ask because I don't know anything about it.

My lowest-level understanding was that, whether the price of food goes up or goes down, people can't afford it because they are impoverished by the trade policies.

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by: count @ Thu Mar 25, 2010 at 19:06:37 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

I didn't say that the price of food was higher (4.00 / 1)

I said that people in third world countries, where most of the hunger is, can't afford to buy the food if they move off the land (where they could have grown their own food) and into cities where they don't make enough money to buy food that they no longer grow themselves.

I watched a TV show, a couple of year ago, on hunger in one of the African nations. It showed a market with fresh fruits and vegetables all around, like the farmers markets we have in the USA, or any of the other fresh markets in cities around the world. There were people starving in the city because they had either been pushed off their land or had been conviced to move off of it and into the cities for jobs which either turned out to not pay enough to support them or just weren't there at all.

The reason that's often given for encouraging people in these countries to move off the land and into the cities is that they are seen by the developed nations as poor. And they are poor (in money). But at least if they're on the land they can subsistence farm, which means growing your own food.

Normal people scare me.... But not as much as I scare them.

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by: JoanneRigutto @ Thu Mar 25, 2010 at 23:19:06 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Perhaps you didn't intend it (4.00 / 1)

but

it did just what you described as far as raising the price of food to the point that people couldn't afford it.

We agree that people are too poor to afford the food, so whether the price increases or decreases doesn't matter in that respect. Maybe it does matter, though, because proponents of current American trade policies argue that prices decrease. If food prices actually increase, I would like to know about it.

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by: count @ Thu Mar 25, 2010 at 23:51:54 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Yep you're right (4.00 / 2)

on the quote.

I didn't state it very well, but what I intended was that if a person isn't producing their own food by growing it directly, then the price of the food in effect does go up.

I'll use myself as a case in point. I can pretty much grow all the food I need out here. I still buy from the store, but that's a convenience thing and I have enough money right now to buy it at the store. But last year, when I was very short on money, I found that it is indeed much less expensive (in cash money) to produce my own than it is to buy, especially if you're producing processed foods like tortillas, bread, fermeted foods like wines, specialty foods like the sweet vinegars I like to use in cooking and sauce/dressing making, etc. Even growing vegetables, meat animals, etc. is less expensive (in cash money) than buying the meat and the vegetables at the store or farmers market.

If I was forced off the land or convinced to leave and go to the city, all of those things that I had been growing or making myself, essentially 'purchasing' with my labor now cost 'money' which I have to 'purchase' with my labor. And the money doesn't go as far to getting my food now that I'm in the city as my labor did in producing food when I was on the land.

So in a way, unless the person moving into the city has a very well paying job, the food they're purchasing is more expensive than it was when they were producing it for themselves on the land.

Normal people scare me.... But not as much as I scare them.

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by: JoanneRigutto @ Fri Mar 26, 2010 at 00:45:10 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

profound point. (4.00 / 1)

How better to empower people than by enabling them to grow their own food?

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by: count @ Fri Mar 26, 2010 at 00:51:48 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

That's the whole point (4.00 / 2)

and the reason why our and the other developed nations aid programs are such failures.

They don't exist to empower people or to make them independant. Oh, everyone tries to spin it like 'look, all we want to do is help'. But what they're actually doing is making people more dependant on business, more dependant on government, aid agencies, and everyone but themselves.

I was watching a 1/2 hour show on Joel Salatin in which he talked about a presentation he made at a military base. He said that after the presentation an officer came up to him and told him that his unit was getting ready to deploy to Afghanistan to work on helping the farmers there to 'develop' their agriculture sector. The officer said that if we were actually interested in helping those people we wouldn't be shipping equipment over there that has to run on fuels they don't have and can't afford, to plant and tend seed that they have to buy from the biotech companies, and that have to be maintained with more water that's available there and with chemical fertilizers that they don't have the money to buy to grow for an export market.

If I remember the show correctly, Joel said that if we were really interested in helping those people, we'd help them to grow the things that do well over there and that the farmers already know about. In other words, we'd go over there and spend a year working with them and listening to them so that we could help them do what they want to do.

Joel Salatin on Meet The Farmer TV

From what I see, what we in the developed world do is tell people what we think they should be doing in order to further everyone else's agendas and that benefit everyone but the people in the countries that we are supposed to be 'helping'.

Help like that can kill or cripple a person.

Makes me laugh when I think of Ronald Regan's famous 9 scariest words "I'm from the government and I'm here to help", that's the kind of thing he was talking about. Government thinking it's helping while the whole time someone else is behind the scenes, pulling the strings on the puppet, to their own benefit, what ever that might be.

Normal people scare me.... But not as much as I scare them.

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by: JoanneRigutto @ Fri Mar 26, 2010 at 02:35:34 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

well his wife has her hands full (4.00 / 2)

dealing with "Bibi" and the mess in Israel.

But this is huge. Not only an apology from a former Pres but seeing the "big" picture.

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by: LeeN @ Thu Mar 25, 2010 at 12:35:05 PM UTC

I credit Obama (4.00 / 1)

Nobody knows what will be the results of the efforts of this administration in Israel and Palestine, but I give Obama huge buckets of credit for not waiting until the last six months of his second term to try.

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by: count @ Thu Mar 25, 2010 at 19:39:54 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Talk is cheap (4.00 / 1)

The WaPo article is notably silent about any Clinton-proposed solutions.

The best-seller comes from Riceland Foods in Stuttgart, Arkansas, which sold six pounds for $3.80 last month, according to Haiti's National Food Security Coordination Unit. The same amount of Haitian rice cost $5.12.

If Clinton continues to oppose tariffs (I don't know if he does), how about subsidizing domestic rice? And shouldn't other domestic crops be subsidized?

Rice, a grain with limited nutrition once reserved for special occasions in the Haitian diet, is now a staple.

Rice is now a staple because people are too poor to afford anything else but the subsidized U.S. food, which is the least nutritious food. It's like the "potato famine" in Ireland. When the price of potatoes increased because of scarce supply, people people were forced to eat more potatoes because they were too poor to afford anything else.

Talk is cheap:

The U.S. Agency for International Development has a five-year program to improve farms and restore watersheds in five Haitian regions. But the $25 million a year pales next to the $91.4 million in U.S.-grown food aid delivered just in the past 10 weeks.

Finally, the crown jewel of American industrial ag policy:

"Haiti doesn't have the land nor the climate ... to produce enough rice," said Bill Reed, Riceland's vice president of communications. "The productivity of U.S. farmers helps feed countries which cannot feed themselves."

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by: count @ Thu Mar 25, 2010 at 19:01:58 PM UTC

heretical thought (4.00 / 1)

Anybody [insert Obama] who expresses support for Haitian agriculture would try to end subsidies to American rice growers. Does anyone see the slightest chance of that happening?

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by: count @ Thu Mar 25, 2010 at 19:10:51 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Reality bites back (4.00 / 1)

Jill's hopes are dashed on the shoals of reality.

Improved US terms for Haiti textile imports sought

22 Mar 2010
Source: Reuters

PORT-AU-PRINCE, March 22 (Reuters) - Former U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush will seek improved U.S. trade preferences for textile and apparel imports from Haiti to assist its recovery from the catastrophic January earthquake, Clinton said on Monday.

Clinton, named by the United Nations as coordinator of relief efforts for the quake-stricken Caribbean state, made the promise during a visit with Bush to Haiti to check on its long-term rebuilding needs following the Jan. 12 quake.

Haiti's Top Imports & Exports

Leading Haitian Exports are Cotton Apparel and Household Products

Haiti's GDP per capita ranked 203rd among the 229 nations that the CIA World Factbook rates.

Haitian exports include apparel, oils, cocoa, mangoes, coffee and some manufactured goods. Based on 2008 statistics, top customers for these exports are the United States (70.7%), Dominican Republic (8.9%) and Canada (3.1%).

My historical memory tells me that the exported apparel comes from American-owned sweatshops. For other manufactured goods, isn't that mostly MLB baseballs?

I didn't know there were 229 nations, I thought the number was more like 192. Some of those "nations" must be little more than large villages.

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by: count @ Thu Mar 25, 2010 at 19:31:38 PM UTC