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Prior to this week's earthquake, when I thought of Haiti, I thought of the 2008 Haitian food riots. My grip on Haitian history is poor, but an anthropologist said something interesting to me about Haiti this summer. She said that because they were the site of a successful slave revolt, they have been punished ever since. That, she said, is why they are the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Sure enough, as the reports about the quake have delved into some of Haiti's history, they have mentioned the successful slave revolt that established the nation of Haiti, as well as United States' unhappiness with the revolt because (at the time) we didn't want the Haitians to give our own slaves any good ideas. But clearly much has happened in the 200 years between now and then that made the human toll of the quake so much worse.
Right now our immediate goal should of course be aid to the people of Haiti. First, emergency medical help as well as whatever is required to dig people out of the ruins and clothe, feed, and house everyone who is now without basic needs. Food First calls on us to support grassroots organizations as we do this, recommending that we donate to Doctors Without Borders and Partners in Health for the short term, Haiti Action and Grassroots International for help to Haiti once the emergency medical needs die down, and Agricultural Missions for the long term. A friend of mine is a "doctor without borders" - so involved in the organization, in fact, that she and her husband personally received the 4am phone call alerting them that Doctors Without Borders won the Nobel Peace Prize... followed by a congratulatory call by President Clinton. She's told me quite a bit about the work she's done overseas in numerous warzones and disaster situations and I'm a strong supporter of her work and her entire organization. I'd also like to add the International Rescue Committee as a wonderful organization I've had some contact with here in San Diego that also does work in Haiti. The IRC's work is vast and multi-faceted, but among the things that they do in San Diego, they are a leader in food system reform, food justice, and urban agriculture. If I had any money, I'd be delighted to give it to them, knowing that they would put it to fantastic use to help the victims of the quake.
After the immediate earthquake aftermath dies down, we should then give thought as to how humans played a role in increasing the tragedy of this quake. What has the world done, economically and politically, that contributed to the suffering?
Going back a century, in 1910-11, the U.S. State Department backed a group of American investors in gaining control of the Banque National d'Haïti, Haiti's only commercial bank and the government treasury. When Haiti wound up deeply in debt to American banks, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson occupied Haiti - and we stayed there until 1934. In 1917, FDR (yes, the future U.S. president) wrote a constitution for Haiti that took away a very pesky (to us) law that prohibited foreign ownership of Haitian land. The Haitian government refused to approve it so we dissolved their government and had the constitution approved by an election in 1919 in which under 5 percent of the population actually voted.
While in Haiti, we behaved very much like the British in India. We built roads (well, actually we made the Haitians do it with what was basically slave labor) to serve our own purposes and introduced export cash crops instead of promoting Haitian food sovereignty. We even one-upped the British by introducing Jim Crow laws in Haiti, which was founded as a black republic. The Haitians didn't accept this lying down - the period was marked with revolts - and the U.S. left during the Great Depression but kept control over Haiti's external finances until 1947.
After another coup or two, Haiti elected "Papa Doc" (Dr. Francois Duvalier) in 1957. He carried out a brutal rule and proclaimed himself president for life, which turned out to be until 1971. He was succeeded by his son, "Baby Doc," a 19-year-old playboy and kleptocrat. The U.S. had cut off aid to Haiti during the Kennedy Administration, but they restored it in 1971. Still, Baby Doc's time in office was no picnic for Haitians, and he was forced into exile by the Haitian military in 1986.
Haiti has not exactly lived without turmoil since then, with at least a few coups in between democratically electing its leaders. Here's an excerpt from a very significant report I found from the period of the food riots back in 2008:
The food riots in Haiti were also a result of policies and actions of the international community. Haiti has lost its food sovereignty as a result of decades of foreign-imposed neoliberal measures. This is a concrete example of what longtime Haiti advocate Paul Farmer calls "structural violence"-the long-term underdevelopment and inequalities in the world system.
Many people in Haiti point to the first trigger being the USAID eradication of the Haitian pig population following an outbreak of swine fever. Peasants counted on pigs as "bank accounts" so the action amounted to Haiti's "great stock market crash, contributing to Duvalier's ouster on Feb. 7, 1986. Under U.S. military supervision, Duvalier was replaced by an army junta, the CNG, whose finance minister Delatour imposed a series of neoliberal measures, including currency devaluation, trade liberalization, and opening Haiti's agricultural markets to U.S. producers. Today, Haiti is the most "open" economy in the hemisphere.
In the 1990s, responding to humanitarian crises following the violent 1991-4 coup period, USAID gave millions of dollars in direct food aid. The implementation of this aid weakened Haiti's economy, with free or heavily subsidized U.S. rice underselling the local peasantry; with the grains and the food-for-work programs arriving during the peak of harvest season, when farmers sold their crops and needed hired help the most; and with conditionalities such as still lower tariffs and further trade advantages for U.S. businesses.
While it can be argued that Haitian governments can choose to refuse this aid, the majority of their funding comes from international institutions. People in Haiti call this dependency on foreign aid a "politics of the stomach." Not surprisingly, U.S. assistance to Haiti is still laced with conditionalities that benefit U.S. corporate interests. For example, the HOPE Act passed in December 2006 was designed to create jobs and cut tariffs on sub-contracted textile productions. While the estimates are way lower than projections, 2-3,000 instead of 50,000 jobs according to an industry lobbyist, the rationale is that saving $1.50 on a pair of pants spurs foreign investment, sorely lacking in Haiti. Nonetheless, the strings attached to HOPE give even more benefits to U.S. business. HOPE contains a condition that Haiti must not "engage in activities that undermine United States national security or foreign policy interests." In order for private, often foreign, companies to receive tax benefits in the bill, the Haitian government must establish or make progress toward "elimination of barriers to United States trade and investment."
In addition to bilateral aid, international agencies also imposed neoliberal conditions on Haiti through negotiations on foreign debt. By 1991, when Aristide - Haiti's first democratically-elected president - took office, the official debt was $785 million, more than half of what was claimed in 2006 of $1.463 billion.
Debt drains resources that could otherwise be invested in national production. For example, in 2003, Haiti's scheduled debt service was $57.4 million, whereas total foreign pledges for education, health care, environment, and transportation added up to $39.21 million. The scheduled debt service for 2009 is $78.7 million. Debt also is the leverage for imposing what used to be called "structural adjustment programs" (SAPs), including privatization, trade liberalization, and forced reduction in services such as health care, education, or rural credit.
Some argue that competition and free trade bring prosperity to all. In this logic, barriers to trade such as protective tariffs need to be removed. Many of the proposals to respond to the crisis still depart from this logic.
But Haitian peasants cannot "compete" with the United States under a free trade system. First of all, under the U.S. Farm Bill, U.S. agribusiness and some individual farmers15 received $13.4 billion in subsidies in 2006, a total of $177 billion over the previous decade. At the same time, the World Trade Organization (WTO) repeatedly strikes down tariffs and other subsidies in Southern countries as "impediments to free trade." Even without the subsidies, the average U.S. farm - individual or corporate - benefits from what we now take for granted as public responsibilities: building and maintaining roads, irrigation canals, water treatment, pumps and pipelines, and federally-insured credit, etc. These public investments cost money, which high debt payments and reduction in social spending mandated by structural adjustment programs have prevented in Haiti.
Occasionally, international institutions directly contribute to the increase in prices, as in January 2003, when the IMF demanded that the government stop subsidizing the cost for fuel, triggering immediate hikes in taptap fares as well as protests. Very efficient in economic terms because timachann (street vendors) operate on very slim profit margins, the informal market immediately saw a rise in prices for staple goods as a result.
As a result of all these factors, Haiti is almost entirely dependent on foreign food production. Once an exporter of rice, now Haiti imports an estimated 82% of total consumption, $200,000,000 per year. Haiti has lost its food security and food sovereignty. As Préval recently stated in his effort to calm the populace: "In 1987, when rice began being imported at a cheap price, many people applauded. But cheap imported rice destroyed [locally grown] rice. Today, imported rice has become expensive, and our national production is in ruins. That's why subsidizing imported food is not the answer."
It is therefore not surprising that prices for basic foodstuffs in Haiti are tied to the global market where rising petroleum costs and inflation in grain prices because of its increasing use as biofuel have driven up prices. Thirty-seven year old community leader and timachann Linda Thibault explains, "You have to buy Miami rice. Do the math: if a bag of Haitian rice costs 150 goud, and a bag of U.S. rice costs 65 goud, I can buy two bags of U.S. rice and still have money left over for the cost of one bag of Haitian rice. I am forced to fill my body with U.S. rice. My children can eat more." [emphasis mine]
Interestingly enough, in 1995, Haiti refused to sign a World Bank loan that required it to accept a "Structural Adjustment Program." These SAPs are typically the tools of the World Bank for extracting "a pound of flesh" from its loan recipients (as you can see in the excerpt above). Upon Haiti's refusal to sign the loan agreement, the U.S. announced we would withdraw our aid to Haiti. Sure enough, as a result of the earthquake, the World Bank is offering Haiti more money.
There's a lot more to be said about this, and much of it can be found in four books:
1. Hoodwinked and Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins
2. The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
3. Food Revolutions! by Eric Holt-Gimenez and Raj Patel
The gist of what these three books say is that:
1. Multinational corporations use institutions like the World Bank and the U.S. government to trap developing nations in debt and then force unfair trade policies on them and sell their natural resources for pennies on the dollar to multinational corporations.
2. Often, in order to do this, they take advantage of natural or manmade disasters, in which people are desperate for anything that resembles help.
3. This is all very much tied in with agriculture and global food security. The solution is "food sovereignty," which Via Campesina defines as:
Food sovereignty is the peoples', Countries' or State Unions' RIGHT to define their agricultural and food policy, without any dumping vis-à-vis third countries. Food sovereignty includes :
* prioritizing local agricultural production in order to feed the people, access of peasants and landless people to land, water, seeds, and credit. Hence the need for land reforms, for fighting against GMOs ((Genetically Modified Organisms), for free access to seeds, and for safeguarding water as a public good to be sustainably distributed.
* the right of farmers, peasants to produce food and the right of consumers to be able to decide what they consume, and how and by whom it is produced.
* the right of Countries to protect themselves from too low priced agricultural and food imports.
* agricultural prices linked to production costs : they can be achieved if the Countries or Unions of States are entitled to impose taxes on excessively cheap imports, if they commit themselves in favour of a sustainable farm production, and if they control production on the inner market so as to avoid structural surpluses.
* the populations taking part in the agricultural policy choices.
* the recognition of women farmers' rights, who play a major role in agricultural production and in food.
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