Haiti's Food Crisis Has Its Roots in Pigs, Rice and Globalization

[magbana]

Two articles that will shed alot of light on the food crisis in Haiti. First article is an excerpt from a book by Aristide that focuses on the pig population in Haiti. The second addresses how the Haitian rice growers got screwed over big time.


Haitian pigs meet globalization
From Eyes of the Heart: Seeking a Path for the Poor in the Age of Globalization, by Jean-Bertrand Aristide
3 May 2000

The history of the eradication of the Haitian Creole pig population in the 1980's is a classic parable of globalization. Haiti's small, black, Creole pigs were at the heart of the peasant economy. An extremely hearty breed, well adapted to Haiti's climate and conditions, they ate readily available waste products, and could survive for three days without food. Eighty to 85% of rural households raised pigs; they played a key role in maintaining the fertility of the soil and constituted the primary savings bank of the peasant population. Traditionally a pig was sold to pay for emergencies and special occasions (funerals, marriages, baptisms, illnesses and, critically, to pay school fees and buy books for the children when school opened each year in October.)

In 1982 international agencies assured Haiti's peasants their pigs were sick and had to be killed (so that the illness would not spread to countries to the North). Promises were made that better pigs would replace the sick pigs. With an efficiency not since seen among development projects, all of the Creole pigs were killed over a period of thirteen months.

Two years later the new, better pigs came from Iowa. They were so much better that they required clean drinking water (unavailable to 80% of the Haitian population), imported feed (costing $90 a year when the per capita income was about $130), and special roofed pigpens. haitian peasants quickly dubbed them prince a quatre pieds, (four-footed princes). adding insult to injury, the meat did not taste as good. Needless to say, the repopulation program was a complete failure. one observer of the process estimated that in monetary terms Haitian peasants lost $600 million dollars. There was a 30% drop in enrollment in rural schools, there was a dramatic decline in the protein consumption in rural Haiti, a devastating decapitalization of the peasant economy and an incalculable negative impact on Haiti's soil and agricultural productivity. The Haitian peasantry has not recovered to this day.

Most of rural Haiti is still isolated from global markets, so for many peasants the extermination of the Creole pigs was their first experience of globalization. The experience looms large in the collective memory. Today, when the peasants are told that economic reform and privatization will benefit them they are understandably wary. The state-owned enterprises are sick, we are told, and they must be privatized. the peasants shake their heads and remember the Creole pigs.

- --From Eyes of the Heart: Seeking a Path for the Poor in the Age of Globalization, by Jean-Bertrand Aristide
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43a/255.html


Free Market Left Haiti's Rice Growers Behind
By Michael Dobbs, Washington Post,
Thursday 13 April 2000; Page A01

PONT-SONDE, Haiti - Last month, several dozen impoverished rice-growers and their families decided they could bear life in Haiti no longer. They pooled their meager savings, bought a rickety boat and headed northward to the British-administered Turks and Caicos Islands. Halfway into the 150-mile trip, the vessel capsized, killing all 60 on board.

We are mourning now, because we lost so many members of our families, said Emince Bernard, one of the villagers who remained behind, and who heard about the disaster on the radio. But the same thing is going to happen over and over again, because the people here no longer have any hope.

The plight of Haitian rice farmers provides a human dimension to the debate over the costs and benefits of globalization as Washington gears up for protests to coincide with the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Organizers of this weekend's demonstrations have cited the rice growers' struggle for survival as a prime example of the failure of free-market policies advocated by the IMF with the strong backing of the United States.

The IMF forced Haiti to open its market to imported, highly subsidized U.S. rice at the same time it prohibited Haiti from subsidizing its own farmers, declares the Web site of Global Exchange, one of the Third World advocacy groups organizing the Washington protests. Haitian farmers have been forced off their land to seek work in sweatshops, and people are poorer than ever.

Over the past two decades, a period of growing IMF tutelage over the Haitian economy, exports of American rice to Haiti have grown from virtually zero to more than 200,000 tons a year, making the poverty-stricken country of 7 million people the fourth-largest market for American rice in the world after Japan, Mexico and Canada. According to U.S. and Haitian economists, the result has been a massive shift in local consumption habits, with many Haitians now choosing cheap imported rice at the expense of domestically grown staples, including rice, corn and millet.

While IMF officials acknowledge that the transition to a market economy has caused wrenching social disruption for Haiti and other developing countries, they argue that it will prove beneficial in the long run, provided governments stay the course. Officials accuse their opponents of exaggerating the influence of lending organizations, oversimplifying and distorting the issues, and playing down systemic problems such as corruption, political instability and insecurity.

It is naive to suggest that the IMF has had a dominant role in the development of Haiti, argued Patricia Brenner, the IMF's mission chief to Haiti. She noted that Haiti had an average of one government a year in the 10 years following the collapse of the brutal Duvalier dictatorships. The economic situation must be seen against the background of political chaos, military takeovers and governments being formed and replaced before they have time to establish a real economic program.

From a grass-roots perspective in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, it seems undeniable that millions of people have been left behind in the rush to globalization. That much is evident from the distended stomachs of children in villages like Pont-Sonde, the throngs of women seeking jobs at 30 cents an hour in sweatshops owned by U.S. clothing manufacturers and the daily street demonstrations through the slums of Port-au-Prince by laid-off government employees.

According to the IMF's figures, roughly 50 percent of Haitian children younger than 5 suffer from malnutrition. Billions of dollars in international assistance have done little to improve conditions in the countryside, where two out of three Haitians live. Per capita income has dropped from around $600 in 1980 to $369 today.

But the real question, say IMF supporters, is not whether a majority of Haitians are worse off than they were 15 or 20 years ago, but whether there is a realistic alternative to free-market policies. Globalization is a fact, not a project, said Richard Coles, president of the Manufacturers' Association of Haiti. The world has shown it works in a certain way. Why should we Haitians think we can invent the wheel all over again?

As a leading rice grower in Haiti's fertile Artibonite valley, Charles Suffrard has a vivid memory of what happened after 1986 when the country began opening its markets to foreign imports at the behest of the IMF and other international lenders. Jean-Claude Duvalier, the son of Haiti's longtime dictator, Francois Papa Doc Duvalier, had just fled the country for a gilded exile in France, to be replaced by the first of several military leaders supported by Haitian business interests.

American rice invaded the country, he recalled. It was sold for so little that we could not compete. There was a very serious struggle. When they brought the rice up from Port-au-Prince, they had to escort it in military convoys, to prevent us from seizing it. By 1987 and 1988, there was so much rice coming into the country that many of us stopped working the land.

Although the IMF was not directly involved in sending cheap American rice to Haiti, its policies accelerated the breakdown of the old subsistence economy, and its replacement by a cash economy. Through a series of structural adjustment programs, beginning in the late 1980s, the IMF encouraged Haiti to adopt some of the lowest tariffs in the Caribbean. The IMF's influence was magnified by its role as the gatekeeper to funds from other international organizations, including the World Bank and the European Union.

IMF officials insist that many Haitians, particularly those living in cities, have benefited from lower tariffs. Because of the influx of cheap American rice, food prices have remained fairly stable. Maintaining a relatively low inflation rate has been the IMF's main achievement in Haiti over the last few years.

According to free market theory, nations should specialize in areas where they have a comparative economic advantage. Poor countries should be able to take advantage of the abundance of cheap labor to increase their exports of manufactured goods, as well as certain agricultural items like mangoes and coffee, to markets including the United States.

But there is a gap between free-market theory and Haitian reality, as the rice conflict demonstrates. Development economists point out that the competition between Haitian and American rice growers was hardly fair, since U.S. rice production is subsidized through a wide variety of mechanisms. Furthermore, most of the American exports were handled by a single U.S. corporation--American Rice Inc.--which has enjoyed an almost monopolistic position in Haiti.

The prospect of dynamic, export-driven growth seems distant, to say the least. Although wage levels are lower in Haiti than elsewhere in the Caribbean, manufacturers have been scared away by the unstable political climate. At present, there are only 25,000 jobs in the light-manufacturing sector, compared with a peak of 60,000 jobs prior to the 1991 military coup.

At the Caribbean Apparel Factory on the northern outskirts of Port-au-Prince, women line up every day, desperately hoping to be hired to sew T-shirts for the American market. Home to several dozen American manufacturers, the industrial zone is virtually autonomous from the rest of the Haitian economy.

I come here every day in the hope that one day there will be work, but there never is, said Caroline Ezebeie, 33, who left her village as a teenager, lured by the promise of a better life in the city. When I leave the house, my children hope that I will earn enough money to come back with food. But very often, I have to walk home because I don't have enough money for a bus.

We are waiting for our deaths, yelled someone else in the crowd. We are starving. There is no work for us here.

For the anti-IMF protesters and Third World advocates now gathering in Washington, the answer to Haiti's problems, and the problems of many other developing countries, resides in measures such as debt relief, land reform, small-scale projects specifically geared to the needs of the rural population and selective tariff protection for agriculture and fledgling industry.

You can't expect a country like Haiti to compete on world markets immediately, said Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. If you look at those countries that have succeeded in dramatically increasing their per capita incomes--countries like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan--you will find they all did it under some kind of protection.

This country is not Korea, retorted Eric Verreydt, the IMF representative in Port-au-Prince, pointing out that Haiti's greatest single economic advantage is its close proximity to the huge American market. Haiti desperately needs investment, and the only people who are likely to invest here are foreigners and rich Haitians living in the United States. That is a fact of life.

Since the reestablishment of democracy in 1995 following a U.S. military intervention, Haiti has been receiving around $125 million a year in international assistance, much of it contingent on an IMF seal of approval. But because of instability--the country has been without a parliament for the last year--IMF attention to Haiti has been sporadic. The last structural adjustment program petered out in 1997 because of a domestic political crisis following the disbursement of only $21 million of a planned $120 million loan. The IMF has since persuaded the government to implement an informal staff program, focusing on macroeconomic goals such as a balanced budget, tight monetary policies and low inflation.

Even left-wing Haitian politicians acknowledge that the country can hardly survive without the support of international lending organizations.

We don't take the position that we don't need the IMF and the World Bank, and that IMF policies are diabolical, said Yvon Neptune, a spokesman for former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who has described capitalism as evil. We are saying we want to sit down and negotiate with the IMF, and adjust their policies to the reality of Haiti.

Attempts to promote alternative models of development in Haiti in recent years have run aground from political infighting, lack of funds and impracticality. A pilot land reform project in the Artibonite valley has failed to increase rice yields, and in some ways even made matters worse, leading to the breakup of relatively efficient farms and the decay of irrigation systems.

Unable to produce enough rice to satisfy domestic demand, or even feed their own families, the rice growers of the Artibonite are close to despair, and caught in a seemingly unresolvable contradiction.

The introduction of American rice has hurt us terribly, said Claudes Derilus, a 29-year-old rice farmer in Pont-Sonde. But if it wasn't for this rice, Haitians would die of hunger.

2000 The Washington Post

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43a/217.html

http://snipurl.com/24om9

[Mika]

1. Tragedy heaped upon tragedy heaped upon corporate terror and corporate domination.

:cry: :cry: :cry: ...



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[Judi Lynn]

2. It really hits home when one realizes that photo of the little boy is the most cheerful image we've

seen from Haiti in the last years. What suffering beyond hell can people endure who are on the #### list of powerful countries?

Haitians have been living on emergency energy so long, just to survive, they must be worn down, so exhausted in spirit, so tired of trying to survive without any signs of help ahead.

The little boy actually looks tired, and nervous to me. Maybe it's my imagination running ahead of me and seeing things but it seems he looks worn, and not at all carefree. He's so intense.

I would pray for their survival if I believed there was someone who heard prayers. If I believed that much, I would pray for their rescue immediately. We do know things can go wildly wrong in a heartbeat. Why do they never go right in a heartbeat, as well?

Maybe the people who are delivering the grief to Haiti will have a change of heart and allow them to breathe again.

As the Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano said he saw on a sign, as he walked down a street in Latin America, "Let's save pessimism for better times."

[Mika]

4. FYI, that little boy is playing in front of a stack of coffins.

Choking back my tears. :cry:

(Not feeling particularly positive today. :( )

On a desperate thread of hope, a thread as thinner than a hair. I don't know.. I just don't know how can people have any hope left faced with such a reality?


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[Judi Lynn]

3. Thanks for sharing these article, magbana. There have been some real sadists involved in Haiti's

history, and that can't be denied.

Through the restrictitons placed by the IMF, they couldn't subsidize their own rice. Outrageous!

It's the U.S.-subsidized products which have driven farmers out of business recently in Mexico! Farms which had been in the family for generations were lost, and the owners and any other agricultural workers were simply outta luck. It's safe to say, however, they weren't as bad off as Haitians were, after so many years of US-supported monster Duvalier.

What a shame it is to know partisan sociopaths like the ones making decisions at the IMF, and the World Bank operate freely, not subject to any restraints, or checks, free to toy with and destroy the lives of so many people. I hope the glee with which they screw entire small countries will sustain them years later, in quiet moments, when they have to confront their consciences.

[Mika]

5. Didn't the US send agents to Cuba to infect & contaminate Cuba's pigs also?

I seem to remember reading about such US bio terrorism ops.

I'll do some checking later.




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[magbana]

6. Yes, Pigs and More

1962-1996 / Cuba
Cuba has accused the U.S. of attacking Cuban human, animal, and plant populations with biological weapons on as many as 21 different occasions. According to Raymond Zilinskas, the Cubans have alleged that the U.S. biological attacks caused such diseases as Newcastle Disease among poultry (1962), African Swine Fever among pigs (1971, 1979-80), Tobacco Blue Mold Disease (1979-80), Sugarcane Rust Disease (1978), dengue hemorrhagic fever among humans (1980), and an infestation of the Thrips insect in 1996 (see separate discussion below). According to Zilinskas, the most likely explanations for all the disease outbreaks and insect infestation was that they were either natural events or had been caused by the accidental transmittal of the causative agent through normal commerce. Further, in most cases, the damaged caused was intensified or heightened by inadequate or inappropriate responses by Cuban governmental agencies.<7>
See United States CBW Programs

http://cns.miis.edu/research/cbw/agchron.htm


this is consistent with what I have heard about over the years.

[Mika]

7. Thanks for the info. Here's more.

Decades of U.S. Biowarfare Against Cuba

The United States government has a long history of using biological and chemical warfare against the Caribbean island nation. In 1961-62, the CIA’s infamous “Operation Mongoose” sought to cause sickness among sugar cane workers by spreading chemicals on the cane fields. U.S. agents repeatedly contaminated exported Cuban sugar. The CIA later admitted that during the 1960s it undertook clandestine anti-crop warfare “research” targeting a number of countries under its MK-ULTRA program, but claimed its records had been destroyed. At the end of the decade, as Castro tried to mobilize the population to bring in ten million tons of sugar, in addition to the regime’s rampant bureaucratic snafus the CIA sabotaged the harvest by seeding clouds to cause torrential rains in nearby provinces while leaving the cane fields parched (see William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II ).

After that “success,” the U.S. moved on to introduce African swine fever to Cuba in 1971. This was the first outbreak of swine fever in the Western Hemisphere. As a result of the epidemic, Cuba was forced to slaughter the entire pig population (some 500,000 animals), eliminating the supply of pork, a staple of the Cuban diet. When Cuban government spokesmen first accused Washington of unleashing the biological attack, U.S. officials dismissed this with a wave of the hand. However, six years later, following the post-Watergate Congressional investigations of skullduggery by U.S. intelligence agencies, a New York paper reported that a “U.S. intelligence source” told the paper that “he was given the virus in a sealed, unmarked container at a U.S. Army base and CIA training ground in Panama with instructions to turn it over to the anti-Castro group” (“CIA Link to Cuban Pig Virus Reported,” Newsday, 10 January 1977). The article explained in detail how the virus was transferred from Fort Gulick to Cuba.

A decade later, the U.S. introduced a virulent strain of dengue fever in Cuba, as a result of which 273,000 people on the island came down with the illness and 158 died, including 101 children. An article in Covert Action (Summer 1982) detailed U.S. experiments with dengue fever at the Army’s Fort Detrick chemical/biological warfare center and its research into the Aedes aegypti mosquito which delivers it. The article noted that only Cuba of all the Caribbean countries was affected, and concluded that “the dengue epidemic could have been a covert U.S. operation.” Two years later, a leader of the Omega 7 gusano (Cuban counterrevolutionary) terrorist group, Eduardo Victor Arocena Pérez, admitted (in a Manhattan trial in which he was convicted of murdering an attaché of the Cuban Mission to the UN) that one of their groups had a mission to “carry some germs to introduce them in Cuba to be used against the Soviets and against the Cuban economy, to begin what was called chemical war” just before simultaneous outbreaks of hemorrhagic dengue fever, hemorrhagic conjunctivitis, tobacco mold, sugar cane fungus and a new outbreak of African swine fever (Covert Action, Fall 1984).

These are only a few of the most spectacular and best documented cases of U.S. biological warfare against Cuba. James Banford in his book Body of Secrets (Doubleday, 2001) revealed that while the Pentagon was refining plans for a biological strike on Cuba, in “Operation Northwoods” the U.S. military developed plans to fake incidents to cause popular outrage. These included shooting people on American streets, sinking refugee boats on the high seas and blowing up a U.S. ship in Guantánamo. These was no mere contingency plans. They were drawn up by rabidly anti-Communist general Lyman Lemnitzer, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the suggestion of U.S. president (former general) Eisenhower, and were signed by all of the service chiefs. But they pale in comparison with the operation code-named “Marshall Plan,” which was to have been unleashed if U.S. forces invaded Cuba at the time of the 1962 missile crisis.

The plan was to attack all of Cuba with incapacitating agents, in a biological strike that would affect millions of Cubans. The scientific director at Fort Detrick said that one alternative considered was spraying Cuban troops with lethal botulinum toxin, arguing that this would be “a good thing” since it would save American lives in an invasion. Judith Miller, who reported this plan in her book Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War (Simon & Schuster, 2001), says that it involved a “cocktail” of two germs and a biological toxin producing extreme nausea, fevers of up to 106 degrees Fht. (close to what produces comas and death), Venezuelan equine encephalitis and Q fever. “Teams at Pine Bluff made thousands of gallons of the cocktail, enough to fill a swimming pool,” Miller reports. The head of Pine Bluff argued, “We could move our forces in and take over the country and that would be it.”

The Fort Detrick director argued that there was “a humane aspect” to the plan, because it would reduce the number of casualties from fighting. The plan was to spray from East to West, to take advantage of the prevailing trade winds, and blanket Havana. And this “humane” U.S. biological warfare would “only” kill 1 to 2 percent of the Cuban population. Given the island’s population of roughly 7 million at the time, this means the Pentagon was planning to kill between 70,000 and 140,000 Cuban civilians. Actual fatalities would probably have been far higher. When Harvard biologist Matthew Meselson learned of the plan, he went to his former colleague McGeorge Bundy, the evil genius of the Vietnam War who was U.S. president John Kennedy’s national security advisor. Bundy promised that the Marshall Plan would be kept out of the war plans. But according to Miller, “In fact, the germs stayed in the war plans, former officials said.”

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Links to other material on Biowar against Cuba
http://afrocubaweb.com/biowar.htm#history%20of%20Plagues



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[Judi Lynn]

8. Wonderful link. It deserves being used over and over. Will be reading it carefully again.

Was going to go get a link myself to post concerning Eduardo Arocena, with Alpha 66, who testified IN COURT at his own murder trial that he had taken biochemical warfare agents to Cuba himself, but I see it's covered already in your link.

That's about as official as you can get! It's on record.

When I actually read at some link years ago that people in Cuba actually stood outside and watched American planes dropping this material on their countryside, even noting details of the planes, then moving off quickly, right before the discovery of some horrendous outbreak, I felt physically ill, myself. My god. US taxpayers' dollars going to fund pure evil like that. How can they face themselves in the mirror each morning?