In 2008, in the midst of the global food crisis, Al Jazeera travelled to Haiti to look at the politics of rice – how such a fertile country became dependent on food aid. In the wake of this current disaster, that dependence is – initially – going to deepen. But as relief efforts slowly turn to plans for reconstruction, it is important to look back at the policies that brought Haiti to the brink in the first place, and the people who had their own vision of self-sufficiency all along. Avi Lewis talks about the US role in the development of Haiti with PJ Crowley, the spokesman at the US State Department, and Emira Woods, the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and an expert on US foreign policy.
The more accepted reasons for Haiti’s enduring poverty have been its internal racial divisions (a small mulatto class dominating a larger negro underclass – in the post independence era some 30,000 mulattos, gens de coleur, usurped power ruling over some 400,00 blacks), the violence of its war for independence that destroyed the economic base of the island and which claimed the lives of one in five Haitians over a 13 year period, the country’s isolation after independence (no one would trade with Haiti until 1821 when Britain finally established ties), political instability, internal divisions, poor governance and above all the crushing indemnity that Haiti agreed to pay France to stave off a second invasion of the country in 1823. Haiti would not finish paying off that debt until 1947.
More recently Haiti’s problem revolve around kleptocratic governance (the Duvalier regimes), the rise of militias as a destabilizing force (political parties in Haiti are little more than armed gangs), overpopulation put pressure on the land and the Reagan/Clinton imposed Washington Consensus that turned Haiti into the most liberalized trade regime in the Western Hemisphere. The tariffs on rice were slashed from 30% to 3% and the result was the destruction of Haiti’s agricultural sector.
Neoliberalism turned Haiti from being self-sufficient in its food production into a basket case dependent on food aid for its survival. Who benefits from this?
Arkansas rice farmers and Tyson foods. (more…)
