By Robin Derby
Now that there is provisional resolution on a key feature of the Haitian electoral debacle ““ that René Préval’s candidate Jude Célestin will be removed for the electoral run off ““ Haiti can return to the problem of reconstruction once again.
Many people have taken heed of the problems of providing services to the refugees living in the tent communities and making them more habitable, yet there is a larger elephant in the room that Paul Farmer alluded to last week in his presentation at the Fowler event on Haiti.
The tent camp solution was intended as a temporary measure; a portion of aid promised needs to be directed toward some larger structural problems that have been crippling the Haitian economy for decades, such as food security. Indeed, much of the aid provisions to the camps are imported.
The aid community needs to invest in the rural economy and especially agriculture and livestock, which could foster job creation and thus enable more of the Port-au-Prince refugees to relocate to rural areas.
The aid community continues to see Haiti as nothing more than a source of cheap labor for assembling baseballs and braziers to the United States, yet with wages at $3.15 a day this cannot be seen as a development strategy.
Much development discourse has placed the blame on the Haitian government for failing to effectively coordinate assistance or provide adequate security. Yet the U.S. has played an important role in hampering Haiti’s development.
It was the U.S. that created the sugar monocrop economy which sustained the Caribbean from the late nineteenth century into the 1970s, and it was their free trade policies which rendered sugar superfluous. U.S. agribusiness flowed into Haiti during the U.S. Marines occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934, reviving the sugar plantation economy, this time with U.S. ownership and for sale to the U.S. market.
Yet U.S. farm subsidies have made high-fructose corn syrup the sweetener and preservative of choice in manufactured food products, drastically reducing the market for sugar and driving down world prices for sucrose. If corn was once the staple crop of southern U.S. slaves, since the 1950s it has become the success story of intensive capitalized agriculture, of which U.S. farms now produce seventy percent of global production.
Between 2003 and 2005, American taxpayers spent $34.75 billion in crop subsidy benefits to farmers to produce corn fit only for livestock feed and corn syrup, which has made processed foods such as soft drinks shrink in price since the mid-1980s. The rise of “king corn” has expanded American waistlines, accounting for much of the growth in obesity here, while the same period has seen sugar prices drop precipitously, thus causing food shortages in the Caribbean.
Americans eat four times the amount of corn syrup they did in 1970, as well as a diet of corn-raised beef that is higher in saturated fats than cattle fed on grass, and our profligate consumption of corn byproducts has made sugar all but obsolete and brought the cane sugar industry to the point of near collapse. While many Caribbean islands have abandoned sugar altogether, others have sought solace in tourism which offers very little if any significant job creation.
And unlike Great Britain, whose sense of responsibility for its former colonies has ensured a steady market for British West Indian bananas at the European Economic Community, the U.S. has left its former colonies to free fall on their own. Haiti has now lost the U.S. sugar market and tourism has not been a viable option given the successive waves of political instability since Jean Claude Duvalier’s departure in 1986.
In the 1970s the U.S. started flooding Haiti (via Haitian entrepreneur middlemen) with subsidized rice so cheap that it replaced the locally-grown tubers, rice and corn that had been Haitian dietary staples, driving local farmers out of business and into the slums of Port-au-Prince and across the Dominican border seeking work.
Today “Miami rice” has become a dietary staple and Haiti imports three-quarters of its demand, making Haiti the fourth most important market for imported U.S. rice (through provisioning wheat as food aid, the U.S. has fostered dependency there by establishing bread as a primary subsistence product).
To make matters worse, the price of rice has doubled over the past years, causing food riots in Port-au-Prince largely due to soaring petroleum costs.
Of course, the U.S. is not solely responsible here and some protectionism could have forestalled this dependency on an item now critical to the domestic subsistence economy.
But first due to the national debt owed to U.S. agencies, and now due to its dependence on aid flows, Haiti has had trouble standing up to the U.S.
In 2003, Haiti sent more than 90 percent of its foreign reserves to Washington, much of which was for loans which had been contracted by the Duvalier regime and ended up in his private bank account in Switzerland, although thankfully Haiti’s debt was cancelled after the earthquake.
Now is the time to address the food security issue once and for all. Doing so could foster job creation and enable some of the refugee population to relocate out of Port-au-Prince, which would greatly improve conditions in the camps.
It would also enable some real development to come out of the millions of dollars which will be spent on assistance to Haiti in the coming years.
Derby is an associate professor of history at UCLA.