|
Last May, the
United Nations announced “6.7 million Haitians face food
insecurity.” Aid organizations, development agencies, and the
media mobilized with articles, videos, and “urgent appeals.”
Thanks to some measures, and also some good weather, the numbers
have likely improved slightly since then. Recently, the
Coordination Nationale de Securité Alimentaire (CNSA or
National Coordination for Food Security) announced that rice and
corn harvests are up from the year before. (However, they remain
below previous years.)
Nevertheless, with terrifying charts and dire warnings,
officials continue to say that in 2013, twice as many Haitians
as last year – some 1.5 million people – continue to face
“severe” or “acute food insecurity,” and that many millions more
are considered food insecure. At least one-fifth, and in some
areas, one-third, of all Haitian children are “stunted,” meaning
that they are underweight, shorter than they ought to be, and
the development of their brains and other organs will likely be
affected.
Hunger has also become part of the political football game in
Haiti.
Speaking on May 10, former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide
criticized the government for not addressing the hunger problem
and gave a thinly veiled warning, quoting a Haitian proverb:
“When a dog is hungry, it doesn't play around."
President Michel Martelly responded a few days later, saying
Aristide was telling “a lie” and that he is also responsible
since “he spent ten years in power.” (Actually, Aristide did not
spend ten years in office. Both terms were truncated by coups).
While
statistically hard to verify, many reports say hunger in Haiti
today is more pervasive than it has ever been in the last 50
years.
Doudou Pierre Festil, a farmer who is also member of a national
peasant movement and the coordinator of a network of about 200
farmers associations and other organizations known as Réseau
National Haïtien pour la Souveraineté et la Sécurité Alimentaire
(RENAHSSA – National Network for Sovereignty and Food Security),
says “the government is 100% responsible” for hunger in Haiti.
But
the reality is more nuanced, the causes of hunger more
structural.
Everyone has been aware of Haiti’s brewing food crisis for
years: Haitian agronomists, economists, farmers, and government
officials, foreign donors and humanitarian agencies. Over they
years, Haitian and foreign “experts” have designed projects,
written grants… and they have also executed contracts and been
well-paid for their services.
Over
the past four decades, donors have spent billions of dollars on
“food aid,” “development aid,” “humanitarian assistance,” and a
host of agricultural programs.
Haiti
Grassroots Watch (HGW) and many others know that the causes of
hunger are structural, some of them dating back to the earliest
days of the republic. They are also interrelated and linked to
larger economic issues in the country and in the world. While it
is not possible to explore the causes in depth in this series,
here is a summary of the most obvious causes.
1) Poverty.
One-half of the population lives on less than US$1 per day; some
three-quarters live on less than US$2 per day. With little to no
buying power, Haitians who do not produce their own food do not
have the income necessary to buy even basic necessities. One
thing that makes Haitians poorer, a recent UN mission report
noted, is that “basic social services” – like education – have
to be purchased, further stressing poor households.
2) Haiti’s
land tenure system and lack of correct land-management.
According to Bernard Ethéart, an expert on Haitian land issues
and former director of the Institut Nationale de la Réforme
Agraire (INARA – the National Institute of Land Reform),
Haiti’s land tenure system is a “complete disorder that has been
going on for 200 years.” Ethéart claims that most land belongs
to the government, because ever since independence, various
dictators have stolen, illegally “sold,” or given away parcels
to their families and their allies. Haiti has no land registry.
In the countryside, land security is quite low because many
“owners” do not have titles or have titles that are out-of-date.
In addition, a great deal of farmland is either state land
leased from the government, or is “owned” by large landowner (grandon)
who then rents it or has sharecroppers (known as “demwatye”)
work it. Thus in many cases, farmers are not invested in the
land. Studies have shown that farmers working leased, rented, or
share-cropped land are less likely to protect it from
deforestation and other practices that weaken the soil and the
environment. Another challenge is the fact that “private” land
is divided into tiny plots because Haitian law says all
offspring have a right to inherit a portion their parent’s land.
3) Neoliberal
trade policies. The World
Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the U.S.
government have pushed neoliberal economic policies on Haitian
governments since the 1980s. In 1995, under pressure from
Washington, the Aristide government dropped tariffs on many food
products to zero or near-zero: making then the lowest tariffs in
the Caribbean at that time. A 2006 Christian Aid report
noted: “[T]he results of lowering agricultural tariffs in Haiti
have been disastrous.” Trade liberalization is directly linked
to decreased agricultural production, increased rural poverty,
an exodus from the countryside into city slums, and increasing
hunger, according to Christian Aid and many other
experts. The radical policies came on top of 200 years of having
what Haitian economist Fred Doura calls an “extraverted”
economy, which is “exploited and dominated” by foreign
countries, their economies, their currencies, and their needs:
first France, then the United States. In Haïti – Histoire et
analyse d’une extraversion dépendent organisée, Doura says
that Haiti’s dependence is cultural, technological, financial,
and also economic, given that since its inception, much of the
country’s production has been exported while its necessities
were imported. Doura laments: “The neoliberal globalization of
the economy has reinforced the vise of Haiti’s dependence.”
4) Population
increase coupled with stagnant or declining agricultural output.
This has taken place due to many interrelated reasons,
including:
- The land tenure
system.
- Decades of an
overall lack of government and donor investment in agriculture.
For example, during the first half of the 2000s, the Agriculture
Ministry received only 4% of the budget, while agriculture and
rural development accounted for only 2.5% of official
development assistance. A 2009 UN mission deplored “the abandon
of agricultural sector and of national production for the past
three decades.” The mission also noted that the approach of the
government and various organizations at the time was
characterized by “multiple strategies and programs which are
sometimes contradictory and by endless conferences which do not
deliver any concrete results.”
- Antiquated
methods and techniques, lack of access to fertilizers and
improved seeds, and other challenges due to the lack of state
support.
- Lack of
efficient and maintained irrigation systems.
- Crop loss due
to the lack of a road system that can safely and efficiently get
produce to markets and/or the lack of adequate food storage
facilities.
- Lack of
enforcement of a tree-cutting ban, and the lack of an energy
policy, which discourages charcoal as an energy source, both of
which contribute to deforestation.
- Vulnerability
to tropical weather events like droughts and flooding due to
massive deforestation and other results of failure to manage the
environment.
- Declining soil
quality caused, in part, by increased run-off due to
deforestation.
- Emigration of
youth from farming areas due to lack of schools, other services,
and economic opportunity, and the ensuing lack of farmers and
farm workers in the countryside.
5) Negative
impacts from various food aid practices over the past 55 years
Other failures or
negative results of “aid” mechanisms. The Haitian government
told the UN mission that foreign donors shy away from budgetary
support and that this is one of many stumbling blocks. According
to the UN Office of the Special Envoy, in 2007, for example,
bilateral donors gave only 3% of their aid to budget support,
while multilateral donors gave only 16%. All the rest of foreign
aid went to agencies and projects. Also, the 2009 UN mission
criticized a decade or more of focusing on “emergencies” rather
than structural causes of hunger, declining agricultural
production, environmental degradation, and other linked
structural issues. The mission also criticized the results of
“the perverse mechanism of handouts like farmers waiting for
free fertilizer, the failure to clean certain canals in the
hopes that an NGO will pay for it…”
6) Internal market inefficiencies,
especially what one U.S. government report called “oligopolistic
practices” by food importers. The rice market, for example, is
dominated by three major import companies, which are controlled
by three members of Haiti’s elite. A 2010 study noted that
“rather than undercutting one another’s prices, Haiti’s major
importers collude to agree on prices.” This results in local
prices that are unnecessarily high and are sometimes much higher
than on the international market. One importer admitted to the
study author: “If this were the U.S., we would go to jail.”
|
