Pigs, Rice and Subjugation: The Continuing Colonization of Haiti

Analysis of current events in Haiti, considering issues of political ecology, colonialism and neo-colonialism, environmental racism, ecological morality, and challenges regarding distribution of human services, viewed through an applied anthropology perspective. Term project for Environmental Anthropology, ANTH212, Dr. Caroline Hartse, 2012.

Image of Kreyol pig, from Kochon Kreyol : A story in pictures http://faculty.goucher.edu/mbell/
 

 

 

                                      

                             


A Rude Awakening:

          While initially beginning this research, I sought to explore the presuppositions about the advantages in utilizing the resources of Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) and contrast it with the effectiveness of direct governmental aid or UN peacekeeping forces to assist the victims of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.  NGOs in many instances demonstrate slower progress and cost more than local Community Based Organizations (CBOs) to complete projects (Reitman, 2011, Schuller 2009, p.91), push unwanted programs on the Haitian people (Reitman, 2011; Schuller, 2009; Vannier, 2010, p. 290-2) cause social rifts within communities (James, 2012, p. 63-68; Sontag, 2012, para. 4-7), in many instances are self-perpetuating cash-cows (Wearne, 2012; Reitman, 2011), and often further the aims of covert international political groups (James, 2012; Schuller, 2007, p. 87; Reitman, 2011, sect. 5).  Even before the quake, Haiti hosted almost 10,000 NGOs (Wearne, p. 18 ), many of them in residence for so long they are nearly naturalized citizens (“Haiti: Constitution of 1987”, 2011).  While NGOs are in several cases useful for direct and immediate emergency relief, their presence in many ways hinders the social, economic and infrastructural rebuilding that are needed in response to the nation’s current dire straits resulting from not only the recent natural and biological disasters in Haiti, but from the many layers of domestic and international failures going all the way back to the Saint Domingue island colony on Hispañola.  

         
          This in itself was a revelation, and upon further digging I found evidence linking the destabilization and centralization of Haiti’s agricultural systems, as well as forced dependence on imported foods to actions by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).  The Kreyol pig eradication in the 1980s (Murray, 1987, p. 244), followed by the influx of US subsidized rice imports (Lindsay, 2010; Wucker, 2004) both caused extreme hardship on the majority rural population and led to mass migration from the countryside to the capital city of Port-au-Prince, where the available work was to be found in low-wage jobs producing export items in foreign owned factories (Lindsay, 2010, p. 20; Wearne, 2012, p. 19).  I propose that the colonial and neo-liberal world powers’ systematic hobbling of Haiti’s self-determination and economic success since the inception of the independent nation not only keeps the country’s people in neo-colonial servitude, but also contributed greatly to massive loss of life in the 2010 earthquake, centered in the nation’s capital.  Wearne (2012) likens the US and international communities’ policies to genocide.

“An empty bag cannot sit on its own.”  – Haitian proverb

          The end of the Duvalier regime in the late 1980s also saw the end of the United States’ favor for the Caribbean nation, formerly a Cold War era insurance policy against Cuba.  When Jean-Claude Duvalier was ousted to the protective custody of the US government, much of the nation’s treasury disappeared with him, and Haiti was left holding the proverbial empty bag.  When the impoverished country sought assistance from the IMF, loans were granted under the condition that it “allow” heavily subsidized rice to be imported from United States’ rice farmers. Tariffs were lifted, markets were flooded, and small Haitian farmers went under while the “Miami rice” business boomed (Wearne, 2012, p. 18).  When combined with other IMF demands such as the privatization of many governmental agencies, increased taxes and the elimination of fuel subsidies (Wucker, p. 43) the resulting economic effects were devastating.  Fluctuations in market prices caused riots in the years preceding the election of President Aristide, and in part led to the installation of international peacekeeping forces to suppress uprisings and maintain order.  President Clinton, who worked extensively to bring the rice program to Haiti, has acknowledged its shortcomings: “It was a mistake…I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed these people. [sic] Because of what I did. [sic] Nobody else.” (Wearne, 2012, p. 18). Haitians may question whether Clinton lives with these consequences in the same way that they do every day, and even Clinton’s actions within more recently implemented works bring into question his sincerity. Projects such as a new industrial park on a previously undeveloped bay, and new maquiladora style factories owned by foreign companies, both supported by the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission (IHRC) of which Clinton is a co-chair, are still popping up in Haiti, while the issues of self-determination and food production are put aside (Lindsay, 2010; Reitman, 2011; Wearne, 2012).

          It hasn’t always been this way. The Constitution of Haiti, in nearly all of its nearly twenty incarnations forbade the foreign ownership of land and in contrast to its colonial beginnings, supported a decentralized “counter-plantation” agricultural system (DuBois & Jenson, 2012, para. 3).  Even though France extorted incredible sums of monetary “compensation” for the loss of its coffee and sugar incomes from the former slave colony throughout the nineteenth century  (Hothschild, para. 5; Schuller, 2007, p. 71), the new nation still attracted immigrants from the Americas and stood as a beacon of hope and democracy-in-action for slave populations across the western hemisphere.  An international embargo enforced during the same time by colonial powers England, France and the United States may actually have been a contributing reason for Haiti’s domestic economic independence and development.  Forced to look within for resources and methods, Haiti developed a system that worked.  The fledgling government divided its nation into districts, each with a seat city and its own port, designing a confederacy of integrated cooperative counties where many merchants exchanged unofficially with US business partners.  

          This system lasted until the invasion and occupation by the United States from 1915 through 1934.  The new occupying government rewrote the Constitution to allow foreign ownership of land, and restructured the economic system to center entirely around Port-au-Prince, using forced labor to build roads from the countryside to the capital (DuBois & Jenson, 2012, para. 7), and effectively streamlined the island nation for export;  in short, re-colonizing it.  A series of US supported dictators and kleptocrats continued in this vein through much of the twentieth century, enforcing economic policies and recreating the plantations’ system of indentured servitude. 

          Still, thirty years ago Haitian farmers grew the majority of their nation’s food (DuBois & Jenson, 2012, para. 3; Lindsay, 2010, p. 21; Wearne, 2012, p. 18).  About half of the nation’s marketed food was produced domestically, and provided a varied diet. But by 2010, Haiti had become the fourth largest importer of US grown rice in the world (Lindsay, 2010, p. 21).  Presently in the post-earthquake economy, although farmers are still willing to produce, the international aid community has put little emphasis on push-starting domestic food programs.  Four percent of the UN’s request for aid after the earthquake was budgeted for Haiti’s own Food and Agriculture Organization, and months after the quake, only eight percent of that budgeted amount had been allocated.  Many farmers were using that year’s seed supply as food for their families (Lindsay, 2010, p. 21).

“It’s the quiet pigs that eat the meal.” – Haitian proverb

          The Kreyol pig was a small black strain brought to the Americas by Spaniards in the early colonization period. Traditionally Haitian peasants banked their surplus wealth by keeping the pigs as insurance against bad times such as crop failures, or to pay for weddings, funerals, medical bills and their children’s education. African Swine Fever appeared in Haiti’s neighbor the Dominican Republic in 1978, posing a threat to the international pork industry.  The disease while damaging to swine is not contagious to humans; infected pigs can be slaughtered and their meat eaten (Gaertner, 2000).  The US insisted that the domesticated pigs of Hispañola be eradicated.  The Duvalier government along with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) enforced the slaughter of all the Kreyol pigs in Haiti, about 380,000 swine, at an estimated loss of $600 million to the peasants (Aristide, 2000, as cited by “Toward Freedom”, 2005).  The European strains of swine imported from the US to replace the herds were dubbed the “four-legged prince” by locals because of their delicate conditions, lack of acclimation to the tropical climate and need for expensive feed, which was available through USAID for a fee.  The neo-liberal program that had sought to replace the local traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) was a failure.

          After this extreme financial loss in the years preceding the 2010 quake, Haitians relocated to Port-au-Prince in droves, where people built anything they could, anywhere they could, in order to have shelter.  The bidonvil (a Kreyol term for “shantytown”) cropped up in arroyos, cliff sides, any place possible.  By some estimates, 2.5 million have left rural areas for the city in the past twenty years, which has seen its population balloon from approximately 750,000 to 3 million (Reitman, 2011, sect. 7, para. 1; Wearne, 2012, p. 18) a fair share of the  nation’s 9.8 million people (“The World Fact Book”, 2012).  The emigration from rural communities further taxed the capital’s already strained infrastructure and services such as garbage removal and road maintenance; electricity, sewers, and running water were not widely available.  When the earthquake hit, the vast majority of residential buildings were reduced to rubble. A few exceptions, such as a high rise public housing project built under the administration of Aristide, escaped damage.  While speculation as to whether the devastating loss of life seen in the 2010 earthquake would have happened if international policy had not forced the population to inhabit dangerous structures that should never have been built does not change the outcome of this tragedy, it is important to note this grave example of the effects of globalization on subjugated cultures (Ambraseys & Bilham, 2011).

“When you’re poor, everything is your fault.”  – Haitian proverb

          Much has been written about the failures of the barely functioning Haitian government’s lack of initiative to proactively tackle the overwhelming obstacles it faces: non-functioning infrastructure, continued squalid conditions in temporary housing camps, and pervasive corruption inhibiting equitable distribution of aid.  But I contend that the blame does not lie squarely on the Haitian people, its government, or its culture.  Haiti’s beginnings after the first successful slave rebellion in the western hemisphere developed a self-determined nation, and it’s continued persistence shows its will to survive, in spite of all its challenges: NGOs that spend donations from well-intentioned international private donors on air conditioners, fleets of shiny SUVs and banks of new computers; international peace keeping forces that at best are ineffectual and at worst cause outbreaks of infectious disease (Sontag, 2012b); kleptocratic dictators and revolving door military juntas, these have all bent Haiti, but not broken it.  Although it is easy to become overwhelmed with the vastness of Haiti’s desperate needs, there are also glimmers of hope.  A program to introduce reforestation as a sustainable cash crop that provides income directly to individual farmers (Murray, 1987) has worked to counteract the unilateral denuding of Haiti’s trees and subsequent erosion of vital soils.  CBOs are learning how to work the bureaucratic system in their favor, and are proactively seeking partnerships with NGOs to design programs that Haitians themselves find vital (Vannier, 2010).  

          The beginnings of a movement away from the city and back to small scale farming in rural areas has encouraged those who are ready to take neocolonialism by the horns, step up, and be heard.  As described by Lindsay, (2010) Louise Bonne, who up until the earthquake had lived her entire life in Port-au-Prince, now camps on the patio of her cousin’s house in the country, and says she would rather try to earn a living where she is now than return to the city: “…they should help us develop our own natural resources for the long term.  That way, we can respond to our needs without having to depend on someone else to give us rice, beans and other daily necessities.”  The Haitian people found their voice when they sent France packing in 1804.  Two hundred years later, if enough voices like Bonne’s keep making themselves heard, she may just get her way.

                                      
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