POOR RICH HAITI
By Lautaro Rivara, People's Dispatch.
March 29, 2021 | EDUCATE!
Above photo: Lautaro Rivara.
How Imperialists And Local Oligarchy Have Sought Destroy Agriculture In
Haiti.
From Haiti, Lautaro Rivara unpacks the tired trope of poor rich Haiti,
highlighting the role of foreign capital and local elites in the destruction
of life in the countryside.
Does the oft-repeated refrain that Haiti is the poorest country in the
Western hemisphere explain anything? Is it a poor country or an
impoverished country? Or perhaps it is unsuspectedly rich? Are its
indifferent friends in the West really not interested in the country? Why
then do the United States and European countries seem to be so zealous about
the Haitian thing? In a series of notes and based on fieldwork carried out
in four departments of the country, we will focus on understanding the poor
rich Haiti and some of the initiatives of what has been called its
reconstruction since 2010. We will discuss the economic interests of
Western powers, expressed through initiatives such as industrial parks,
mining operations, enclave tourism ventures, land grabbing and agricultural
free zones.
Haitis borders are curious. The small country is bordered to the east by
the Dominican Republic, dividing in two the territory of the island of
Hispaniola. To the west it borders the Caribbean Sea and to the south, a
forgotten maritime border with the Republic of Colombia. But what interests
us here is a border that is not entirely imaginary: to the north and
northeast, although the maps would like to indicate otherwise, Haiti borders
the United States.
It is here, in this region, that most US economic interests and also those
of its smaller partners are concentrated. This is the case of Canada, that
peculiar North American colony that in turn colonizes others. But also those
of France, Germany and other European nations. In this and the following
notes, we will talk about industrial parks, mining and speculation, enclave
tourism ventures, land grabbing and agricultural free trade zones. This does
not include some unholy initiatives in other parts of the country, such as
the seizure of entire islands, drug trafficking or tax havens where the
money comes in dirty and goes out free of guilt and sin.
But it is in the northeast region of this poor rich country that the power
enjoyed by the current de facto president, Jovenel Moïse, has been amassed.
He has made this territory his personal fiefdom. His modus operandi has been
land grabbing and the true foundation of his power, his economic alliances
with transnational capital, both legal and extralegal.
For this, we will travel to the heart of the communities affected by what,
after the devastating earthquake of 2010, has become known as the
Reconstruction of Haiti. In this first note, we will talk paraphrasing
Eduardo Galeano about the Banana King Jovenel Moïse and his numerous
agricultural courtiers. But first, lets take a look at the situation of the
rural areas and the local peasantry.
Barefoot
One out of every two inhabitants of the country lives in the countryside.
But an even higher percentage of the population, around 66%, depends on and
subsists in relation to rural areas and agricultural production. According
to a study by the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean
(ECLAC), the urban population has only overtaken the rural population in the
last five years, and the current difference is only about 100,000 people.
Land everywhere is finite and vital. But it is even more so in a territory
covered by extensive mountain ranges, and where the agricultural frontier is
receding with every meter gained by deforestation and desertification
today the country retains barely 2 percent of its original vegetation cover.
It is not surprising, then, that a large part of the peasant population is
poor: they are the so-called pyè atè, the pata en tierra, the barefoot.
For a long time, however, an unprecedentedly radical measure was at least
able to guarantee Haitians a piece of land on which to produce and reproduce
life. Since the revolutionary constitution of 1805, land ownership was
denied to foreigners on the grounds of sovereignty and national dignity,
becoming an obstacle to the full implementation of capitalism on the island.
At least until the definitive abolition of this prohibition in 1915, under
the mantle of the American occupation.
Today, there are around 600,000 farms in Haiti, organized in small plots
jaden of between 0.5 and 1.8 hectares. Peasant agriculture is mostly
family and traditional, but there are many different forms of land
ownership, work and usage: family landowners, tenant farmers, tenant
farmers, day laborers, sharecroppers, etc. The tools used are rustic, often
no more than the traditional pickaxe and machete, usually without draft
animals, without any kind of machinery, without chemical fertilizers, with
native seeds, all under a rain-fed agricultural regime. Despite the enormous
contribution of peasant agriculture to national wealth around 25 percent
of GDP the states contributions to the sector are practically
nonexistent.
On the other side of rural life, a select group of families, usually living
abroad, as well as a handful of transnational corporations, still
concentrate around half of the available land and in many cases, worse
still, keep it unproductive.
A Requiem For The Free Market
Eat what you dont produce and dont eat what you produce. This is the
secret of the offshoring and financialized export agriculture that has been
promoted in the country in recent decades. A fundamental milestone in its
implementation was the policy of trade and financial liberalization imposed
in the mid-1980s, with the help of the International Monetary Fund, the US
State Department and the enthusiastic action of the ineffable Bill Clinton
a self-styled friend of Haiti whose friendship, however, nobody here wants
to reciprocate.
In the mid-1990s, this policy deepened, with tariffs on rice imports falling
from 35 percent to 3 percent under external pressure. In the same year, the
US invested 60 billion dollars to subsidize its own rice production.
So-called dumping resulted in Haitis production falling by over 50% from
130,000 to 60,000 tons. The selling prices of the peasantry, exposed to
unfair competition with the hyper-subsidized American farmer, led to the
ruin and exodus of thousands and thousands of peasants. A vicious circle of
agricultural ruin, unemployment, hunger, foreign food aid, impossibility of
competing with the free food sent to the country, and again more ruin,
unemployment, hunger, etc., was generated.
As a result, Haiti went from being practically self-sufficient in the
production of the staple grain of its national diet to importing it
massively. Although the case of rice is the most dramatic, it is far from
the only one. The nation went from importing less than 20 percent of its
food in the early 1980s to importing more than 55 percent from abroad today,
mainly from the United States and the Dominican Republic.
This cycle resulted in the partial destruction of traditional peasant
agriculture. Some may call it subsistence, but for the local peasant it
was instead an agriculture of abundance, if we consider how trade
liberalization has generalized the phenomenon of hunger today. On the other
hand, the relationship between food assistance and hunger is direct, as was
the case with the Tikè Manje program and others developed by USAID,
through voucher systems that only allow the population to have access to
North American products.
Agritrans S.A.: The Flagship
In this scorched earth scenario, after the devastating earthquake of January
2010, the project of transnational, deterritorialized and financialized
agriculture began to take shape. Transnational, due to the dominant
influence of external capital, beyond the resounding publicity of certain
local entrepreneurs. It is deterritorialized because the local space
becomes a kind of non-place for the capitals that mold the territory in
their image and likeness: bananas from Haiti or Guadeloupe, soya from Brazil
or Paraguay, sugar cane from the Caribbean or European beet sugar, etc., are
all the same. And it is financialized because what this agriculture tends to
produce is not food, but foreign currency. In short, it is an agriculture
that satisfies only the hunger for capital accumulation.
A cautious detour with a good local guide allowed us to enter the lands of
Agritrans S.A., the company of de facto president Jovenel Moïse, which
became famous for its involvement in one of the largest embezzlements of
public funds in the countrys history, amounting to a quarter of the
national GDP. This was confirmed by Senate investigations before its
closure in January 2020 and by the Supreme Audit Court, before its
reduction, by presidential decree, to nothing more than a mere consultative
body.
The inhabitants of the Limonade and Terrier-Rouge area, in the North-East
Department, are in awe of all things related to this fabled expanse of land.
And for those who feel neither fear nor respect, there are armed guards to
remind them. They told us to stop and threatened to shoot as soon as the
motorbike we were traveling on around their perimeter on National Route 6
slowed down. Unable to film or photograph the accesses, we had to
clandestinely enter the estate through some twisted wire fences on the side
of a canal. Surprisingly, a barren plain then spread out before us. Whether
because of the environmental damage resulting from intensive production
without crop rotation, or perhaps because the tenure of these lands today
serves more the assertion of local power than the process of real
accumulation, we saw not even a trace of a cultivated field. Today,
Agritrans S.A. is a huge, uncultivated estate, surrounded by crowds of
peasants who cannot even get access to a handkerchief of land, as the
locals eloquently put it.
The Nourribio project was set up here in 2013, on the land of the man who
would later become the countrys president. The 1,000 hectares in front of
us were donated for a project that envisaged the intensive production of
bananas, mainly for export to Western countries. It also took the form of a
free zone, exempt from taxes and other charges. The land for its
establishment was expropriated from 3,000 peasants and granted in concession
for a renewable term of 25 years. The aforementioned promises of employment
fell far short of expectations: only 200 people were being employed,
according to information from 2014. And the people who lost land? The small
amount of their compensation was spent on the basic necessities of everyday
life. With no land to work or produce, their beneficiaries soon found
themselves unemployed, expelled to the capital, expelled abroad, or reduced
to starvation, if not a combination of all of the above.
According to the specialist Georges Eddy Lucien, in the face of the banana
production crisis in the French overseas departments (Guadeloupe and
Martinique), the Northeast of Haiti appears in the eyes of investors
and international institutions as an ideal alternative territory, where
production costs (labor, available land) are much lower
. The
impoverishment of Haitian workers has meant that the wages of an
agricultural worker can be 25 times lower 25 times! Not to mention if we
compare it with the average wages of a Frenchman or a North American.
History is a boomerang. The first shipment of Agritrans bananas arrived at
the port of Antwerp in Belgium in 2015. The same port that flourished during
the slave trade and during the reign of Leopold II. A century ago, thousands
of kilos of ivory and rubber, the product of slave exploitation in the
Belgian Congo, arrived there. Today, it is bananas from Haiti, produced by
one of the most impoverished workforces on the planet.
Operation Dispossession
However, at least the construction of Agritrans S.A. involved mechanisms
that we will call quasi-legal although not moral through the
expropriation and compensation of peasant properties, measures taken perhaps
because of the international visibility of the project.
But the policy of land grabbing has deepened in recent years, according to
the leaders of the main peasant organizations during a recent colloquium on
the subject held in the central region. There, for example, the national
government ceded by decree no less than 8,600 hectares of fertile land to
the Apaid family, one of the richest in the country. Another agricultural
free trade zone is supposed to be built there, but this time for the
production and export of stevia for the multinational Coca-Cola.
But back to the Northeast. After long walks along impassable rural roads,
flooded by rain, mud and state neglect, we were able to visit several
communities that have suffered and are today facing the dispossession of
their lands by local landowners, foreign companies and armed gangs.
In Terrier Rouge, Irené Cinic Antoine of the Small planters movement told
us that she has owned a large plot of 6,000 hectares of land since 1986. In
1995, under the progressive government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the
process to legalize their tenure began. Since then, the common lands have
been divided between agriculture, charcoal trees and livestock. Their
ownership rights were even published in the official state newspaper, but
the documents were later disappeared by anonymous hands.
We also talk to Christiane Fonrose and her husband, as they stoke the fire
on the mountain of earth inside which burns the wood that will be turned
into charcoal. It is one of the few remaining means of survival in the
region, although its ecological costs are well known to all, particularly to
the peasantry. From his unshakeable faith, Fonrose tells us: The land is
Gods thing, which God created for us. Before creating his children, God
created the earth. (
) But then they took the earth out of our hands. Today
we have nowhere to plant, nowhere to graze some small animals, the children
cannot go to school (
) We are in a very difficult situation.
We were also able to visit peasant organizations in Grand Basin who are
currently resisting the permanent hostility of invisible actors who are
trying to take over land that was ceded to them by the state, again during
the Aristide era. After another long trek along the difficult rural roads,
our interview had to be conducted in the pouring rain, as even the roofs and
doors of the small house on the plot were stolen. Here, on the edge of
mineral-rich mountains, 1,500 organized peasants have been able to work 148
kawo of land (about 200 hectares) to produce sugar cane, maize, manioc and
even honey and kleren a peasant sugar cane brandy in a sovereign and
agro-ecological way.
A little over a year ago, a heavily armed group broke in, disrupting their
crops, stealing or killing their animals, destroying fences, buildings and
their meager agricultural implements. Evidently these were neither neighbors
nor amateurs, as the operation involved the deployment of expensive
bulldozers. Even today, the land that was taken remains unproductive, and
the peasants are constantly threatened not to try to recover it. So far, no
state body has given them any response. Without the land, outside the land,
we peasants are worthless. We voted for them ourselves, but it seems that
they dont need us anymore, concludes Antoine.
Today there are barely 350 people left, including only a handful of young
people: most of them have been forced to migrate to the capital
Port-au-Prince or even abroad. In the long siege they have been suffering
since then. The National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INARA) has hardly
dared to take sides with them. Coincidentally, according to recent reports,
the Moïse government is seeking to eliminate this body in the new
constitution it is now preparing. According to Wilson Messidor, leader of
MOPAG, the project to dispossess them of their land would be closely linked
to the mining resources in the area, and to the construction of the
so-called villages, semi-closed residential neighborhoods that USAID is
building for the workers in the free trade zones.
USAID appears, in fact, as the de facto civil authority in these
territories, and its projects are constantly growing and multiplying, as
indicated by the numerous signs on the roadsides. According to an anonymous
Cuban engineer, the US mega-cooperation organization operates through loans
and projects, indebting the state and the communities, in order to guarantee
control of strategic areas for their water and mineral resources.
It matters little, following Eduardo Galeanos metaphor, whether the monarch
is King Banana, Queen Stevia or King Manufacture. Haiti continues to be
determined by the blessings of nature and the curses of those who dominate
history. We will continue, in the next note, to unravel the mysteries of
this poor rich country which, in the international division of labor, has
been subjected to the task of exporting poverty and importing humanitarian
aid. We will talk about the export processing zones and the bizarre project
to turn Haiti into the Taiwan of America.
Lautaro Rivara is a sociologist, researcher and poet. As a trained
journalist, he participated as an activist in different spaces of
communications work, covering tasks of editing, writing, radio broadcasts,
and photography. During his two years in the Jean-Jacques Dessalines Brigade
in Haiti he was responsible for communications and carried out political
education with Haitian peoples movements in this area. He writes regularly
in peoples media projects of Argentina and the rest of Latin America and
the Caribbean including Nodal, ALAI, Telesur, Resumen Latinoamericano,
Pressenza, la RedH, Notas, Haití Liberte, Alcarajo, and more.