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27670: Hermantin(News)U.S. exports killing Haitis once thriving rice industry (fwd)
From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>
U.S. exports killing Haiti’s once thriving rice industry
BY Letta Tayler
NEWSDAY
February 5, 2006
LA VERDUE, Haiti · The scene couldn't have looked more idyllic. Men, women and
teenagers waded slowly through verdant rice paddies, rhythmically plunging
handfuls of seedlings into the warm mud. White egrets skimmed the surface of
the wet fields. Here and there, a coconut palm swayed in the humid breeze.
But rice cultivation, a centuries-old ritual in La Verdue and other hamlets
across the fertile Artibonite Valley in central Haiti, is becoming an
endangered occupation.
Every year, more farmers leave their tiny plots of land, unable to cope with
soaring production costs, clogged irrigation canals and armed bandits who steal
the harvest and day workers' pay.
Most devastating of all, Haitians increasingly are eating what they call "Miami
rice," heavily subsidized U.S. rice that floods the market at half the price of
local grain.
"It's misery and more misery," said Roland Toussaint, 35, a farmer in bare feet
and a straw hat who started working in the paddies as a boy, alongside his
father and grandfather. "We can't compete with the American rice. It's killing
us."
Three decades ago, Haiti was almost self-sufficient in rice production, the
mainstay of the rural economy. But since Haiti opened its markets to the United
States in 1986 at the behest of lenders including the International Monetary
Fund, rice production has halved, while rice imports, mainly from the United
States, have increased 50-fold.
Haiti's rice problems are emblematic of the broader economic crisis facing this
tiny island nation, which two centuries ago was the pearl of the Antilles,
stuffing colonial France's coffers by producing much of the world's sugar,
coffee and mahogany.
Now, Haiti is the poorest country in the hemisphere. Three-fourths of Haitians
live on less than $2 a day and 70 percent of the workforce is jobless or
underemployed. More than half the children don't get enough to eat.
Most development experts think that the president whom Haitians will elect in
balloting now set for Tuesday must start any economic turnaround in the
countryside, home to two-thirds of the country's 8 million people.
While tourism, light industry and handicrafts also can create jobs, "rural
development is key to revitalizing Haiti's economy," said Volny Paultre, Haiti
program director for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. "And
central to that development is rice."
Otherwise, Paultre and other experts predict, peasants will continue leaving
for the city in search of manufacturing jobs that no longer exist. Or migrating
to neighboring Dominican Republic, where they often work under brutal
conditions for almost no pay. Or boarding rickety boats bound for the United
States, home to an estimated 1 million Haitians. About a quarter of them live
in South Florida, according to the 2004 U.S. Census survey, although community
leaders say the number is larger.
Haiti still has the capacity to be almost self-sufficient in rice, many
agronomists say.
Rice was among a flood of foreign imports that Haiti's then-military government
accepted in exchange for international loans in the 1980s. The rice imports
sparked such an uproar that the government dispatched armed convoys to escort
the first rice shipments through the Artibonite Valley.
Further protective barriers against U.S. rice were dismantled in 1994 by
then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide as part of the agreement with Washington
to restore him to power after he had been ousted in a military coup three years
earlier.
Haiti's tariffs on rice imports fell from 35 percent to 3 percent, the lowest
in the region. In contrast, rice tariffs in the Dominican Republic, which
shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, are 40 percent.
International lenders forbade Haiti from subsidizing its rice farmers; the aim
was to cultivate Haitian industries that could survive without props. Yet U.S.
rice farmers are massively subsidized by the U.S. government, receiving $1.3
billion last year to support a crop that cost $1.8 billion to grow, according
to a report issued in April by Oxfam International, a nonprofit organization
dedicated to poverty eradication.
"This is an example of rigged rules and double standards at their baldest,"
said Phil Bloomer, head of Oxfam International's Make Trade Fair campaign, who
called the practice "scandalous."
Today, three out of four platefuls of rice eaten were grown in the United
States. Rice has gradually edged out other staples such as cassava, cornmeal
and millet.
U.S. products have hurt other farm sectors as well. Haiti's once-thriving
poultry industry is in ruins, thanks to a flood of chicken parts.
"They keep the breast meat in the United States and sell us the gizzards and
necks and claws just before they are about to rot," said Jean Pierre-Louis, a
rice farmer in Petite Riviere, a market town near La Verdue. "We've become a
U.S. dumping ground."
Defenders, including U.S. food exporters, note that the imports have helped
consumers by lowering food prices in a nation where half the children are
malnourished. They also have provided Haiti's cash-strapped government with
revenue through import taxes, though two executives at one U.S. company were
convicted last year of bribing Haitian Customs officials to illegally reduce
those tax payments.
But the flood of U.S. goods has "proved disastrous in the long term," said
Jean-Claude Paulvin, president of the Haiti Economists Association.
Paulvin said the blame falls not just on international lenders but also on this
country's leaders, who traditionally have ignored the peasant class in the
countryside and inherited their old colonizers' habit of plundering the
country's wealth.
"Here in Haiti we have a pirate mentality. We've had a series of predatory
governments whose mentality is, suck out the resources rather than reinvest,"
Paulvin said. "I only hope the next government is strong enough and has clear
enough vision to sit down with the international community and say, `This is
what I want.'"
"Miami rice" is not the only threat to rice farmers. The transitional
government, installed after Aristide was ousted from office a second time in
February 2004, has ended fertilizer subsidies despite soaring costs for fuel, a
fertilizer component. A 100-pound bag of fertilizer now costs up to $35, double
the price a year ago. With credit almost nonexistent, many farmers are forced
to sell a pig or a cow to buy fertilizer.
But farmers have fewer pigs to sell, thanks in part to a U.S.-backed
international aid program in 1981 to replace Creole pigs slaughtered during an
African Swine Fever epidemic.
Instead of replacing the Creole swine, which were hardy and easy to feed, the
aid agencies sent in Iowa porkers that required special feed and pens.
So, many farmers plant less rice. Others make ends meet by not sending their
children to school, contributing to the country's illiteracy rate of 55
percent.
"What choice do I have?" said rice farmer Jasnel Charles, 29, of La Verdue,
explaining that annual tuition for his young daughter would cost about the same
as a bag of fertilizer.
With fertilizer costs so high, most farmers can't even think about renting or
buying a tractor or other machinery to improve production. Most rice is
harvested with machetes and threshed by hand.
With Haiti sliding toward anarchy in the past several years, the government has
failed to maintain irrigation canals, causing many paddies to dry up.
Then there are the armed bandits, some paid by large landowners seeking to
squeeze out subsistence farmers, others acting on their own. They whiz through
back roads on motor scooters, extracting illegal taxes or bags of rice worth
only a few dollars each to "authorize" peasants to work the land.
"Every day we're more scared to go out and work," said Toussaint, who has been
robbed three times in less than two years. Like most farmers in the Artibonite,
he wishes his three young children could continue to cultivate rice. But if
things continue as they are, he wants them to leave, as so many young people
already have.
Some sneak into neighboring Caribbean countries or the United States. Others
head to burgeoning slums in Port-au-Prince, hoping to find work in assembly
plants..
But most of the factory jobs have moved to China, leaving 92 percent of the
Port-au-Prince workforce with no regular employment.
Some unemployed join armed gangs. Others scrounge enough to buy a wheelbarrow
and sell whatever they can at street markets: used clothes, spaghetti, soap,
sugarcane or U.S. rice.
"Haitian rice tastes better, but it costs too much," said Natalie Gilmon, a
mother of six, as she paid 15 gourdes (37 cents) for a two-cup scoop of U.S.
rice from a sack emblazoned with a red, white and blue flag at a Port-au-Prince
street market. It was exactly half the cost of Haitian rice. "As it is, we
don't get enough to eat."
Newsday is a Tribune Co. newspaper.
Copyright © 2006, South Florida Sun-Sentinel