a1033: Re: a1027, 1023, etc. Devastating effects (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Philip Richter <philipcrichter@hotmail.com>

Kevin:
   I was refering to government policy. The real government during the coup
period was headed by Aristide and run jointly by him, principally through
telephone contact, and Robert Malval, Prime Minister, who appointed a full
complement of Ministers and who operated together out of his home in Delmas.
The defacto regime was not a legally or any way the true government of
Haiti, so , as far as I'm concerned, whatever commercial import practices
they adopted were not government policy.
   One of the  devastating effects of the cheap imports is a drop in per
capita income The average per capita income is now, I think, $240/year, and
the median income per capita, which is a better measure for Haiti in my
opinion, is now $60/year. I will look up where I got these numbers and how
they compare to 1995, but I really don't have time to go back and document
the other effects. I will add that you can look around yourself: PAPDA has
done a study which maintains there has been a 60% drop in corn production in
the South which it links to cheap food imports. I have a hard time believing
that figure, it seems a bit too low, but you can stop by their office in
Port-au-Prince and pick it up. They also have an econometric analysis of the
rise in prices that points out that the increase in the cost of agricultural
inputs is greater proportionally than the rise in market prices due to the
downward pressure of cheap imported food, which explains in part the drop in
per capita income in rural areas. I believe that USAID's recent nutrition
surveys (1999, 2000, 2001) done in collaboration with the NGO's that
distribute food note a recent drop in rural nutrition levels. This drop is
also predicted in one of the studies I recommended to you through a
'probable causal link' to low prices for imported food. This is pretty
damning and its all due to government policy. I should add also that the
import policy has been foisted on Haiti by the lenders and grantors. It is
possible that the administration would not have adopted these policies if
left to there own decisions. However, the anti-neoliberal block in the
legislature didn't make a peep about the import policy element of the
structural adjustment, resisting only - correct me if I'm wrong - the
privatization of the parastatals.
Phil R.



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