a1017: Re: a1010: Re: Duvalier period protectionism (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JoAnn Jaffe <joann.jaffe@uregina.ca>

Thanks for the helpful comments. Let me tell you where I'm coming from on
this. I believe the situation may be a bit different than it looks
"officially." I, too, was living in Haiti at the time, in a rural village in
the Southwest.  At the time, I was conducting research for my dissertation,
and was running weekly market surveys in the regional market of Ducis as a
part of that work. This is the largest market in the SW and serves as a
major bulking and breaking centre. Week after week, month after month, the
price of Madame Gougous (IR 8)--at the time the most popular and expensive
Haitian produced rice--sold for 17 goud pou mamit. In July of 1985, the
price fell precipitously to 12 goud, and never recovered. Suddenly, there
were vast quantities of imported rice, diri miyami it was called at the
time, in the Ducis market. This had very negative effects on producers of
all grains, as you can well imagine. The price of corn, for example, which
had previously been 5-5.5 goud/mamit during "normal periods" and 4-4.5
goud/mamit during harvest fell to 3.5 goud/mamit and 2.5 goud/mamit,
respectively.

It was clear to me at the time that the growing levels of contraband were at
least in part to blame. But it was also clear to me from conversations with
people in Haitian and US gov circles that the growing contraband market was
a way of bending to demands to liberalize, while at the same time allowing
for new opportunities to accumulate through cronyism. Rice was not the
first, nor the only, agricultural product to succumb. For example,
contraband also defeated some locally transformed agro-industry products, as
well.

In a discussion with Leslie Delatour in February, 1987, he basically
concurred, and while he felt that the Duvalier gov had begun to liberalize,
the present regime needed to go further and without contraband.

I would agree that we have left out of this discussion the effect of wheat
and corn imports, which are another matter.

Thanks for the reference,
JoAnn Jaffe