Haiti food aid lags, hunger deepens

Thirty years ago, Haiti raised nearly all the rice it needed.  What happened?  

In 1986, after the expulsion of Haitian dictator Jean Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loaned Haiti $24.6 million in desperately needed funds (Baby Doc had raided the treasury on the way out).  But, in order to get the IMF loan, Haiti was required to reduce tariff protections for their Haitian rice and other agricultural products and some industries to open up the country's markets to competition from outside countries.  The U.S. has by far the largest voice in decisions of the IMF.

Doctor Paul Farmer was in Haiti then and saw what happened.  "Within less than two years, it became impossible for Haitian farmers to compete with what they called ‘Miami rice.'  The whole local rice market in Haiti fell apart as cheap, U.S. subsidized rice, some of it in the form of ‘food aid,' flooded the market. There was violence, ‘rice wars,' and lives were lost."

"American rice invaded the country," recalled Charles Suffrard, a leading rice grower in Haiti in an interview with the Washington Post in 2000.  By 1987 and 1988, there was so much rice coming into the country that many stopped working the land.

Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste, a Haitian priest who has been the pastor at St. Claire and an outspoken human rights advocate, agrees.  "In the 1980s, imported rice poured into Haiti, below the cost of what our farmers could produce it.  Farmers lost their businesses.  People from the countryside started losing their jobs and moving to the cities.  After a few years of cheap imported rice, local production went way down."

Still the international business community was not satisfied.  In 1994, as a condition for U.S. assistance in returning to Haiti to resume his elected Presidency, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced by the U.S., the IMF, and the World Bank to open up the markets in Haiti even more.