[News] How USAID Undermines Democracy In Haiti
Anti-Imperialist News
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Thu Nov 10 20:52:43 EST 2011
HOW USAID UNDERMINES DEMOCRACY IN HAITI by Leslie Mullin
The US Agency for International Development
(USAID) is an arm of the US State Department.
Founded in 1961, USAID serves as a "velvet glove"
for US foreign policy. The political bias of its
operations in Haiti goes back decades. Here are
ten things to know about USAID in Haiti:
USAID PAID MILLIONS TO HAITI'S RUTHLESS DICTATOR,
FRANCOIS "PAPA DOC" DUVALIER, aimed at shoring up
US influence in the region after the Cuban
revolution. Thirty to fifty thousand people were
killed under Duvalier’s regime while aid funds
were siphoned into the private coffers of the
Duvalier family. Under Duvalier, assembly
production for American corporations became the
blueprint for Haiti’s economic dependence on the
US. The formula, essentially unchanged to this
day, backs Haiti’s ruling elite while turning
Haiti into a low-wage export-focused economy that
creates profitable business opportunities for
foreign investors. Haitians call it “the death plan.”
USAID BACKED DUVALIER'S SON, JEAN-CLAUDE "BABY
DOC," when he took over in 1971, with plans to
promote Haiti as the “Taiwan of the Caribbean.”
American taxpayers provided millions to build an
infrastructure to lure US manufacturers to open
assembly plants, taking advantage of Haiti’s high
unemployment, political repression, and wages of
14 cents an hour. The consequences were profits
for US business and the Haitian superrich. By
the time of Duvalier’s fall, Haiti was the
world’s ninth largest assembler of goods for US
consumption, and the largest producer of baseballs.
USAID SABOTAGED HAITI'S DOMESTIC FOOD
PRODUCTION. USAID has a major impact on Haiti’s
economy, both directly and as an agent for big
financial institutions like the IMF. Nowhere is
this more clearly demonstrated than Haiti’s food
system. As recently as 30 years ago, Haiti
<http://www.chrgj.org/projects/docs/sakvidpakanpe.pdf>produced
most of its own food. Then, in the early 1980s,
<http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43a/210.html>USAID
undertook a plan to redirect Haiti’s domestic
food production towards export crops. The idea,
tied to Ronald Reagan’s Caribbean Basin
Initiative, was to integrate Haiti into the world
market via agro-industry and export manufacturing.
With full awareness of its dire impact on Haitian
peasants, USAID experts set about to shift 30% of
Haiti’s cultivated land from food produced for
local consumption to export crops. As Haiti's
rural economy unravelled, impoverished peasants
fled to the capital city. Competition from cheap
imports and the absence of policies to promote
production led to a rapid decline in Haiti’s food
production. By 2008, local food production
amounted to 42% of Haiti’s food consumption,
compared to 80% in 1986. At the same time the
value of US agricultural exports to Haiti began
to increase - from $44 million (1986) to $95
million (1989). Recently, USAID was helping
agriculture officials boost Haiti's production of
mangoes -- for export to the United States.
USAID ENFORCED TRADE LIBERALIZATION POLICIES THAT
UNDERCUT HAITI'S RICE INDUSTRY WHILE PROMOTING
AMERICAN
RICE.
<http://www.counterpunch.org/quigley04212008.html>In
1986, USAID conditioned aid to the ruling
military junta on lowering rice tariffs, while
advising the government to remove the little
assistance it gave to Haitian farmers. Haiti
slashed its rice tariff from
<http://jbs.sagepub.com/content/40/5/974.full.pdf>35%
to 3.5% (1986) and to 1.5% (1995). Not only were
Haitian farmers hurt, but American producers and
grain sellers profited. Cheap, heavily subsidized
“Miami” US rice flooded Haitian markets, and
Haitian rice production began to drop. Until the
early 1980s, Haiti produced the majority of its
own rice, but Haiti is now the fourth largest importer of American rice.
One beneficiary was the
<http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43a/210.html>Rice
Corporation of Haiti (RCH), owned by Erly
Industries - a massive US agribusiness and the
largest marketer of American rice. In 1992, RCH
secured a 9-year contract to import rice from
Haiti’s illegal coup government – a military
junta responsible for the deaths of thousands of
Haitians. RCH was managed at the time by the
former director of the Caribbean Basin Initiative
(1982-1988), with powerful friends in Washington
like Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-NC).
Erly Industries gained another foothold in Haiti
after the 2010 earthquake when USAID awarded an
Erly subsidiary, CHEMONICS, the contract to
implement the 2009 USAID “WINNER”
program.<http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/haitian-companies-bypassed-in-favor-of-dc-area-contractors-with-poor-track-records>
CHEMONICS is an international consulting firm
that
<http://projects.publicintegrity.org/wow/bio.aspx?act=pro&ddlC=8>relies
on USAID for 90% of its business. WINNER is
another example of USAID’s reckless assault on
Haitian agriculture. After the 2010 Haiti
earthquake,
<http://haitijustice.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/winner-bad-for-haiti/>WINNER
championed the introduction of Monsanto hybrid
seeds at cheap prices to Haitian farmers, despite
the recommendation of the International Center
for Tropical Agriculture to halt all seed
donations as both unnecessary and harmful. WINNER
undermines Haitian seed distribution networks,
and will leave Haitian farmers dependent on
Monsanto seeds when the program expires in 2015.
USAID "FOOD AID" IS GOOD FOR US AGRIBUSINESS, NOT
FOR HAITIAN FARMERS. Haiti’s domestic rice
production was undermined even more by the vast
amounts of “free” American rice that
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11472874>USAID
dumps on Haiti every year in the form of
“<http://www.chrgj.org/projects/docs/sakvidpakanpe.pdf>food
aid.” A recent report,
<http://www.chrgj.org/projects/docs/sakvidpakanpe.pdf>Sak
Vid Pa Kanpe: The Impact of US Food Aid on Human
Rights in Haiti, explains how food aid is given
to the poor as direct food assistance or sold by
NGOs to support their overhead and operating
costs (a process known as “monetization”). The
report examines how US food aid benefits the
American companies who provide and
<http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/barriers-to-reform-the-big-business-of-shipping-food-aid>transport
it, but has a negative impact on local Haitian
economies which would benefit instead from
agricultural assistance or cash to boost local
production. In its most recent budget request,
USAID proposed spending $1.2 billion globally on
helping poor farmers grow more food, while asking
Congress for $4.2 billion for food aid, almost
all of which will be spent on purchases from American farmers.
USAID DESTROYED THE HAITIAN CREOLE PIG. The 1982
swine flu outbreak in the Dominican Republic
provided the justification for USAID to condemn
Haiti’s 1.3 million pig population, promising to
replace them with “better” pigs. Over a period
of 13 months, enforced by Duvalier militia, the
Creole pig was wiped out. A Haitian woman
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-flynn/not-even-the-past_b_813172.html>recalls
the era: “When the armed forces of Jean-Claude
Duvalier's regime set about exterminating Haiti's
Creole pigs, they would come to Haiti's rural
villages, seize all of the pigs, pile them up,
one on top of the other, in large pits and set
fire to them, burning them alive.” In monetary
terms Haitian peasants lost $600 million dollars.
Haiti’s former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide
analyzed the outcome in his book, Eyes of the
Heart, explaining the small, black, Creole pig
was at the heart of the peasant economy and
constituted the primary savings bank of the
peasant population. Pigs were sold to pay for
emergencies, special occasions and to pay school
fees and buy books for the children. What
followed was a 30% drop in enrollment in rural
schools, a dramatic decline in protein
consumption in rural Haiti, and a negative impact
on the soil and agricultural productivity. When
“better pigs” arrived from Iowa two years later,
they could not survive Haiti’s rural life,
requiring clean drinking water (unavailable to
80% of the Haitian people), imported feed
(costing $90 a year when the per capita income
was about $130), and special roofed pigpens.
USAID HAS CONSISTENTLY OPPOSED MINIMUM WAGE
INCREASES IN HAITI. In 1991, USAID used US tax
dollars to oppose a minimum wage increase from
$.33 to $.50 per hour proposed by the Aristide
government, claiming it was bad for business. The
agency also countered a plan for temporary price
controls on basic food so people could afford to
eat. According to
<http://www.thenation.com/article/161057/wikileaks-haiti-let-them-live-3-day>secret
State Department cables, after the 2010
earthquake, the U.S. Embassy in Haiti worked
closely with factory owners contracted by Levi's,
Hanes, and Fruit of the Loom to block a small
minimum wage increase for Haitian assembly zone
workers, the lowest paid in the hemisphere. The
factory owners, with backing of USAID and the US
Embassy, refused to pay 62 cents an hour, or $5
per eight hour day, a measure unanimously passed
by the Haitian parliament in June 2009.
USAID PROMOTED AND FUNDED THE 2004 OVERTHROW OF
DEMOCRATICALLY-ELECTED PRESIDENT ARISTIDE. While
millions of American dollars have propped up
Haiti’s dictators, aid shifted abruptly away from
the democratically elected government of
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Under the guise
of
“<http://rt.com/usa/news/democracy-promotion-usa-regime/>democracy
promotion,” USAID and USAID-funded organizations
like the National Endowment for Democracy and the
<http://motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/coup-connection>International
Republican Institute, funneled millions to
organize political opposition to Aristide and
build conservative alternatives aligned with US
interests. After the 2004 coup, USAID funded the
integration of former death squad forces into the
Haitian National Police to quell resistance among
Haitians to the illegitimate coup government.
<http://www.cepr.net/index.php/press-releases/press-releases/cepr-criticizes-us-funding-for-elections-in-haiti>USAID
paid millions to fund the
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jan/10/haiti-oas-election-runoff>fraudulent
Nov 2010 and March 2011 elections that excluded
Haiti’s largest political party, Fanmi Lavalas,
the party of President Aristide.
USAID EXTENDS ITS FAR-REACHING INFLUENCE IN HAITI
BY FUNDING NGOs (non-governmental organizations)
which receive
<http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/02/24/haiti-and-the-aid-racket/>70%
of their budgets from the agency. Over 10,000
NGOs operate in Haiti with authorization to
bypass the elected government and serve as a
permanent form of “soft” invasion. As far back as
1995, Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State Strobe
Talbott reassured members of the Senate Foreign
Affairs Committee that,
“<http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199809--.htm>even
after our (military) exit in February 1996 we
will remain in charge by means of the USAID and the private sector.”
USAID BOASTS THAT 84 CENTS OF EVERY DOLLAR OF ITS
FUNDING IN HAITI RETURNS TO THE US in the form
of salaries, supplies, consulting fees, and
services. As the lead US agency for Haiti
reconstruction, just
<http://www.thenation.com/article/161469/wikileaks-haiti-post-quake-gold-rush-reconstruction-contracts>2.5%
of USAID’s $200 million in post-earthquake relief
and reconstruction contracts had gone to Haitian
firms by April 2010.
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/05/hait-relief-money-critic_n_487976.html>USAID
paid at least $160 million of its total
Haiti-related expenditures to the Defense
Department, the Federal Emergency Management
Agency, two US search and rescue teams and, in at
least two instances, itself. US Ambassador
Merten reported to Washington that the post-quake
“gold rush” was on, according to a secret cable
that described disaster capitalists flocking to
Haiti for contracts to rebuild the country.
Sources:
Aristide, Jean-Bertrand (2000). Eyes of the
Heart: Seeking a Path for the Poor in the Age of
Globalization. Common Courage Press, pp 13-14.
Center for Economic and Policy Research (Dec 13
2010). Haitian companies bypassed in favor of DC
area contractors with poor track records.
Available at:
<http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/haitian-companies-bypassed-in-favor-of-dc-area-contractors-with-poor-track-records>http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/haitian-companies-bypassed-in-favor-of-dc-area-contractors-with-poor-track-records
(Accessed Nov 10, 2011)
Center for Public Integrity, Windfalls of War:
Chemonics, International. Available at:
<http://projects.publicintegrity.org/wow/bio.aspx?act=pro&ddlC=8>http://projects.publicintegrity.org/wow/bio.aspx?act=pro&ddlC=8
(Accessed Nov 10, 2011)
Center for Human Rights and Global Justice,
Partners in Health, RFK Center for Justice &
Human Rights (December 2010). Sak Vid Pa Kanpe:
The Impact of US Food Aid on Human Rights in
Haiti. Available at
<http://www.chrgj.org/projects/docs/sakvidpakanpe.pdf>http://www.chrgj.org/projects/docs/sakvidpakanpe.pdf
(Accessed Nov 10, 2011)
Coughlin, Dan and Ives, Kim (2011). “Wikileaks
Haiti: Let them live on $3 day.” The Nation, June
1, 2011. Available at:
<http://projects.publicintegrity.org/wow/bio.aspx?act=pro&ddlC=8>http://projects.publicintegrity.org/wow/bio.aspx?act=pro&ddlC=8
(Accessed Nov 10, 2011)
DeWind Josh and Kinley David H (1994). U.S. Aid
Programs and the Haitian Political Economy:
Export-Led Development. IN The Haiti Files,
Ridgeway J (ed). Essential Books/Azul Editions. Washington, DC. P125
Diederich, Bernard and Burt, Al (2009). Papa Doc
and the Tonton Macoutes, 3rd edition. Markus Wiener Publishers, Princeton, NJ.
Doyle, Mark (Oct 2010) US urged to stop Rice
Subsidies. BBC news, Latin America & the
Caribbean. Available at:
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11472874>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11472874
(Accessed Nov 10, 2011)
Farmer, Paul (2006). The Uses of Haiti, 3rd edition. Common Courage Press.
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Duvalier, Waiting for Aristide. Huffington Post.
Available at:
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-flynn/not-even-the-past_b_813172.html>http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-flynn/not-even-the-past_b_813172.html
(Accessed Nov 10, 2011)
Gros, Jean-Germaine. Indigestible Recipe: Rice,
Chicken Wings, and International Financial
Institutions: or Hunger Politics in Haiti.
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<http://jbs.sagepub.com/content/40/5/974.full.pdf>http://jbs.sagepub.com/content/40/5/974.full.pdf
(Accessed Nov 10, 2011)
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<http://www.afaceaface.org/blog/2010/09/neoliberalism-in-haiti-the-case-of-rice/>http://www.afaceaface.org/blog/2010/09/neoliberalism-in-haiti-the-case-of-rice/
(Accessed Nov 10, 2011)
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<http://www.thenation.com/article/161469/wikileaks-haiti-post-quake-gold-rush-reconstruction-contracts>http://www.thenation.com/article/161469/wikileaks-haiti-post-quake-gold-rush-reconstruction-contracts
(Accessed Nov 10, 2011)
Katz, Jonathan (March 2010). Haiti Relief Money:
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Available at:
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/05/haiti-relief-money-critic_n_487976.html>http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/05/haiti-relief-money-critic_n_487976.html
(Accessed Nov 10, 2011)
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(Accessed Nov 10, 2011)
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<http://www.developmentgap.org/foriegn_aid/Democracy_Undermined_Economic_Justice_Denied_Structural_Adjustment_%26_Aid_Juggernaut_in_Haiti.html>http://www.developmentgap.org/foriegn_aid/Democracy_Undermined_Economic_Justice_Denied_Structural_Adjustment_%26_Aid_Juggernaut_in_Haiti.html
(Accessed Nov 10, 2011)
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<http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/04/21/the-u-s-role-in-haiti-s-food-riots/>http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/04/21/the-u-s-role-in-haiti-s-food-riots/
(Accessed Nov 10, 2011)
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<http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/02/24/haiti-and-the-aid-racket/>http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/02/24/haiti-and-the-aid-racket/
(Accessed Nov 10, 2011)
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Criticizes US Funding of Flawed “Elections” in
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<http://www.cepr.net/index.php/press-releases/press-releases/cepr-criticizes-us-funding-for-elections-in-haiti>http://www.cepr.net/index.php/press-releases/press-releases/cepr-criticizes-us-funding-for-elections-in-haiti
(Accessed Nov 10, 2011)
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(Accessed Nov 10, 2011)
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(Accessed Nov 10, 2011)
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<http://www.haitisolidarity.net/>www.haitisolidarity.net and on FACEBOOK
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