27061; Hermantin(News)A grain of hope exists (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

HAITI: DAY TWO

A grain of hope exists

Rice: Haiti's once and future cash crop is the key to its economic turnaround



BY LETTA TAYLER
STAFF CORRESPONDENT

January 2, 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 country's children don't get enough to eat.

Most development experts believe that the new president whom Haitians will 
elect in balloting tentatively scheduled for later this month must start any 
economic turnaround here 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, half of them in the 
metropolitan area.

Haiti still has the capacity to be almost self-sufficient in rice, many 
agronomists believe.

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 alone 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 here 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. Like many 
developing nations that accepted the International Monetary Fund's position 
that free trade would jump-start the economy, he said, "We're left with a 
country with a destroyed economic base that's dependent on imports."

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. The 
imports were too costly for many farmers, who dubbed them "four-footed 
princes."

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?" asked 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: the men whacking the bundles 
against the ground, the women spreading the grains into dazzling gold carpets 
that dry in front of tiny, pink-and-turquoise cottages with no running water or 
electricity that families here call home.

With Haiti sliding toward anarchy in the past several years, the government has 
failed to maintain irrigation canals, causing many paddies to dry up. 
Deforestation in the mountains overlooking the Artibonite has contributed to 
massive flooding during the rainy season in lower-lying paddies.

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, as he waded through his paddy under 
a broiling sun. 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 that sprouted in the 1980s.

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," explained 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."
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