This year's earthquake took a huge toll, but the rural economy was already wrecked, in part by US imports. Louise Williamsvisits its farmers as elections loom
ALAIN ALCIMÉ holds a bundle of rice stalks high over his head, using all of his meagre body weight to swing the stalks downwards and slam them against the white stone in front of him, sending a scattering of rice grains flying off on to a blue tarpaulin. Alongside Alcimé his two cousins and brother take it in turns to bash their bundles against the stones. With every swing a pile of rice grows by their feet.
It’s harvest time in Artibonite Valley in central Haiti, and after a long day’s work under the fierce sun several sacks have already been filled. The skies are darkening overhead, and several claps of thunder can be heard. The four men work on undeterred as large drops of rain start to fall on their shirts, which are already soaked through with sweat.
Artibonite Valley is the rice bowl of Haiti, producing the bulk of the country’s varieties of rice. The valley’s waterlogged paddies are lush and glowingly fertile, yet farmers here struggle to feed their families.
When Alcimé tells me how much the men earn for a day’s work – 200 gourdes, equivalent to €3.55 – I understand at first that he means this sum is per person for a day’s work. My mistake makes him hoot with laughter. “No, that’s what we have to share out between us four,” he says, adding that the next day they will work on a plot he leases from a landowner in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. “I pay him with half of what I produce.”
I later find out that this sort of land tenure is not uncommon in Artibonite Valley, where agents will collect the harvest on behalf of landlords. The rice harvest starts in late September and continues into October.
“We’ve been here since 6am,” says Roger Henri, a farmer, at the bustling Pont Jo market, one of the main rice-trading centres in the Artibonite region. Henri grows the Sheila variety of rice common to Haiti, but by 2pm he still hasn’t made any sales.
He can afford to send some of his children to school, he explains, but not all five of them.
“We were hoping to get 95 gourdes a bowl but now we’re willing to take 80 or 85,” he says. “The traders are saying there is too much uncertainty in the market. They’re forcing the price down.”
Finally a trader shows interest, and by 3pm Henri has sold all three of his sacks of Sheila rice at 75 gourdes a bowl.
The Pont Jo traders are almost all women. The sound in the market is deafening, especially when disagreements happen. “You’re counting wrong, you skipped 18,” one buyer screams in the face of a seller who is counting out bowls of rice into a larger sack. A furious argument ensues. Haiti has an active, very noisy bird called a Madame Sarah, and this is also the name given to these women traders around the country.
The central rice market in Port-au-Prince is a maze of corridors lined with Madams Sarahs selling rice of different varieties. In one narrow corridor that offers rice from Artibonite, Jenide Elie is perched on one of her sacks of rice, creating a hollowed-out seat so she can rest her feet in the suffocating heat. “I’ve sold nothing today,” she says softly. “Nothing yesterday either.”
Elie lost all her stock in the earthquake, and now she has to buy on credit. Her family has had to set up home in a camp in the city. “Our house has big cracks. We can’t live there any more,” she says. “We haven’t received any help at all. I even had to buy a tarpaulin for our roof.”
In the next corridor of the market, white sacks are piled high. “US rice” is marked on the side of each sack, along with large red and blue stars and stripes. This imported rice sells, on average, for a fifth less than Haitian rice, not just in this market but in every market across the country.
“It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked . . . It was a mistake,” the former US president Bill Clinton told the US Senate committee on foreign relations in March, apologising for encouraging Haiti to cut tariffs on imports from 50 per cent to 3 per cent in 1994. “I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did.”
After the earthquake the UN made Clinton its special envoy for Haiti; he also became co-chair of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission. But, despite Clinton’s regret, the tariffs are still in place, and heavily subsidised US rice continues to flood Haiti. The country is the third-largest market for US rice exports, after Japan and Mexico.
“That’s private American exporters. We don’t control that,” says Carleene Dei, USAid’s mission director in Haiti. Oxfam has called for a more balanced trade policy for Haiti, but Dei is unwilling to address the tariff issue. “Our focus is to work with the farmers themselves to produce more and better,” she says. “Rice will continue to come in until we increase the quality and output.”
If Haitian rice is ever to compete with US imports, major restructuring of the agricultural sector will be needed. Land reform in the 1980s had little impact on the ever- diminishing size of plots, which are called mouchwa in Haitian Creole, from the French for handkerchief. The plots are too small to feed a family, let alone provide rice for extra income.
Haiti’s environment has been devastated. Deforestation, which creates major floods and some droughts, is, at 95 per cent, “the worst I’ve ever seen”, according to one aid official. And then there’s the traditional profound neglect of Haiti’s rural people by the elite in the capital.
“For decades the Haitian government and international donors have neglected agriculture despite its importance to Haitian lives,” says Philippe Mathieu of Oxfam, calling for support for Haiti’s ambitious €550 million agricultural reconstruction plan. But many are sceptical about whether this project will get funding, as most decision-makers are based in the “Republic of Port-au-Prince” and are unlikely to roll back decades of discrimination against Haiti’s rural population.
“You used to have two types of birth certificate here,” says Camille Chalmers of Papda, a lobbying organisation for alternative development in Haiti. “One if you were born in the city (urbain), another if you were born in a rural area (paysan). If you were born a paysan you were not a citizen but a second-class citizen.”
This hierarchy of citizenship was scrapped in the 1980s, but discrimination continues. Haiti’s rural population is still dismissed as les gens du dehors (the outsiders) by the people in the capital, the people in power.
Chalmers warns that history in Haiti has a habit of repeating itself. “We saw what happened before when the US came and ran the country,” she says. “That led to a complete catastrophe. This state has been taken hostage by an ensemble of imperialist international organisations.
“We need to rethink the way we interact with institutions and the external market.”
Elections are coming up next month, when the Haitian people, both urban and rural, will have their chance to cast a vote on how the country is run in the future.
This article and the accompanying photographic project were supported by the Simon Cumbers Media Fund
