Haiti’s Smallholder Farmers: Children of the Land

Book excerpt: Fault Lines: Views across Haiti’s Divide, by Beverly Bell.

“It’s clear that you can’t develop a country and build another Haiti where 80 percent of the people are excluded,” said Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, the executive director of the Peasant Movement of Papaye and the spokesperson for the National Peasant Movement of the Papaye Congress (Mouvman Peyizan Nasyonal Kongre Papay, or MPNKP), a couple of weeks after the January 2010 earthquake. “We have to take advantage of this catastrophe and say, ‘The clock is set at zero.’ We have to build another Haiti that doesn’t have anything to do with the Haiti we had before. A Haiti that has political sovereignty and that has food sovereignty. It has to begin by building agriculture.”

Haiti’s people are among the most rural-based in the Western Hemisphere. Somewhere between 66 percent to 80 percent depend on small-scale agriculture. Rosnel Jean-Baptiste, member of the national coordinating committee of Heads Together, gave this opinion, “It’s not houses which will rebuild Haiti, it’s investing in the agriculture sector.”

Regardless, state neglect of the farming sector has been extreme. As one data point, in 2009 and 2010 the government dedicated only 7 percent of its budget to agriculture. This was despite pleas from peasants that their urgent needs required more support, and despite international recommendations, like that of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN that no less than 12 percent of the budget be dedicated to agriculture. The government’s Post-Disaster Needs Assessment indicated that rebuilding agriculture and fisheries should get just 6.3 percent, over three years, of the total $11.5 billion it estimated to be necessary for recovery. Most small farmers receive no support for production, like seeds and tools. No help in developing infrastructure like irrigation, storage, or transport. No credit or marketing support. No technical assistance, like information on how to combat blight or updated production methods. Recent administrations have given little discernible attention to combating the environmental destruction that has created floods and droughts and otherwise made growing almost impossible in many regions. Some nonprofits and foreign agencies help with reforestation and environmental management projects but can’t come close to meeting the need. Eighty-eight percent of the rural population lives in poverty, 67 percent in extreme poverty. Rural communities are neglected, furthermore, in terms of basic survival services, like potable water, health care, schools, and roads. In rural areas one-quarter of births are attended by a skilled health professional, as opposed to 47 percent in urban areas. One hundred fourteen out of every thousand children die by the age of five in the countryside, whereas that number is seventy-eight in cities and towns.

Dieudonné Charlemagne, a survivor of the Piatre massacre, said, “We love agriculture. We love to plant. We love to live as people who’re recognized as citizens of this nation. Even if we’re peasants, we deserve to live, too. It shouldn’t be that because we’re peasants we’re condemned to death.”

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How did the status of peasants and their farming drop to this abyss? Chavannes explained, “We peasants have been victims for more than two hundred years. The slaves who struggled to get their independence did so in part to get land from the colonialists. [But] from the moment of independence there’s been division between rich and poor, between people of the city and people of the country. That gave us two countries inside one small country. Little by little, the state has abandoned the countryside, leaving the peasants as a marginalized class they just use when they need votes in an election.”

Until recently, the two classes of citizenry were legally codified; birth certificates of those in the countryside actually bore the title “peasant,” hand-scripted in the appropriate box. Rural families are still widely known as moun andeyò, people outside, meaning outside social value and outside the reach of economic benefits. Moun anndan, people inside, are those inside the Republic of Port-au-Prince. The grandon claim ownership of most arable land. Only 5 percent of Haitian land is legally registered, but it doesn’t matter, since the grandon also frequently control the local courts, government, and the security apparatus—members of whom might be government employees or just paid thugs. The grandon usually control access to water, storage facilities for food and seed, and the local market, too, paying what they want since they have a monopoly. The urban elite holds the reins of the national food market through lucrative import-export businesses.

Making matters worse have been the economic policies that Washington and international trade and financial institutions have foisted since the 1980s on Haiti, as in most of the rest of the world. The unfair economic advantage of the Western nations who control these institutions has allowed them to pressure global South countries to eliminate policies that protect their agricultural markets, while the West protects its own markets through interventions like subsidies for wheat and rice. The IMF pushed Haiti so hard to open its borders to trade that by 1995, import tariffs on rice and flour had dropped from 50 percent to as low as 3 percent; tariffs on sugar and other agricultural products plummeted similarly. By 1999, Haiti had reached the IMF’s lowest category for trade restrictiveness, making it one of the easiest countries to which to export. The resultant flood of cheap food from other countries has been a death knell for peasant agriculture.

Another blow to the well-being of the peasantry was the eradication of the Creole pig. The hardy animals foraged and ate scraps and required little to no investment. They served as a virtual piggy bank for those without savings or bank accounts; selling one off meant quick cash for tuition for a child or medical treatment for a spouse. In the early 1980s, several multinational agencies and the U.S., Canadian, and Mexican governments, in cooperation with the Duvalier regime, slaughtered every last pig they could find—an estimated four hundred thousand. The declared reason was that African swine fever, with which some pigs were infected, might spread to the United States. A less touted reason, as stated in a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) project paper, was “to eradicate once and for all the Haitian model of swine raising, whose ‘primitive’ conditions may at all times be a source of nuisance for the modern swine industry of North America.” The loss caused rural families varying degrees of financial devastation, which many claim have repercussions to this day. On the profit side of the ledger, constituents of congressmen from the U.S. Midwest received contracts to export their breed of fat, pink pigs, along with the imported feed the pigs were said to need to survive. Once in Haiti, they were redistributed primarily to upper-class industrialists. Many of the U.S. pigs died over time because they couldn’t adapt to the local conditions.

Given these political forces, today farmers are able to produce only about half of what is required to meet the country’s food needs, causing a dire food crisis. Haiti is the one of the hungriest countries in the world, with up to half of the population facing food insecurity.

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Lacking political clout to get their needs and demands met, peasants have relied primarily on the tools they have at hand: the strength of their numbers, their collective will, and the power of grassroots organizing. Haiti’s dry hamlets, terraced hills, and fertile plains are home to literally thousands of peasant associations. Heads Together, the oldest, was founded under Jean-Claude Duvalier, while many others emerged in the fecund days after the dictatorship’s end. Many of the groups focus on mutual aid to help each other survive, sharing resources and labor and trying to develop collective solutions. Some are production and marketing cooperatives, in which people might compile what little cash they have to purchase a mobile irrigation pump so all their fields can get watered because a grandon controls parts of the river or a drought is bearing down, or might pool their grapefruit or pineapples to make jam, which brings in a better price than the fruit itself. Members might sell their corn or rice to the cooperative so it can be stored in the group’s warehouse while they look for the highest-paying buyer. The bigger groups get out- side funding and can offer technical support to their members, like help in setting up solar power and water cisterns and finding export markets for mangoes.

Some of the associations have the additional goal of increasing their power so they can win the policies and programs they need. Four of these, Heads Together, the National Peasant Movement of the Papaye Congress, the Peasant Movement of Papaye, and the Regional Coordination of Organizations of the Southwest, have the size and force to lobby for their agenda at national and even international levels. They have teamed up with advocacy groups, other movements, and foreign friends to form strong, broad coalitions. Some belong to worldwide networks such as Via Campesina, the two-hundred-million-member-strong confederation of small farmers and landless people, and its Latin American cousin Cry of the Excluded (Grito de los Excluidos). They take part in global campaigns, like one against the corporate titan Monsanto and another to force the World Trade Organization out of agriculture.

Jean-Jacques Henrilus, one of the national coordinators of Heads Together, said, “We need to see how Haitian peasants, workers, street vendors, and everyone from the excluded sectors can put themselves together to create another Ayiti Cheri, Dear Haiti. Heads Together and popular organizations alone can’t do this job. But we and other sectors— social, professional, all conscious people—can tie our strength together and get to our goal, constructing a Haiti where all Haitians feel like children of the land.”

Book excerpt: Fault Lines: Views across Haiti’s Divide

Fault Lines is a publication of Cornell University Press. ©2013 by Cornell University.