A Bird Flu Scare on Hispaniola, in a Time of Hunger
Reports of a bird flu outbreak in the Dominican Republic began to surface in Haitian media on Thursday, June 6, with claims that the flu had already killed five people. Haiti promptly and unilaterally banned imports of eggs, chickens, and other meat products from its neighbor, as it similarly did five years ago during another avian flu scare.
A day later, Dominican officials released a statement claiming that there was no bird flu in the country, and that the country’s Ministry of Agriculture hadn’t been notified of Haiti’s ban. Five people had died of swine flu, Dominican officials said, not avian flu.
The D.R. is one of Haiti’s most important trade partners, particularly when it comes to food – Haiti receives 25 million eggs and 8 million chickens from its eastern neighbor each month. The Haitian daily Le Nouvelliste recently reported (in French) that “an egg that cost 3.30 pesos, now arriving in Haiti through irregular channels [due to the ban], costs 7 pesos … ”
Three weeks after the initial bird flu scare, despite the price increases, bilateral meetings of high-level officials, and Dominican border-market closings in protest, the ban remains in effect. If the interdiction was ever based in science, it is firmly rooted in politics now.
Le Nouvelliste editor-in-chief Frantz Duval wrote this week (French, again) that “to satisfy our appetite for eggs, chicken giblets, and anything that looks like meat, Dominicans are positioned to capture the market and our billions.” Across the border, the government in the D.R. looks toward other markets as it negotiates a deal to send millions of eggs to Venezuela, and the Agriculture Ministry and egg producers have partnered to slaughter one million hens who have passed peak-producing age in an effort to stem the glut.
But for Haiti, now may be most inopportune time in years to use even-more-than-usually-politicized policy in response to issues that are about economics at heart – high reliance on food imports due to a relative dearth of investment in food processing.
The Monday following the ban, an Associated Press report detailed the food security situation that many Haitians face this summer. After drought, a tropical storm, and Hurricane Sandy ravaged crops in 2012, “hunger is worse than ever”:
In 1997 some 1.2 million Haitians didn’t have enough food to eat. A decade later the number had more than doubled. Today, that figure is 6.7 million, or a staggering 67 percent of the population that goes without food some days, can’t afford a balanced diet or has limited access to food, according to surveys by the government’s National Coordination of Food Security. As many as 1.5 million of those face malnutrition and other hunger-related problems.
Meanwhile, The Economist reports on the interplay of U.S. farm subsidies, rice tariffs and the lack of efficient agriculture practices in Haiti, and what it all means for Haitians trying to feed their families. “Though it may undercut local farmers,” the report noted, “cheap foreign produce at least means that ‘people have food on the table’, says Pierre Gary Mathieu, head of the government’s food-security unit. … In the short term, at least, raising tariffs could be disastrous in a country where three-quarters of the population lives on less than $2 a day.”
The so-far resilient ban on Dominican fowl and meat products has not yet proven disastrous. But in a country where so many struggle to scratch out a living each day, the government does its people no favors by making it more costly and difficult to obtain the cheapest forms of protein available to Haitian bread-winners.
“Already,” The Economist notes, “one in ten people struggles to eat a daily meal and half eat only two meals, with little meat, vegetables, eggs or milk.”
