Grangou Klowoks

From a presentation by Anne Hastings, the director of Fonkoze:

According to the World Bank, people who live on two dollars (US) a day are considered to be living in poverty. Those who live on one dollar a day are considered to be living in extreme poverty. In Haiti, over 80% of population is poor, and over 50% live in extreme poverty.

In a place like the U.S. or Canada, we typically spend something like 10% or less of our income on food, but the poor spend 50% (or even as much as 80%) of their income on food. As the cost of food increases, the poor are forced to make concerning choices to keep food on the table. They sell assets, they cut back on spending for things like health and they use up any savings they've accumulated. But also, they just eat less.

This table is pretty scary:

Food	Amount	Dec 03	Aug 07	Feb 08	Aug 08	increase in 1 year
Rice	6 pound pot	105	84	125	210	150%
Beans	6 pound pot	100	90	175	200	122%
Oil	Gallon	210	197	250	375	90%
Flour	6 pound pot	40	55	84	105	91%
Exchange rate Gd/USD		42.0	35.1	37.0	40.25

Prices in Haitian Gourdes (goud).

(When I first travelled to Haiti in 2002, the exchange rate was closer to 27 HTG/USD).

The scary part is that this is not seen as a blip. Most analysts agree that this is a permanent adjustment in food prices.

I've posted, in the past, about how Haiti used to be fairly self-sufficient, agriculturally. In 1986, it imported only 7000 tons of rice from the US. In the late 1980s, Haiti was forced by the international lending agencies to lift tariffs on the import of rice and cheaper US rice flooded the market and put Haitian farmers out of business. (It's worth mentioning that agriculture is one of the few areas that free trade people seem to think that it's okay to subsidize. This is great for agriculture-heavy countries like the US and Canada). By 1996, Haiti was importing 196,000 tons of rice.

And we can't even say we didn't predict this. Professor Yasmine Shamsie testified before a Foreign Affairs committee:

What I mean is that it was clear to donors in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s that the liberalization of Haiti's markets and the lowering of protective tariffs on rice, for instance—the country's most basic staple—would devastate Haitian rice producers. This was well known. USAID came out with two reports, one in 1987 and another one in 1995, that said that if they lowered their tariffs, it would basically bring a loss of about $15 million a year to rice-growing peasants, further reducing their already poor standard of living. That was in a USAID report. In other words, we are advancing macro-economic policies that we know will impoverish these sectors.

This is the result of neoliberalism. And this is the stated objective of organizations such as the World Bank.

More debates than you can shake a stick at

Last night, we watched the US Presidential Debate via the CNN web site. Who knows of a source to watch Wednesday's Federal Leaders debate online?

(I'm really feeling the absence of Sister Mary Alban. I have no one to talk Canadian politics with. I can carry my own talking about the key beats of the US presidential election, but the couple that's running the place, here, know nothing about Canadian politics. I want to talk about what's going on with the NDP. They don't understand who the NDP even are. Le sigh.)

Neighbourhood Watch

We had a little bit of excitement tonight. I was sitting at the kitchen table talking to V, the wife of the couple who work here at the guest house. Both of them have been coming to Haiti for years, and they've done a lot of stuff. So she's telling me stories of things that they've seen, and people from the history of Lavalas. It's an interesting conversation. And then Te showed up. Te is one of the guards who works here. P and V know even less kreyòl than I know, and the guards have about the same amount of English, so it's always an interesting thing having a bit of a conversation. Te says he's looking for the "flash", which P and V recognize as wanting P's good flashlight.

P goes off to find the flashlight, and Te mentions something about a vòlè. Me, I recognize this word. It's from the French: voleur. Thief.

Now, I've been awakened once or twice by flashlights going by my window: the guards do keep a good eye out at night, and they check nooks and crannies looking for things that shouldn't be there. So I figured that they probably saw some movement and just wanted to check it out.

But P went out with Te, and it became clear that something more was up.

Beside the guest house, there's a soccer field -- the land belongs to the Izméry family (the same family that owns the guest house building), and it's run as a local recreation centre for the neighbourhood. Apparently someone saw a stranger in the park, and quickly a crowd of people confronted him.

So, some things about this were interesting because they're so different than they'd be back home. First up, this guy was a stranger, and everyone in the neighbourhood knew it because everyone in the neighbourhood knows everyone else in the neighbourhood. The neighbourhood was concerned that he might be a thief. Since it was one guy versus a growing crowd of people, they instructed him to lie on the ground until they could figure out who he was and he (probably wisely) complied. So by the time we showed up, there were about twenty-five people surrounding this one guy lying on the ground.

Now, at some level, it sounds like this could be a real mob situation. Twenty-five people jumping to the conclusion that this guy was a thief. But they were really orderly and organized about things. They asked the guy his story, and he claimed that he used to live in the neighbourhood (which is how he knew the soccer field), and that he was supposed to meet a friend around there, but he had to go to the bathroom, which is why he was in the field at night.

So the mob asked for his friend's phone number to check on this story, and the mob started phoning on their cell phones. Unfortunately, his friend tended to hang up the phone. (Perhaps the guy on the other end of the phone was afraid that there was some trouble, or perhaps it was all a lie. I don't know.) They also got numbers for the guy's brother and mother. Nobody seemed to be able to really mollify the crowd.

They weren't perfect; when they couldn't get answers, a couple of people slapped the guy. But mostly I was amazed at how orderly this mob was. In Toronto, either nobody would get involved, or it'd be a really bad scene with shouting or something.

Eventually the police came, and the guy was taken off to the police station; his mother and brother were going to meet him there. And the mob dispensed. But it was definitely a moment that was very different than anything I'd ever seen in Toronto.