Grangou Klowoks

[bcholmes]

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.

Comments

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Sigh.