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The Donors Conference meeting in the Trusteeship Council. Over 150
nations and international organizations pledged $5.3 billion in aid to
Haiti over the next 18 months
Michele Montas, the widow of
slain radio journalist Jean Dominique
and former spokeswoman for Ban Ki-
Moon, spoke in English and French on
behalf of the “Voices of the Voiceless
Forum” which held focus group discussions
with peasants, workers and
small merchants in Haiti during March.
“A clear majority of focus group participants,”
she said, “from both rural
and urban areas, strongly believe
that there is a critical need to invest
in people. Focus groups highlighted five key immediate priorities: housing,
new earthquake resistant shelters
for displaced people; education,
in all of the school systems throughout
the country; health, the building
of primary healthcare facilities and
hospitals; local public services,
potable water, sanitation, electricity;
communications infrastructure,
primarily roads to allow food production
to reach the cities... There seemed
to be unanimity on the need to invest
in human capital through education,
including higher education.”
“Support for agricultural
production,” Montas continued,
“was stressed as a top priority... Agriculture,
perhaps more than other
sectors, is seen as essential to the
country’s health, and the prevailing
sentiment is that the peasantry has
been neglected.”
Even Préval has recognized
this neglect, but he got in trouble last
month when he called on Washington
to “stop sending food aid” because of
its deleterious effects on the Haitian
peasant economy (see Haïti Liberté,
Vol. 3, No. 36, 3/24/2010). The U.S.
responded that there was “severe corruption”
in his government.
Préval fell back into line. His
government prepared a Post-Disaster
Needs Assessment report (PDNA),
the conference’s reference document,
with “members of the International Community.” Of the $12.2 billion total
it requested for the next three years, only $41 million, or 0.3
percent, would be earmarked for “Agriculture and fishing.”
The centerpieces of the Clinton
plan are assembly factories and tourism
(see Haïti Liberté, Vol. 3, No. 36,
3/24/2010). But the former president
still pays lip-service to agriculture.
In the hallway outside the Trusteeship
Council, Haïti Liberté asked Bill
Clinton what had led him last month
before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee to renounce his policies as
US president of dumping cheap rice on
Haiti.
“Oh, I just think that, you
know, there’s a movement all around
the world now,” Clinton responded.
“I first saw Bob Zoellick, the head of
the World Bank, say the same thing,
where he said..., starting in 1981,
the wealthy agricultural producing
countries genuinely believed that they
and the emerging agricultural powers
in Brazil and Argentina... that
they really believed for twenty years
that if you moved agricultural production
there and then facilitated its
introduction into poorer places, you
would free those places to get aid to
skip agricultural development and go
straight into an industrial era. And
it’s failed everywhere it’s been tried.
And you just can’t take the food chain
out of production. And it also undermines
a lot of the culture, the fabric of
life, the sense of self-determination...
And we made this devil’s bargain on
rice. And it wasn’t the right thing to
do. We should have continued to work
to help them be self-sufficient in agriculture.
And that’s a lot of what we’re
doing now. We’re thinking about how
can we get the coffee production up,
how can we get ... the mango production
up, ... the avocados, and lots of
other things.” |
