Globalization In Haiti

Throughout its history, Haiti has endured many challenges including Colonial Rule, the pitfalls of self-governance and the quagmire of Globalization. However, no Haitian community has been more impacted by change than the agriculture community. The following will be an examination of the unique and precarious position of the Haitian farming community, their families and the role of Globalization in their current predicament. To spite the fact that Haitian farmers make up 75% of the population in Haiti, they have been and remain the most marginalized group of people in the entire country. The Haitian farming community has been a victim of their own culture, the place they started after the revolution and voiceless Globalization.

Farmers are

commonly known as peasants in the Haitian sociological structure. Marriage among peasants is commonplace, but not in the traditional structure found in places like the United States. The most well-known marital arrangement among peasants is called “plasaj.” Unrecognized by the government, plasaj is a union in which an economic arrangement is made between a man and a woman. The man cultivates their land and the woman takes care of the family, but the marriage is not truly recognized until the man provides a house for his wife. During the 19th century, the extended family held a prominent role, but as the population grew the reality of land ownership among families slowly dissolved.
During the 19th century, farmers took great pride in the cultivation of their land. They were, “intimately connected to the land that was itself the root of Haitian authenticity,” but there were often bitter rivalries among farming communities rather than against the ruling class (Munro). The rivalry's diminished any chance of peasants becoming a unified class, which would have given them a larger voice within the government. As such, the social structure of Haiti’s farming community has often been a reason for its inefficiency. Land ownership transferred by inheritance or marriage, which led to the compartmentalization of arable land. As a result, farming is/was a disorganized trade with no discernable leader. Furthermore, the fragmentation of land ownership, due to the complicated nature of family and inheritance, caused the social structure of family to change dramatically. What was once an extended family in the household turned into a nuclear family early in the 20th century. As land plot ownership became significantly smaller the needs of an extended family became too much for the small amount of land to support. As a result, most families engaged in subsistence farming rather than using their crops for trade. Most importantly, the isolation of agriculture community led to low prices for their produce and an enormous lack of government representation.
Beginning in 1920, after a failed guerrilla war, the United States became a formidable power in Haiti.

They brought in businesses, built roads and took over the Haitian banking industry. The US capital investments in Haiti necessitated the proletarization of farmers. Unfortunately for the Haitian farming community, the Haitian government began the largest land grab in the history of the country. Farmers were stripped of the informal rights to their land and those who leased land through the government were not able to renew. Displaced farmers had no choice but to work as low wage labor at the new larger farming industries, as industrial labor for the new manufacturing businesses or to be a migrant worker somewhere else in the Caribbean where labor was needed. “The development of sugar in Cuba, mostly by U.S. landowners, brought to the island’s shores tens of thousands of Haitians”

(Mcpherson).
Farming has been in steady decline since the 1980’s. First, the softening of agricultural tariffs made farming less and less profitable. To compensate, farmers overcropped their land making an already dodgy soil even more infertile. As time went on, imported produce steadily rose and Haitian crop production remained stagnant in spite of population growth. By 1991, imports exceeded domestic production in many crops. Consequently, Haiti had developed huge trade deficits, which were further exacerbated by a military coup in 1991.
The Haiti coup of 1991, led by Lieutenant-General Raoul Cédras and his confidants, was met with strict criticism from the US and other nations. After only 8 months in office, the first democratically elected president in the history of Haiti Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown. “The majority of Haitians saw in Aristide someone who was fighting for their right to improved living and working conditions, to live free of repression, and to be treated with respect and dignity.” (Noelle-Films) In short time, a trade embargo was enacted, led by the United States and its allies. The embargo lasted several years, eventually leading to an unemployment rate in Haiti over 70%. The coup was finally dismantled in 2004 and President Aristide retook office on October 12, 1994. Democracy finally returned and would remain until present day, but democracy would land the most damaging blow to the Haitian farmers.
The largest decreases in Haitian farming output were allowed under the guise of free trade. The Haitian government, led by Aristide, made agreements with central banking entities, the IMF and World Bank, to drop trade tariffs and accept the importation of foreign produce. Trade tariffs decreased from over 30% to an ineffectual 3%. Within a year of the trade deal, Haiti was inundated with an enormous amount of heavily subsidized produce from the United States. Consequently, the price of domestic produce plummeted, making farming-for-profit in Haiti nearly a futile enterprise. The proposed purpose of the agreement was to free up farm workers to work better jobs in industry, but since such a significant workforce encompassed farming it did little to quell those fears. However, Haitian farmers would not realize how truly worse off they were until one of the worst natural disasters in their country’s history. Haiti was already vulnerable to a number of natural disasters, “These households are particularly vulnerable to natural shocks such as droughts, floods and hurricanes” (Echevin). Even within a country with a propensity for natural disasters, Haitians were not prepared for them; thus, an earthquake of large magnitude was something unimaginable.
In the wake of the massive earthquake in Haiti on January 11, 2010, the farmers had realized a near total loss of what was left of their agriculture infrastructure.

The earthquake caused an estimated 234 million dollars of agricultural losses. Additionally, agricultural capacity had already fallen to all-time lows due the massive, cheap imports, leaving Haiti in the midst of one of the largest humanitarian crisis of the 21st. century. In 2010, former president Bill Clinton publicly apologized for his role in the crisis, “It might of been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake. I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else” (The Buffalo News). Still, nearly 50 percent of food consumed in the country is imported including 80% of the

rice.
In conclusion, the plight of the Haitian farming community has had many diverse influences. Fragmentation of land ownership ensured participants of the farming industry had little solidarity. Their own espoused culture left them wholly unprepared for the dynamics of their own nation. Farmers were the largest portion of Haiti’s population, but an indifference to politics and isolationist preferences gave them no voice in their own government. After independence, French colonialism gave way to United States neo-colonialism early in the country’s history. In the 1990’s, free trade and globalization were the final blow to a viable domestic agriculture industry. Finally, a natural disaster has turned a struggling country into a full blown humanitarian crisis.