How the U.S. Crippled Haiti’s Domestic Rice Production

By: Leslie Mullin – Haiti Solidarity

We are all living under a system so corrupt that to ask for a
plate of rice and beans every day for every man, woman and child is to preach
revolution
– Jean Bertrand Aristide, Dignity 1990.

    The basic right to eat is at the very heart of Haiti’s struggle
for democracy.  Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the radical voice of Haiti’s poor,
aptly characterized slavery when he wrote, “The role of slaves was to harvest
coconuts, and the role of colonists was to eat the coconuts.” [i]
To
Aristide, those who have food and those who don’t marks the vast chasm
separating Haiti’s wealthy elite from millions of impoverished citizens:

It’s no wonder that Haiti’s most popular party, Fanmi Lavalas,
chose the image of Haitian people seated around a dining table as its emblem,
signifying the overthrow of privilege and the right of every Haitian to share
the nation’s wealth. This is not mere symbolism. In its 1990 program, the Lavalas
party recognized the right to eat as one of three basic principles, along with
the right to work and the right of the impoverished masses to demand what is
owed them.[iii]
In a very concrete way, Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected
president, illustrated this commitment on the day of his February 7th, 1991
inauguration, when he invited several hundred street children to join him for
breakfast in the Palace garden.

Haiti’s hunger crisis is no accident – it is the direct result
of US economic policies imposed on rural Haiti beginning in the 1980s. The
story of how the US undermined Haiti’s domestic rice industry explains why a
nation of farmers can no longer feed itself.

     The story of Haitian rice begins in Africa, where rice has
sustained African peoples for centuries.  Rice was so basic to the West
African diet that it was an essential provision on slave ships, accompanying
captive Africans to Brazil, the Caribbean and the southern United States.[iv]
Today, testament to 10 million souls kidnapped from their homeland, every
region touched by the African diaspora has its own unique version of rice and
beans. [v]

Rice cultivation in the United States is deeply rooted in
slavery. Black Rice author Judith Carney writes, “Few Americans identify
slavery with the cultivation of rice, yet rice was a major plantation crop
during the first three centuries of settlement in the Americas… By the middle
of the eighteenth century, rice plantations in South Carolina and the black
slaves who worked them had created one of the most profitable economies in the
world.” [vi]
European settlers knew nothing about the complexities of growing, harvesting
and threshing rice. But enslaved Africans did.

A basic staple of the Haitian diet, rice has been cultivated in
Haiti since its 1804 independence. Until the 1980s, Haitian farmers produced
most of the rice consumed in Haiti. Under the US-backed dictator Jean-Claude
Duvalier and the brutal military regimes that followed, domestic rice
cultivation began to plummet. In the space of a few decades, Haiti became the
world’s fourth largest market for American rice. By 2004, the value of US rice
exports to Haiti amounted to $80 million. How this colossal tragedy came about
is a story of foreign intervention, government corruption, and corporate greed
backed by ruthless repression.

Food aid played a key role in undermining Haiti’s domestic rice
production. President Aristide observed, “What good does it do the peasant when
the pastor feeds his children? For one night, he is grateful to the pastor,
because that night he does not have to hear the whimpers of his children,
starving. But the same free foreign rice the pastor feeds the peasant’s
children is being sold on the market for less than the farmer’s own produce. The
very food that the pastor feeds the peasant’s children is keeping the peasant
in poverty, unable himself to feed his children.” [vii]

Ronald Reagan’s 1984 Caribbean Basin Initiative prompted a major
increase in US food aid to Haiti. In 1984, Haiti received $11 million in food
aid; from 1985-1988, Haiti received $54 million in food aid.[viii]
The Caribbean Basin Initiative called for integrating Haiti into the global
market by redirecting 30% of Haiti’s domestic food production towards export
crops, a plan that USAID experts systematically carried out. The United States
fully recognized that this would lead to widespread hunger in rural Haiti, as
peasant land was converted to grow food for foreigners. Food aid was supposed
to compensate rural Haitians for this attack on their livelihood.[ix]
Food aid benefits the big American companies who grow and transport it, but
wrecks local economies. As cheap American food undersold Haitian farmers’
produce, domestic agriculture became even less sustainable. In effect, food aid
created a dependence on foreign imports.

How was the United States able to impose its will on rural
Haiti? At the time, Jean-Claude Duvalier, the son of Haiti’s infamous dictator,
Francois Duvalier, ruled Haiti. Like his father, the younger Duvalier held onto
power by controlling Haiti’s repressive security forces. He received millions
in US aid intended to maintain US influence in the Caribbean as a bulwark
against Cuba. The Reagan administration conditioned US aid on Duvalier’s
support for the plan to restructure Haiti’s economy. Thus began the most
massive foreign intervention in Haiti since the 1915-1934 American occupation.

In February 1986, a popular uprising forced Baby-Doc Duvalier
out of power. After he fled Haiti, raiding the treasury as he left, a military
junta headed by General Henri Namphy took power. Predictably, the United States
aligned with the junta and intensified measures to restructure Haiti’s economy.
In 1987, Namphy received IMF loans valued at $24.6 million in exchange for
agreeing to slash rice tariffs from 150% to 50%,[x]
the lowest in the Caribbean.[xi]
He opened all of Haiti’s ports to commercial activity[xii]
and agreed to stop what little support the government had offered Haitian
farmers. Meanwhile, Haiti’s military elite saw an opportunity to make a profit
smuggling American rice.

In the United States, the passage of the 1985 Farm Bill
significantly boosted subsidies to American rice growers. By 1987, 40% of
American rice growers’ profits came from the government.[xiii]
Heavily subsidized American rice could sell at prices far below the market
value of Haitian rice. Haitian farmers never stood a chance against this unfair
competition.

In Haiti, imported American rice is called “Miami
rice” because it is shipped from Miami in sacks stamped “Miami, FLA.” By December 1987,
Haiti’s rice production had shrunk to 75% of Haitian needs.[xiv]
Outraged Haitian peasants barricaded highways and ports for three months to
protest the cheap American rice that had begun to flood Haitian markets. They
attacked truckloads of Miami rice with machetes, picks and clubs, dumping rice
onto the earth.

The
late Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste, a Haitian priest and human rights advocate, later
recalled this era: “In the 1980s, imported rice poured into Haiti, below
the cost of what our farmers could produce it. Farmers lost their businesses.
People from the countryside started losing their jobs and moving to the cities.
After a few years of cheap imported rice, local production went way down.”
[xv]

By 1990, the year Fr. Jean Bertrand Aristide was elected
President in Haiti’s first democratic election, US rice imports outpaced domestic
production.[xvi]
Aristide was the candidate of Haiti’s popular movement Lavalas. He won
with 67% of the vote. His February 1991 inauguration marked a victory for
Haiti’s poor majority after decades of Duvalier family dictatorships and
military rule, signaling participation of the poor in a new social order. The
new administration began to implement programs in adult literacy, health care,
and land redistribution; lobbied for a minimum wage hike; and proposed new
roads and infrastructure. Aristide enforced taxes on the wealthy, and dissolved
the rural section chief infrastructure that empowered the paramilitary force
known as Tonton Macoute. He closed Fort Dimanche, the dreaded
Duvalier-era torture center.[xvii]
The Aristide government met with a large coalition of farmers’ associations and
unions and proposed buying all Haitian-grown rice in order to stabilize the
price, limiting rice imports during periods between harvests.

Just seven months after his inauguration, President Aristide and
the democratic government were overthrown in a bloody military coup led by
General Raoul Cedras. Trained in the United States and funded by the CIA, Cedras
commanded the Haitian Army. His regime unleashed the collective violence of
Haiti’s repressive forces against its own people. From 1991-1994, nearly five
thousand Lavalas activists and supporters of the constitutional
government were massacred; many others were savagely tortured and imprisoned.
Rape as a political weapon was widespread. Three hundred thousand Haitians were
driven into hiding, while tens of thousands fled the country.

Around the world and in the United States, there was a massive
outcry demanding the restoration of democracy and the return of President
Aristide. Aside from the Vatican, few governments recognized the illegal Cedras
regime, widely condemned for its sweeping human-rights abuses. This did not
stop American Rice Inc from collaborating with the ruthless military regime to
turn a profit. In September 1992, barely a year after the coup, American Rice
Inc negotiated a nine-year contract with the illegal Haitian government,
importing American rice under its newly formed Rice Corporation of Haiti. [xviii]

American Rice Inc is a subsidiary of Erly Industries, a powerful
international agribusiness. The company holds an almost monopolistic position
in Haiti’s rice market. [xix]
In the 1980’s American Rice Inc imported rice under its brand Comet Rice, which
constituted much of the Miami rice that ravaged Haitian rice production at the time.[xx]

In the 1990s, American Rice Inc supplemented its profits in
“legal” rice imports by smuggling rice to avoid paying import taxes. Lawrence
Theriot, the Washington lobbyist for American Rice Inc, was a former director
of Reagan’s Caribbean Basin Initiative. He had powerful friends in Washington,
DC like Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-NC). In
March 2000, the Haitian government fined the company $1.4 million for evading
Haiti’s customs duties. Jesse Helms retaliated by withholding $30 million in US
aid, and denying high-ranking Haitian officials visas to enter the United
States. The American Securities & Exchange Commission later found Theriot
and two other American Rice Inc executives guilty of corrupt foreign practices
for smuggling rice into Haiti.

Bill Clinton’s 1992 election took place during Haiti’s
repressive Cedras regime, when President Aristide lived in exile in the United
States. After Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, Clinton famously apologized for forcing
Haiti to lower its rice tariffs during his administration. He acknowledged that
he helped big Arkansas agro-businesses reap profits at the expense of Haiti’s
rice farmers. But Clinton left a lot out of the story.

Nothing changed after Clinton’s apology either. Haiti’s 2010
earthquake became yet another business opportunity for foreign corporations to
overrun Haiti’s economy, while food aid, callously tossed off trucks to
desperate Haitians, meant more revenue for US corporations. Nor should we let
Clinton off the hook for forcibly repatriating thousands of Haitian “boat
people” fleeing tyranny under the junta, and intercepting 12,000 other refugees
who were illegally imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.

Democracy asks us to put the needs and
rights of people at the center of our endeavors. This means investing in
people. In investing in people means first of all food, clean water, education
and health care. These are basic human rights. It is the challenge of any real
democracy to guarantee them
– Jean-Bertrand Aristide