Aid Should Go to Haitian Popular Organizations, Not to Contractors or NGOs
For decades, Noam Chomsky has been an analyst and activist working in support of the Haitian people. In addition to his revolutionary linguistics career at MIT, he has written, lectured and protested against injustice for 40 years. He is co-author, along with Paul Farmer and Amy Goodman of Getting Haiti Right This Time: The U.S. and the Coup. His analysis "The Tragedy of Haiti" from his 1993 book Year 501: The Conquest Continues is available for free online. This interview was conducted in late February 2010 by phone and email. The interviewer thanks Peter Hallward for his kind assistance.
Keane Bhatt: Recently you signed a letter to the Guardian protesting the militarization of emergency relief. It criticized a prioritization of security and military control to the detriment of rescue and relief.
Noam Chomsky: I think there was an overemphasis in the early stage on militarization rather than directly providing relief. I don't think it has any long-term significance...the United States has comparative advantage in military force. It tends to react to anything at first with military force, that's what it's good at. And I think they overdid it. There was more military force than was necessary; some of the doctors that were in Haiti, including those from Partners in Health who have been there for a long time, felt that there was an element of racism in believing that Haitians were going to riot and they had to be controlled and so on, but there was very little indication of that; it was very calm and quiet. The emphasis on militarization did probably delay somewhat the provision of relief. I went along with the general thrust of the petition that there was too much militarization.
KB: If this militarization of relief was not intentionally extreme but rather just a default response of the US, is it just serendipity that there is a massive troop presence available to manage the rapidly mounting popular protests post-earthquake? A surprisingly large, politicized group comprised of survivors has already mobilized around demanding Aristide's return, French reparations instead of charity, and so on.
NC: So far, at least, I don't know of any employment of the troops to subdue protests. It might come, but I suspect a more urgent concern is the impending disaster of the rainy season, terrible to contemplate.
KB: Regarding relief work, aside from Partners in Health, Al Jazeera noted that the Cuban medical team was the first to set up medical facilities among the debris and constitutes the largest contingent of medical workers in Haiti, something that preceded the earthquake. If their performance in Pakistan [earthquake of 2005] is any indicator, they will probably be the last to leave. Cuba seems to have an exemplary, decades-long conduct in foreign assistance.
NC: Well, the Cubans were already there before the earthquake. They had a couple hundred doctors there. And yes, they sent doctors very quickly; they had medical facilities there very quickly. Venezuela also sent aid quite quickly; Venezuela was also the first country and the only country at any scale to cancel totally the debt. There was considerable debt to Venezuela because of PetroCaribe, and it's rather striking that Venezuela and Cuba were not invited to the donors' meeting in Montreal.
Actually the prime minister of Haiti, Bellerive, went out of his way to thank three countries: the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Venezuela for their rapid provision of aid. What Al Jazeera said about Pakistan is quite correct. In that terrible earthquake a couple of years ago, the Cubans were really the only ones who went into the very difficult areas high up in the mountains where it's very hard to live. They're the ones who stayed after everyone else left. And none of that gets reported in the United States. But the fact of the matter is, whatever you think about Cuba, its internationalism is pretty dramatic. And the people who've been working in Haiti for years have been awestruck by Cuban medical aid as they were in Pakistan, in fact. That's an old story. I mean, the Cuban contribution to the liberation of Africa is just overwhelming. And you can find that in scholarship, but the public doesn't know anything about it.
KB: On that point, you've talked about how "states are not moral agents. They act in their own interests. And that means the interests of powerful forces within them." How does the history of exemplary humanitarian work as Cuban state policy relate to that thought?
NC: Well, I think it's just been a core part of the Cuban revolution to have a very high level of internationalism. I mean, these cases you've mentioned are cases in point, but the most extreme case was the liberation of Africa. Take the case of Angola for example, and there are real connections between Cuba and Angola-much of the Cuban population comes from Angola. But South Africa, with US support, after the fall of the Portuguese empire, invaded Angola and Mozambique to establish their own puppet regime there. They were trying to protect Namibia, to protect apartheid, and nobody did much about it; but the Cubans sent forces, and furthermore they sent black soldiers and they defeated a white mercenary army, which not only rescued Angola but it sent a shock throughout the continent-it was a psychic shock-white mercenaries were purported to be invincible, and a black army defeated them and sent them back fleeing into South Africa. Well that gave a real shot in the arm to the liberation movements, and it also was a lesson to the white South Africans that the end is coming. They can't just hope to subdue the continent on racist grounds. Now, it didn't end the wars. The South African attacks in Angola and Mozambique continued until the late 1980s, with strong US support. And it was no joke. According to the UN estimates they killed a million and a half people in Angola and Mozambique, nothing slight. Nevertheless, the Cuban intervention had a huge effect, also on other countries of Africa. And one the most striking aspects of it is that they took no credit for it. They wanted credit to be taken by the nationalist movements in Africa. So in fact none of this was even known until an American researcher, Piero Gleijeses unearthed the evidence from the Cuban archives and African sources and published it in scholarly journals and a scholarly book, and it's just an astonishing story but barely known-one out of a million people has ever heard of it.
KB: You mentioned the Venezuelan debt cancellation. At the same time, the G7 is in the process of eliminating bilateral debt. Why is that?
NC: Well they're talking about it, yeah. The Venezuelans were first. And they just completely canceled the debt. G7 refused. In the Montreal meeting, they refused to even discuss it. Later, they indicated that they might do something. Maybe they're embarrassed by the Venezuelan action. But I'm not sure how it's playing out. As far as the IMF is concerned-the IMF is basically an offshoot of the US Treasury Department-they've talked about it but so far they have not agreed, as far as I can discover, to cancel the debt.
KB: Bellerive, Prime Minister of Haiti, thanked the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Venezuela. The DR has been lauded for its relief efforts: providing food, materials and medical care, for example. But at the same time there are reports from the border of Dominican troops forcibly deporting family members of Haitian patients and sometimes even the patients themselves, in Jimaní, for example. What is your take on these contrary developments taking place and is there any historical context that you would like to add?
NC: Well, what the Dominican Republic does is up to Dominicans to decide, but the much more striking thing from my perspective, is that the United States has not brought in any-barely any refugees-even for medical treatment. And that was harshly condemned by the dean of the University of Miami Medical School who thought it was just criminal not to bring Haitians to Miami where there's marvelous medical facilities while they have to do surgery with, you know, hacksaws in Haiti. And in fact one of the first US reactions to the earthquake was to send in the Coast Guard to ensure that there wouldn't be any attempt to flee from Haiti. I mean, that's atrocious. The United States is the richest country in the world, it's right next door to Haiti. It should be offering every possible means of assistance to Haitians.
Furthermore there's a little bit of background here. I mean, the earthquake in Haiti was a class-based catastrophe. It didn't much harm the wealthy elite up in the hills, they were shaken but not destroyed. On the other hand the people who were living in the miserable urban slums, huge numbers of them, they were devastated. Maybe a couple hundred thousand were killed. How come they were living there? They were living there because of-it goes back to the French colonial system-but in the past century, they were living there because of US policies, consistent policies.
KB: You're talking about the forcible decimation of peasant agriculture in the 1990s?
NC: It started with Woodrow Wilson. When Wilson invaded all of Hispaniola, Haiti and the DR, the Wilson invasion was pretty brutal in both parts of Hispaniola. But it was much worse in Haiti. And the reasons were very clearly stated.
KB: Racism.
NC: Yeah. The State Department said, well, the Dominicans have some European blood so they're not quite so bad. But the Haitians are pure nigger. So Wilson sent the marines to disband the Haitian parliament because they wouldn't permit US corporations to buy up Haitian lands. And he forced them to do it. Well, that's one of the many atrocities and crimes. Just keeping to this, that accelerated the destruction of Haitian agriculture and the flight of people from the countryside to the cities. Now that continued under Reagan. Under Reagan, USAID and the World Bank set up very explicit programs, explicitly designed to destroy Haitian agriculture. They didn't cover it up. They gave an argument that Haiti shouldn't have an agricultural system, it should have assembly plants; women working to stitch baseballs in miserable conditions. Well that was another blow to Haitian agriculture, but nevertheless even under Reagan, Haiti was producing most of its own rice when Clinton came along.
When Clinton restored Aristide-Clinton of course supported the military junta, another little hidden story...he strongly supported it in fact. He even allowed the Texaco Oil Company to send oil to the junta in violation of presidential directives; Bush Sr. did so as well-well, he finally allowed the president to return, but on condition that he accept the programs of Marc Bazin, the US candidate that he had defeated in the 1990 election. And that meant a harsh neoliberal program, no import barriers. That means that Haiti has to import rice and other agricultural commodities from the US from US agribusiness, which is getting a huge part of its profits from state subsidies. So you get highly subsidized US agribusiness pouring commodities into Haiti; I mean, Haitian rice farmers are efficient but nobody can compete with that, so that accelerated the flight into the cities. And it wasn't that they didn't know it was going to happen. USAID was publishing reports in 1995 saying, yes this is going to destroy Haitian agriculture and that's a good thing. And you get the flight into the cities and you get food riots in 2008, because they can't produce their own food. And now you get this class-based catastrophe. After this history-it's only a tiny piece of it-the United States should be paying massive reparations, not just aid. And France as well. The French role is grotesque.
KB: May I ask, regarding Aristide's languishing in exile, was he right to go back to Haiti in 1994 in the way that he did, with US troops? Also, was he right to agree, under enormous pressure of course, to the neoliberal reforms laid out in the Paris Accords?
NC: Well, I happened to be in Haiti almost at that time-1993. I was there for a while; this was the peak of the terror. And I've been in a lot of awful places in the world. Some of the worst, in fact. But I don't think I've ever seen anything like the misery and the terror that was going on in Haiti under the junta, with Clinton's backing at that time. And there was a lot of discussion, I talked for example to the late Father Gerard Jean-Juste, one of the most popular figures in Haiti, who the government recently forced out, he was then underground in a church but Haitian friends took me to him. He was very close to large parts of the population. I talked to labor leaders who'd been beaten and tortured but were willing to talk, and to activists and others. And what most of them said is, Father Jean-Juste for example, what he said is, "Look, I don't want a marine invasion, I think it's a bad idea. But on the other hand," he said, "my people, the people in the slums-La Saline, Cite Soleil and so on, they just can't take it anymore." He said, "the torture is too awful, the terror is too awful. They'll accept anything that'll put an end to it." And that was the dilemma. I don't have an answer to that.
KB: Was Aristide wrong to argue against calls (made by some of his more militant supporters) for armed struggle inside Haiti to restore democracy after the 1991 coup?
NC: Not in my opinion. Armed struggle would have led to a horrendous slaughter.
KB: On February 17th, Sarkozy was greeted to street protests by thousands of Haitians holding up images of Aristide, demanding his return, and demanding reparations for what the French extorted in exchange for recognizing Haiti's independence. At that same address, Preval was shouted down and he withdrew into his jeep. With this kind of sentiment brewing in Haiti right now, do you see Aristide's return as an important priority, or is it something that might be desirable but not that pressing?
NC: Well, the answer to that question is going to be given in Washington. The United States and France, the two traditional torturers of Haiti, essentially kidnapped Aristide in 2004 after having blocked any international aid to the country under very dubious pretexts, not credible grounds, which of course extremely harmed this fragile economy. There was chaos and the US and France and Canada flew in, kidnapped Aristide-they said they rescued him, they actually kidnapped him-they flew him off to Central Africa, his party Fanmi Lavalas is banned, which probably accounts for the very low turnout in the recent elections, and the United States has been trying to keep Aristide not only from Haiti, but from the entire hemisphere.
KB: By which way is Aristide compelled to remain exiled? How exactly is his persona non grata status in the hemisphere maintained and by whom? What is preventing him from flying into a sympathetic country near Haiti, like Venezuela, for example?
NC: He might be able to go to Venezuela, but if he tried to go to the Dominican Republic, for example, they wouldn't let him in. And there's good reason for that. International affairs is very much like the mafia, and the small storekeeper doesn't offend the Godfather. It's too dangerous. We can pretend it's otherwise, but that's the way it is. There was one country, I think it was Jamaica if I remember correctly, that did allow Aristide in, over serious US pressure and protest. And not a lot of countries are willing to take the risk of offending the United States. It's a dangerous, violent superpower. I don't have to tell you, you know the history of the Dominican Republic. I don't have to tell you about it-that's the way it works.
KB: Using, as you've said, the historical US legacy in the DR, can we turn to recent Dominican history? As this humanitarian aid is provided on behalf of the DR, and it fills in the vacuum left by a weak Haitian state, if we go back to the events leading up to the coup of 2004, it worked under US aegis to actively destabilize Haiti by training the paramilitary rebels, Guy Philippe and Louis Jodel Chamblain...
NC: I know. And providing a base for them.
KB: Is there some kind of a contradiction to provide charity for people who you've actually worked to dismantle and destabilize?
NC: Well, you can call it a contradiction if you like, but it's also a contradiction for Sarkozy and Clinton to appear in Haiti without abject apologies for the terrible crimes that France and the U.S. under Clinton, particularly, have carried out against Haiti. But they don't do it. The head of Toyota has to go to Congress and apologize for hours because some people were killed by Toyota cars, but does Clinton have to go and apologize for what he did to Haiti? He dealt a death blow. Does Sarkozy have to apologize for the fact that Haiti was France's richest colony and a source of a lot of France's wealth and they destroyed the country and then posed an indemnity as a price for liberating themselves, which the country was never able to get out of?
A couple of years ago, in 2002 I think, Aristide appealed to France, to Chirac, to pay some remuneration for the huge debt that Haiti had to pay them...
KB: Twenty-one billion dollars...
NC: Yeah, for this huge debt that Haiti had to pay them. And they did set up a commission led by Regis Debray, a former radical. And the commission said that France has no need to give any compensation at all. In other words, first we rob and then destroy them, and then when they ask for a little bit of help, we kick them in the face. It's not surprising.
KB: Although at the same time there are sources that say that while France put up an indifferent front, it was actually worried about a head of state bringing a legal case with overwhelming documentary evidence for international arbitration.
NC: Well, they really didn't have to worry, because the way power politics works, the World Court can't do anything. Look, there's one country in the world at the moment which has refused to accept World Court decision-that's the United States. Is anybody going to do anything about it?
KB: You mentioned Clinton, now UN special envoy to Haiti, who intends to woo foreign investors and continue on a low-wage textile focus for Haitian economic development. The lens of neoliberal economist Paul Collier, special adviser to the UN in 2009, dominates the UN perspective of Haiti. An advocate of sweatshop-led growth himself, he's lavished praise on the much-resented MINUSTAH occupation force there, and has even said that the Dominican Republic "is not engaged in the sort of activities, such as clandestine support for guerrilla groups, that beset many other fragile states." Can a true humanitarian like Paul Farmer-representing a different development model based on fair wages, public health, strengthening the Haitian state-influence the UN as deputy special envoy?
NC: It's a hard choice. I don't blame him for trying. We live in this world, not another one that we'd prefer, and sometimes it's necessary to follow painful paths if we hope to provide at least a little help for suffering people. Like Father Jean-Juste and the marines.
KB: You've talked about how the media created an artificial distinction between the South American 'Bad Left' and 'Good Left,' omitting Brazil's important collaboration with Venezuela in the interest of maintaining this view. However, with respect to Haiti, hasn't Brazil legitimately earned a secure place within the 'Good Left'? A center-left government of the South has spearheaded the MINUSTAH occupation and has pledged to increase its presence, after taking it over from the imperial architects of the coup (US, France, Canada). What factors made it so vigorous in supporting another deposed president of an equally geopolitically-unimportant country in recent times (Zelaya of Honduras)?
NC: Good questions. I haven't seen anything useful on Brazil's decisions on these matters.
KB: Any comments on the US media regarding Haiti following the earthquake? For example, Pat Robertson's 'pact with the devil,' David Brooks' 'progress-resistant culture,' pleas with transnational capital to create more sweatshops (Kirstof), Aristide being a despot and a cheat (Jon Lee Anderson). Even Amy Wilentz has compared Aristide to Duvalier in the New York Times.
NC: It's been mainly awful, but I haven't kept a record. The worst part is ignoring our own disgraceful role in helping to create the catastrophe, and consequent refusal to react as any decent person should-with massive reparations, directed to popular organizations. Same with France.
KB: I guess my final question is for the future: there have been a discouraging two decades, from 1990-2010, about the popular mobilization for political change in Haiti, and how to proceed, and I guess now that the Haitian people have struggled so hard through parliamentary democracy for 25 years and have so little to show for it, what are the lessons learned and possible strategies now that they've exhausted this parliamentary, democratic approach? Two coups d'etat and thousands tortured and murdered in this process.
NC: The lessons are, unfortunately, that a small weak country that is facing an extremely hostile and very violent superpower will not make much progress unless there's a strong solidarity movement within the superpower that will restrain its actions. With more support within the United States, I think the Haitian efforts could have succeeded.
And that applies right now. Take the aid that's coming in. There is aid coming in-we have to show we're nice people and so on. But the aid ought to be going to Haitian popular organizations. Not to contractors, not to NGOs-to Haitian popular organizations, and they're the ones that should be deciding what to do with it. Well you know, that's not the agenda of G7. They don't want popular organizations; they don't like popular movements; they don't like democracy for that matter. What they want is for the rich and powerful to run things. Well, if there was a strong solidarity movement in the United States and the world, it could change that.
Keane Bhatt is an activist and jazz musician from New York currently living in the Dominican Republic as a volunteer.
Haitian recovery through sweatshop labor by Gabriel A. Fraire Carolina Peacemaker Originally posted 2/24/2010  A recent Associated Press article ran in the local daily paper with the headline “Low-pay garment jobs may aid Haiti’s recovery.” At first glance one might see this as a positive act, new jobs aiding in the recovery of Haiti. But a quick read through the story presents some glaring injustices, injustices that seem to mirror one of the major disservices of a corporate run world. Jobs to aid recovery is a great idea (one we could use in this country), however, can there ever be a good reason to perpetuate the concept of third-world sweatshops? The article states how one young garment worker makes $3.08 for an eight-hour day of labor. And despite living in a poverty-ridden country (even before the earthquake) three dollars a day is not enough money to sustain the worker who must sleep in the street and scavenge for food. The U.S. government is aiding this process by encouraging all U.S. retailers to obtain from Haiti at least one percent of the clothes they sell. An act passed by Congress in 2008 called the HOPE II Act (Haiti Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Act) allows Haiti to export textiles duty-free to the U.S. According to the AP article $513 million worth of Haitian-made apparel was exported to the U.S. last year with the factory profit margin averaging about 22 percent. Call me a bleeding heart liberal but where is the justice in this? How can we allow a 22 percent profit margin on the backs of slave labor? And, more importantly, how can we perpetuate and even encourage such activity under the guise of helping? If we truly want to help shouldn’t we be allowing this duty-free export only if wages are increased? In some ways it reminds me of how corporate America has, under the guise of economic recovery, come away with a major stronghold on the American worker. Thanks to the corrupt practices of the financial industry our “economic downturn” has given corporate America exactly what it has, for years, strived to achieve – workers who are forced to accept whatever is dished out by management. Everywhere one goes today you can hear people complain about their job, or rant about their boss, or worry about their pay and still the last thing each and everyone of those complaining says is, “Well, at least I’ve got a job.” American workers are so grateful to not be unemployed that they will now accept any and all conditions of their work. So, I guess if it can happen here then why not in Haiti. They will just be happy to have the job. Right? Well, that’s not what the young woman in the AP story said. She said, “We’re just fighting to survive.” Which also sounds like a lot of American workers, we’re just fighting to survive. Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a fantasy world were corporate owners felt some sense of responsibility to their workers or their customers? Wouldn’t it be grand if those factory owners, instead of making a 22 percent profit margin decided instead to make only 20 percent profit and would return the other two percent to the workers? Think of the hope that might truly give the Haitians knowing that not only would they be re-building their country but that the country they were re-building would be better than the one that was devastated by the earthquake. It never ceases to amaze me how one can make profit on the misery and hardships of others. I have no doubt there were scammers, con men and “business” men who raced to New Orleans after Katrina to take advantage of the misfortune and now there will be the same in Haiti. | ||||
Clearing the Rubble, Including the Old Plan for Haiti
Yesterday was the Oscars. Last year's Best Actor Sean Penn made the morning's headlines, donating a million dollars to Haiti's relief / reconstruction effort. Collectively U.S. citizens have donated $1 billion so far. Two questions arise: one, which I and many others have asked numerous times, where is this money being spent, how, and what plan? A second, related question is where Haiti will get the funds for the rest of the effort conservatively estimated at $16 billion.
Private charitable donations can only go so far. Where is the rest of the reconstruction coming from? What is the plan of these other actors? Generally speaking there are two sets of actors: the "public sector" and the "private sector." I put both in quotes because there is considerable slippage between governments and private, for-profit investors or companies, in the U.S. as in Haiti. Both sets of actors have a planning conference coming up, one in Miami and the other in New York.
Given tomorrow's "Haiti summit" in Miami organized by International Peace Operations Association, this first blog will focus on the private sector. The argument goes something like this: official development aid can set the conditions for development, but its impact is always going to be smaller than that of the private sector, which provides jobs. Globally, private sector "foreign direct investment" (FDI) dwarfs public sector "overseas development assistance" (ODA). For example, FDI to "developing countries" in the Global South reached $636 billion in 2004, compared to $93 billion in ODA.
The opposite is true in Haiti. FDI is a pittance in Haiti. In 2002, it was $4.7 million, growing to 160 million in 2006 only to shrink again to 29.8 million in 2008.(1) By contrast, ODA has been high following Aristide's ouster, beginning with a rushed, top-down process in the Interim Cooperation Framework wherein donors pledged 1.4 billion.(2) Why is capital investment so small and volatile in Haiti? First of all, it should be noted that Haiti's traditional elite(3) was not a capitalist but a mercantile class. In other words they did not build like the Rockefellers or the Carnegies but always benefited directly off of monopolizing trade. They therefore always took foreign interests as their own.
To many people, especially foreign investors, the devastating earthquake wherein recent estimates count 230,000 dead, presents a "window of opportunity." First and foremost, there is the obvious money to be made in reconstruction: private prison company GEO pulled aquarter-million no-bid contract for security; Cooperative Housing Foundation received $117 million for housing reconstruction. This is one element of what journalist-activist Naomi Klein dubbed "disaster capitalism," what I would call "nonprofiteering."
In addition to the money to be made, there is another component to disaster capitalism, what longtime humanitarian provider/scholar Antonio Donini calls "world ordering." Disasters -- both "natural" and "man-made" -- provide the opportunity to clear the slate, to make anew. To some agencies, disasters create a terra nullius(4) -- blank slate -- upon which new plans, new visions and new policies can be written and imposed.
If there really is a new Haiti and a new Port-au-Prince coming, that would be welcome to most of my neighbors, friends, and colleagues. Imagine a Port-au-Prince where everyone in all neighborhoods has equal access to a large enough, dry, safe house, electricity, clean drinking water, and sanitation. Imagine a Haiti where everyone, girls and boys, can go to school for free, which is mandated by the Haitian Constitution (Article 32.1). Imagine enough primary health care in close proximity so that women who want to have prenatal care can have it, so that the 75 children out of 1,000 who currently die before their fifth birthday can be but a painful memory.
Unfortunately this isn't the plan from the private sector, and it is anything but new. While the name has changed, from Reagan's Caribbean Basin Initiative to the Interim Cooperation Framework to the HOPE Act to the Collier Report, the plan essentially remains the same.
Since the 1970s and 1980s, with support from the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and USAID, Haiti has been the site for offshore textile plants, alternatively called Free-Trade Zones, Export Processing Zones, maquiladoras, and sweatshops -- the core plank in neoliberalism. Dictator "Baby Doc" Duvalier promised to turn Haiti into the "Taiwan of the Caribbean." Neoliberalism pushed peasants off their land. According to Haitian economist, director of research at the State University and author of seven books Fritz Deshommes, neoliberalism destroyed 800,000 agricultural jobs in Haiti. Even at its height in the 1980s the offshore apparel industry only provided 70,000 jobs. Port-au-Prince grew up from 500,000 people (only built for 250,000) in 1980 to an estimated 2.5 million in 2005.
Where were these 2 million new residents going to live? Even for the lucky few that did make a steadily declining minimum wage (now valued at $1.65 per day), what kind of house could they afford? Said Hélène,(5) "If you pay 10 gourdes (Haiti's currency, around 40 to a U.S. dollar) for transport to work, 10 to return, and buy a plate of food for 50, that's all your 70 gourdes." I have visited dozens of people's homes in various bidonvil (shantytowns); many are seven feet square cinderblock and patchwork tin roofs that have no privacy, no water, no toilet or shower, and barely keep out the elements like pouring rain and scorching Caribbean sun. After the promotion of export-processing zones, literally overnight, these bidonvil were created, including the infamous Cité Soleil, according to a movie Ghosts of Cité Soleil "the most dangerous place on Earth." With state services privatized, also a plank in neoliberalism, families (especially mothers) have to pay for their children's education (40% of a minimum wage salary for one child) and health care, on top of high housing costs and increasing food costs.
On top of this, the offshore apparel industry is notoriously unstable; at its peak it employed 70-80,000 jobs but dwindled to 12-14,000 at the nadir of violence following Aristide's forced removal from office - both in 1991 and 2004. Combine this with an already weak state deliberately undermined through neo-liberal policies such as "structural adjustment" and these bidonvil have next to no public services, and even fewer jobs. Economist Camille Chalmers said, "We can say therefore that Cité Soleil is a child of the Industrial Park." Sub-contracted, low-wage factory work does not contribute much to the economy besides jobs. Being exempt from taxes, it does not contribute to the financing of Haiti's social services. According to a minister of finance, it is the sector with the least "value-added" in Haiti.
We'll be hearing soon another siren song about the "Asian Tigers" like Korea who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps through textiles and grew into heavy industry. We'll hear about China who has even lower wages and the world's greatest productive capacity. To be blunt, Haiti is different, given its place within the world system. It has always been drained by its former colonial power and later its powerful neighbor to the north, its productive resources steadily drained. Haiti had a small but important industrialization that supported a peasant economy but that has all been systematically destroyed. Korea and China both had large internal markets, huge infusions of cash, and iron-fisted dictators. Most importantly, however, both countries had and have a range of public services provided by the government to factory workers so their much lower wages actually go farther than they do in Haiti. This is part of what economists call "purchasing power parity," along with fluctuating exchange rates.
It is true that even before the earthquake Haiti was in desperate need of good paying jobs; estimates range from 70 to 85 percent unemployment. The lack of jobs definitely gives factory owners a sense of impunity, as factory worker Marie-Jeanne said, "they fire us if we join a union because they know that if they fire you they will find 50 people to replace your jobs." Job creation, especially now, is indeed an urgent priority. But we all need to be asking the questions about what the social cost of these jobs will be, what their long-term benefits are, and who in the end will benefit. For example, based on my research last summer, the cost of all the Haitian labor on a pair of jeans ranges from 12 and a half to 18 cents. My Levi's cost me - on sale - $35. The problem is the enormous imbalance of where the "value added" is being kept, with only the barest minimum staying in Haiti. The same is true, by the way, of mangoes and other agricultural exports.
To those who don't trust me because I am not a development economist, listen to the factory workers themselves, like Frisline: "when I was working in the factories, I only made pennies. And this didn't do anything for me. Now I am doing commerce, and I see I live better. I can invest in my business."She of course lost her house and her business in the earthquake. I hope to see her when I return at the end of the month.
If there is a plan to clear the rubble I would sincerely hope that people like Fritz Deshommes and the State University are framing the conversation with their expertise, and people like Hélène and Frisline are participating in the process, giving their priorities, their critiques, and actually setting agenda in addition to being a name on an attendance roster.
Haiti's future development, not to mention basic human dignity and respect, demand it.
Mark Schuller is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology at York College, the City University of New York. He is co-director of Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy and co-editor of Capitalizing on Catastrophe: Neoliberal Strategies in Disaster Reconstruction.
Notes:
(1) Source: World Bank Haiti at-a-Glance. Accessed March 7, 2010.
(2) See critique, "Haiti: the Tail Wagging the Dog?" on HaitiAnalysis or "Haiti Is Finished" inCapitalizing on Catastrophe.
(3) Actually there were two: black military and lighter-skinned merchants, each competing with one another. See Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Haiti: State against Nation.
(4) This legal term, Latin for "empty land," justified European and American expansion and genocide into already-inhabited lands.
(5) Names are pseudonyms to protect their anonymity. All quotes are from Poto Mitan
(1) Source: World Bank Haiti at-a-Glance. Accessed March 7, 2010.
(2) See critique, "Haiti: the Tail Wagging the Dog?" on HaitiAnalysis or "Haiti Is Finished" inCapitalizing on Catastrophe.
(3) Actually there were two: black military and lighter-skinned merchants, each competing with one another. See Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Haiti: State against Nation.
(4) This legal term, Latin for "empty land," justified European and American expansion and genocide into already-inhabited lands.
(5) Names are pseudonyms to protect their anonymity. All quotes are from Poto Mitan
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