By JONATHAN M. KATZ, The Asso­ci­ated Press

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/20/AR2010032001329.html

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The earth­quake not only smashed mar­kets, col­lapsed ware­houses and left more than 2.5 mil­lion peo­ple with­out enough to eat. It may also have shaken up the way the devel­op­ing world gets food.

Decades of inex­pen­sive imports — espe­cially rice from the U.S. — punc­tu­ated with abun­dant aid in var­i­ous crises have destroyed local agri­cul­ture and left impov­er­ished coun­tries such as Haiti unable to feed themselves.

While those poli­cies have been crit­i­cized for years in aid worker cir­cles, world lead­ers focused on fix­ing Haiti are admit­ting for the first time that loos­en­ing trade bar­ri­ers has only exac­er­bated hunger in Haiti and elsewhere.

They’re led by for­mer U.S. Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton — now U.N. spe­cial envoy to Haiti — who pub­licly apol­o­gized this month for cham­pi­oning poli­cies that destroyed Haiti’s rice pro­duc­tion. Clin­ton in the mid-1990s encour­aged the impov­er­ished coun­try to dra­mat­i­cally cut tar­iffs on imported U.S. rice.

“It may have been good for some of my farm­ers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mis­take,” Clin­ton told the Sen­ate For­eign Rela­tions Com­mit­tee on March 10. “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.”

Clin­ton and for­mer Pres­i­dent George W. Bush, who are spear­head­ing U.S. fundrais­ing for Haiti, arrive Mon­day in Port-au-Prince. Then comes a key Haiti donors’ con­fer­ence on March 31 at the United Nations in New York.

Those oppor­tu­ni­ties present the coun­try with its best chance in decades to build long-term food pro­duc­tion, and could pro­vide a model for other devel­op­ing coun­tries strug­gling to feed themselves.

“A com­bi­na­tion of food aid, but also cheap imports have … resulted in a lack of invest­ment in Hait­ian farm­ing, and that has to be reversed,” U.N. human­i­tar­ian chief John Holmes told The Asso­ci­ated Press. “That’s a global phe­nom­e­non, but Haiti’s a prime exam­ple. I think this is where we should start.”

Haiti’s gov­ern­ment is ask­ing for $722 mil­lion for agri­cul­ture, part of an over­all request of $11.5 billion.

That includes money to fix the esti­mated $31 mil­lion of quake dam­age to agri­cul­ture, but much more for future projects restor­ing Haiti’s dan­ger­ous and dam­aged water­sheds, improv­ing irri­ga­tion and infra­struc­ture, and train­ing farm­ers and pro­vid­ing them with bet­ter support.

Hait­ian Pres­i­dent Rene Preval, an agron­o­mist from the rice-growing Art­i­bonite Val­ley, is also call­ing for food aid to be stopped in favor of agri­cul­tural investment.

Today Haiti depends on the out­side world for nearly all of its sus­te­nance. The most cur­rent gov­ern­ment needs assess­ment — based on num­bers from 2005 — is that 51 per­cent of the food con­sumed in the coun­try is imported, includ­ing 80 per­cent of all rice eaten.

The free-food dis­tri­b­u­tions that filled the shat­tered capital’s plazas with swarm­ing hun­gry sur­vivors of the Jan. 12 earth­quake have ended, but the U.N. World Food Pro­gram is con­tin­u­ing tar­geted hand­outs expected to reach 2.5 mil­lion peo­ple this month. All that food has been imported — though the agency recently put out a ten­der to buy locally grown rice.

Street mar­kets have reopened, filled with honk­ing trucks, drink sell­ers clink­ing bot­tles and women ven­dors crouched behind rolled-down sacks of dry goods. Peo­ple buy what’s cheap­est, and that’s American-grown rice.

The best-seller comes from Rice­land Foods in Stuttgart, Arkansas, which sold six pounds for $3.80 last month, accord­ing to Haiti’s National Food Secu­rity Coor­di­na­tion Unit. The same amount of Hait­ian rice cost $5.12.

“National rice isn’t the same, it’s bet­ter qual­ity. It tastes bet­ter. But it’s too expen­sive for peo­ple to buy,” said Leonne Fede­lone, a 50-year-old vendor.

Rice­land defends its mar­ket share in Haiti, now the fifth-biggest export mar­ket in the world for Amer­i­can rice.

But for Haitians, near-total depen­dence on imported food has been a disaster.

Cheap for­eign prod­ucts drove farm­ers off their land and into over­crowded cities. Rice, a grain with lim­ited nutri­tion once reserved for spe­cial occa­sions in the Hait­ian diet, is now a staple.

Imports also put the coun­try at the mercy of inter­na­tional prices: When they spiked in 2008, riot­ers unable to afford rice smashed and burned build­ings. Par­lia­ment ousted the prime minister.

Now it could be hap­pen­ing again. Imported rice prices are up 25 per­cent since the quake — and would likely be even higher if it weren’t for the flood of food aid, said WFP mar­ket ana­lyst Ceren Gurkan.

Three decades ago things were dif­fer­ent. Haiti imported only 19 per­cent of its food and pro­duced enough rice to export, thanks in part to pro­tec­tive tar­iffs of 50 per­cent set by the father-son dic­ta­tors, Fran­cois and Jean-Claude Duvalier.

When their reign ended in 1986, free-market advo­cates in Wash­ing­ton and Europe pushed Haiti to tear those mar­ket bar­ri­ers down. Pres­i­dent Jean-Bertrand Aris­tide, freshly rein­stalled to power by Clin­ton in 1994, cut the rice tar­iff to 3 percent.

Impov­er­ished farm­ers unable to com­pete with the bil­lions of dol­lars in sub­si­dies paid by the U.S. to its grow­ers aban­doned their farms. Oth­ers turned to more envi­ron­men­tally destruc­tive crops, such as beans, that are har­vested quickly but has­ten soil ero­sion and deadly floods.

There have been some efforts to restore Haiti’s agri­cul­ture in recent years: The U.S. Agency for Inter­na­tional Devel­op­ment has a five-year pro­gram to improve farms and restore water­sheds in five Hait­ian regions. But the $25 mil­lion a year pales next to the $91.4 mil­lion in U.S.-grown food aid deliv­ered just in the past 10 weeks.

The U.N. Food and Agri­cul­ture Orga­ni­za­tion also dis­trib­uted 28 tons of bean seeds in moun­tain­ous areas this month, with plans this week to dis­trib­ute 49 tons of corn.

The G8 group of the world’s wealth­i­est nations pledged $20 bil­lion for farm­ers in poor coun­tries last year. The head of the FAO called this week for some to be given to Haiti.

Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s admin­is­tra­tion has pledged to sup­port agri­cul­ture in devel­op­ing nations. U.S. Repub­li­can Sen. Richard Lugar of Indi­ana has spon­sored leg­is­la­tion to cre­ate a White House Global Food Secu­rity coor­di­na­tor to improve long-term agri­cul­ture world­wide, with a bud­get of $8.5 bil­lion through 2014.

Even Haiti’s most pow­er­ful food importers have joined the push for locally pro­duced food.

“I would pre­fer to buy every­thing locally and have noth­ing to import,” said busi­ness­man Regi­nald Bou­los, who is also pres­i­dent of Haiti’s cham­ber of commerce.

But one group staunchly opposes reduc­ing food exports to Haiti: the exporters themselves.

“Haiti doesn’t have the land nor the cli­mate … to pro­duce enough rice,” said Bill Reed, Riceland’s vice pres­i­dent of com­mu­ni­ca­tions. “The pro­duc­tiv­ity of U.S. farm­ers helps feed coun­tries which can­not feed themselves.”