Pho­to­graph by: Natasha Fil­lion, The gazette

The key to Haiti’s sal­va­tion, says the man who would be pres­i­dent of the nation that has lan­guished in ter­mi­nal poverty for gen­er­a­tions, is a “no-brainer.”

“There are three mil­lion farm­ing fam­i­lies in Haiti,” says Charles Henri Baker, a lead­ing can­di­date in Haiti’s com­ing elections.

“The tex­tile sec­tor, to which I belong … could cre­ate 100,000, maybe 200,000 jobs. Agri­cul­ture can cre­ate three mil­lion jobs, bring down the cost of liv­ing and decen­tral­ize the four mil­lion peo­ple liv­ing in and around Port-au-Prince.… They could go back to their vil­lages and lead pos­i­tive lives, rather than stay in Port-au-Prince and just barely make a living.”

If $1 bil­lion of the $11 bil­lion pledged by inter­na­tional donors was put toward agri­cul­ture, the world could “watch Haiti not only feed itself, but export bil­lions,” he said.

Haiti might finally get the type of fund­ing Baker espouses in his polit­i­cal plat­form. After decades dur­ing which the country’s agri­cul­tural base was dec­i­mated by polit­i­cal insta­bil­ity and mis­man­age­ment, envi­ron­men­tal destruc­tion and for­eign inter­fer­ence that preached the sal­va­tion of free-market economies, the idea of rebuild­ing the coun­try from the soil up and giv­ing Haiti the means to once again feed itself by trans­fer­ring resources to farm­ers is gain­ing ground.

Much of the impe­tus comes from January’s earth­quake that killed upwards of 230,000 peo­ple, mainly in the shoddy, multi-storey build­ings of the con­gested cap­i­tal. Hun­dreds of thou­sands fled the city to find shel­ter in their rural home­lands, and are now des­per­ate for work and food.

After decades of poorly man­aged for­eign assis­tance that has seen Haitians attain­ing a lower stan­dard of liv­ing than they did 30 years ago, there is hope the recent spot­light cast on Haiti’s mis­ery can lead to an orga­nized sys­tem of man­ag­ing the aid and finally shift­ing devel­op­ment away from Port-au-Prince and to the regions where the major­ity live.

But then there’s the real­ity of a farmer like Roland Hyp­po­lite, an engi­neer who also has degrees in man­age­ment and agri­cul­tural development.

Hyp­po­lite moved back to his home­land of Lasc­a­hobas in Haiti’s bread­bas­ket Cen­tral Plateau region four years ago. He was 52, and decided it was time to leave Port-au-Prince to feed his inner spirit and his coun­try, earn a bet­ter salary than he earned as exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Haitian-Canadian Cham­ber of Com­merce and give his five chil­dren the happy rural child­hood he remembers.

Hyp­po­lite soon dis­cov­ered, how­ever, that farm­ing in Haiti is not as easy as throw­ing a few seeds in the ground and watch­ing them grow. There were few cus­tomers for his pep­pers, no decent roads to trans­port pro­duce to mar­ket, no elec­tric­ity for refrig­er­ated stor­age. He had to lay off some of his staff of four after his first year. It wasn’t until he joined forces with other farm­ers and had the good for­tune to find a Quebec-based dis­trib­u­tor on the web, at the one Inter­net cafe in his town of 53,000, that his future grew less tenuous.

While it can be reward­ing — Hyp­po­lite esti­mates a suc­cess­ful farmer with a hectare of pep­pers can make $10,000 in a sea­son on the local mar­ket, 20 times the aver­age per capita income — road­blocks are numerous.

“You have to have courage” to be a farmer in Haiti, he said last week via cell­phone, roost­ers crow­ing in the background.

If this is the expe­ri­ence of a for­mer engi­neer with degrees from uni­ver­si­ties in Haiti, the United States and Puerto Rico, who has some sav­ings and land, what hope is there for the mil­lions of des­ti­tute peas­ant farm­ers who depend on agri­cul­ture for sur­vival? And how many Haitians who have had a taste of city life want to return to a coun­try­side where health care and edu­ca­tion for their chil­dren are non-existent, to toil in the fields?

Charles Henri Baker is a con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure in Haiti. So light skinned he appears white, he is the owner of a gar­ment fac­tory where 750 employ­ees sew med­ical uni­forms that are exported worldwide.

Born in Haiti and with a degree in busi­ness admin­is­tra­tion from a Florida uni­ver­sity, he lapses fre­quently into Cre­ole dur­ing speeches as if to sub­stan­ti­ate the Hait­ian roots his skin colour puts into question.

He fin­ished third in Haiti’s 2006 pres­i­den­tial vote, and is seen as a pos­si­ble front-runner in the elec­tions slated for Novem­ber. A mem­ber of the country’s well-heeled busi­ness elite, which makes up one per cent of its pop­u­la­tion but con­trols more than 50 per cent of its wealth, Baker’s crit­ics accuse him of being a “sweat­shop indus­tri­al­ist” who prof­ited from Haiti’s cheap labour base and is now pan­der­ing to the mas­sive rural vote.

But Baker was also a suc­cess­ful farmer in the 1980s, and his plat­form of agri­cul­tural reform reflects a grow­ing vision for Haiti’s rebirth.

“What’s essen­tial is agrar­ian reform which would allow us to make peas­ants the mas­ters and the man­agers of their own land,” Cha­vannes Jean-Baptiste, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Peas­ant Move­ment of Papay in the Cen­tral Plateau region, told the Toward Free­dom grass­roots media group in March.

“Along with land, we need credit, tech­ni­cal assis­tance and mar­kets to sell our products.”

Jean-Baptiste and oth­ers call for “food sov­er­eignty” that focuses on local food pro­duc­tion for local con­sump­tion and the pro­tec­tion of local mar­kets with tar­iffs on food imports.

Baker uses Malawi as an exam­ple of what can hap­pen if aid is dis­trib­uted directly to farm­ers. Fol­low­ing a dis­as­trous corn har­vest in 2005, the impov­er­ished African coun­try needed emer­gency food aid to feed five mil­lion of its 13 mil­lion peo­ple. Malawi’s newly elected pres­i­dent vowed never again. He ignored World Bank and rich donor coun­tries’ advice that Malawi should con­tinue to rely on free-market economies for eco­nomic resur­gence and not sub­si­dize fer­til­izer or seed for its planters (even though most of the donor coun­tries heav­ily sub­si­dize their own farmers).

Malawi’s farm­land, like Haiti’s, had become severely depleted over the years because farm­ers with shrink­ing plots could not afford to fer­til­ize them or let them lie fal­low. Farm­ers and their chil­dren slowly starved to death in the bad years.

So in 2006, the New York Times reported, the gov­ern­ment of Malawi ignored the experts and gave half the nation’s farm­ing fam­i­lies coupons to buy two 50-kilogram bags of fer­til­izer, enough for an acre of land, for $15, about one-third the mar­ket price. They also received coupons for enough seed to plant half an acre. Corn pro­duc­tion jumped to 2.7 mil­lion tonnes in 2006, more than dou­ble the har­vest in 2005. In 2007, it was 3.4 mil­lion tonnes. Greater rain­fall helped, but stud­ies deter­mined access to fer­til­izer played a large role.

Malawi went from beg­ging to sell­ing more corn to the World Food Pro­gram of the United Nations than any other coun­try in south­ern Africa and export­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands of tonnes to Zim­babwe. Food prices dropped and wages for farm labour rose.

When Baker ran a farm on land he inher­ited from his father in the 1980s, he said he pro­duced 190 bags of the cereal crop sorghum per hectare because he had the money to buy fer­til­izer, irri­ga­tion equip­ment and trac­tors. The aver­age pro­duc­tion rate in Haiti at the time was 22 bags, about one-tenth his output.

“Give farm­ers access to credit,” Baker said, and their pro­duc­tion will triple. “The bank­ing sys­tem is there. The gov­ern­ment just needs to put money into the banks.”

Get the money out quickly, and farm­ers can be self-sufficient in six months to a year, Baker predicted.

Before the earth­quake, Haiti’s gov­ern­ment ear­marked seven per cent of its 2009-10 bud­get for agri­cul­tural devel­op­ment. The Food and Agri­cul­ture Orga­ni­za­tion of the United Nations sug­gested that fig­ure should be at least 12 per cent.

The down­fall of Haiti’s agri­cul­tural base has been in the works for a cen­tury, but accel­er­ated greatly with the onset of free-market eco­nomic the­ory in the 1970s and ’80s. Dur­ing the United States’ 19-year occu­pa­tion of Haiti begin­ning in 1915, the U.S. con­cen­trated most of its trade oper­a­tions in Port-au-Prince where its mil­i­tary was based, erod­ing the influ­ence of the many ports that used to dot its north­ern, west­ern and south­ern coasts, notes New York Times colum­nist Nico­lai Ouroussoff.

By the 1960s, dic­ta­tor Fran­cois (Papa Doc) Duva­lier had closed the other ports to con­cen­trate his power in the cap­i­tal, and the sys­temic neglect of the coun­try­side, where roughly 80 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion lived, was well underway.

Haiti was still largely food self-sufficient until the 1970s, when the Inter­na­tional Mon­e­tary Fund and wealthy donor nations began to push for open-market poli­cies in the new global marketplace.

The the­ory worked like this: Haiti’s pro­duc­tion of cer­tain sta­ple crops, like rice, that were con­cen­trated on smaller farms was inef­fi­cient and expen­sive com­pared to the huge oper­a­tions found else­where. Hait­ian farm­ers should aban­don their rice farms in favour of spe­cial­ized exportable cash crops like cof­fee, man­goes and tobacco, or work at the many man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs that would be cre­ated. They could use their riches to buy cheap imported rice and have cash left over.

“The (Jean-Claude – Baby Doc) Duva­lier dic­ta­tor­ship embraced these poli­cies as a means of enrich­ment and main­tain­ing con­trol,” said Bob Maguire, direc­tor of the Haiti pro­gram at Trin­ity Col­lege in Wash­ing­ton, D.C.

“Sub­se­quent demo­c­ra­t­i­cally elected gov­ern­ments in the 1990s to the present have been too weak and too depen­dent on inter­na­tional aid to resist them.”

Haiti receives about $165 mil­lion annu­ally in for­eign aid, much of it used to feed its peo­ple. It is in a poor posi­tion to say no.

Haiti dropped its tar­iffs to some of the low­est rates in the Caribbean, and its mar­ket was quickly flooded with cheap, U.S. rice pro­duced by highly sub­si­dized farmers.

Exports of U.S. rice, the Wash­ing­ton Post noted, went from zero to 200,000 tonnes a year over two decades, mak­ing Haiti the fourth largest mar­ket for U.S. rice after Japan, Mex­ico and Canada.

Hun­dreds of thou­sands of rice farm­ers no longer had a mar­ket for their produce.

Starv­ing and des­per­ate, many flooded into Port-au-Prince with their fam­i­lies seek­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing work that never appeared — at its peak, light indus­try cre­ated about 60,000 jobs in Haiti, but at least 70 per cent of those were lost after a mil­i­tary coup in 1991.

Most of the jobs still pay low wages — aver­ag­ing around $2 a day, or 40 cents an hour. Attempts by Haiti’s par­lia­ment to increase the country’s min­i­mum wage to $5 a day recently were over­ruled by the busi­ness com­mu­nity, Charles Henri Baker among them, who argued Haiti would be unable to com­pete with places like the Domini­can Repub­lic, where min­i­mum wage is $4.25 a day, Baker said.

Mean­while, the planned exports of cof­fee and man­goes were hurt by over­pro­duc­tion in poor coun­tries and trade bar­ri­ers in rich coun­tries. Many Haitians changed their eat­ing habits to cheap, imported rice instead of locally grown corn, mil­let and rice, putting them at the mercy of price fluc­tu­a­tions. In 2008, rice prices surged inter­na­tion­ally, lead­ing to protests, riots and star­va­tion. Today, Haiti imports about 75 per cent of its food.

In 1980, the Post reported, per capita income in Haiti was $600. Twenty years later it had dropped to $369. (It rose to about $480 by 2009).

The IMF coun­ters that the painful tran­si­tion will work out if given time. In 2000, the Post reported, IMF offi­cials accused their oppo­nents of “exag­ger­at­ing the influ­ence of lend­ing orga­ni­za­tions, over­sim­pli­fy­ing and dis­tort­ing the issues, and play­ing down sys­temic prob­lems such as cor­rup­tion, polit­i­cal insta­bil­ity and insecurity.”

Haiti had an aver­age of one gov­ern­ment a year for 10 years after the Duva­lier regime col­lapsed in 1986, offi­cials noted, so no gov­ern­ment was able to pro­mote a long-standing eco­nomic program.

“Claims that the IMF ‘forced’ Haiti to reduce tar­iffs, and even to aban­don agri­cul­tural pro­duc­tion, par­tic­u­larly on rice, are just based on faulty infor­ma­tion and con­jec­ture,” said an IMF offi­cial in an e-mail.

The Hait­ian gov­ern­ment low­ered tar­iffs because infla­tion had risen to 40 per cent and peo­ple couldn’t afford food, he wrote.

“Our sup­port for gen­eral trade lib­er­al­iza­tion … reflects the clear evi­dence that coun­tries open to trade do bet­ter and grow faster than coun­tries with more restric­tive regimes.”

How­ever, accord­ing to Bill Clin­ton, the U.S. pres­i­dent dur­ing the period in which tar­iffs were low­ered, this has not been the case in Haiti.

“It may have been good for some of my farm­ers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. I have to live every day with the con­se­quences of the lost capac­ity to pro­duce a rice crop in Haiti to feed the people.”

Recent his­tory has shown free-market the­ory does not work in many devel­op­ing nations, lead­ing to poverty and out-migration, par­tic­u­larly in the Caribbean, Uni­ver­sity of Toronto asso­ciate pro­fes­sor Melanie New­ton said.

“We’ve sort of been brain­washed that hav­ing peo­ple work for $2 a day, that it will some­day get bet­ter and salaries will rise.… This model — vul­ture cap­i­tal­ism with extremely low wages — does not pro­duce this step­ping stone to a west­ern system.”

Wages stay low, and the dreams of par­ents that their chil­dren will be edu­cated and find bet­ter employ­ment die because the bet­ter jobs are never cre­ated, she said.

“In Haiti, where rural life is val­ued, we have an oppor­tu­nity to do things dif­fer­ently,” New­ton said.

“Sub­sis­tence farm­ing, which has been seen as lack of civ­i­liza­tion for much of the 20th cen­tury, has actu­ally been — socially, envi­ron­men­tally and polit­i­cally — much more sustainable.”

Haiti, she added, must do a bet­ter job of pro­tect­ing itself, refus­ing low-wage labour con­tracts and impos­ing tariffs.

Neigh­bour­ing Domini­can Repub­lic, for instance, main­tained its rice tar­iffs and refused the import of donated second-hand clothes to pro­tect its local gar­ment trade.

Coun­tries such as Tai­wan, held up as shin­ing exam­ples of the free-market eco­nomic system’s poten­tial for good, “enacted aggres­sive pro­grams of uni­ver­sal edu­ca­tion and agrar­ian invest­ment before embark­ing on its touted light-manufacturing phase,” Maguire notes.

Haiti is a rural coun­try with an agrar­ian struc­ture and a mar­ket of 10 mil­lion peo­ple, he said. Sup­port decen­tral­ized invest­ment in the agri­cul­tural sec­tor and the rural econ­omy will rebound. But first Haiti must be allowed to level the play­ing field so its farm­ers can compete.

“Hait­ian farm­ers merit the same kind of pro­tec­tion and sub­si­dies as Amer­i­can and Cana­dian farm­ers,” Maguire said.

For Haiti’s agri­cul­tural renais­sance to ben­e­fit from the post-earthquake exo­dus, aid had bet­ter come to the out­ly­ing regions soon, farm­ers say. Res­i­dents who have returned com­plain there are no jobs and lit­tle to eat, and speak of return­ing to the capital.

Haiti is said to have more non-governmental orga­ni­za­tions per capita than any coun­try in the world, a sup­posed bless­ing that has become some­thing of a curse. NGOs filled many gov­ern­men­tal roles, like pro­vid­ing health care and edu­ca­tion, but with­out the over­reach­ing frame­work a gov­ern­ment nor­mally pro­vides to ensure an equal dis­tri­b­u­tion of resources through­out the coun­try. The result­ing inabil­ity to gov­ern was obvi­ous in the earthquake’s after­math, when Haiti’s gov­ern­ment was prac­ti­cally invis­i­ble and NGOs took over relief efforts.

Decades of inter­na­tional aid has also fos­tered a cul­ture of depen­dency among many. Well-intentioned food aid is crip­pling local farm­ers unable to sell their produce.

Post-earthquake rede­vel­op­ment plans unveiled in late March bring hope for the regions, promis­ing two new regional air­ports, two new sea ports, more than 600 kilo­me­tres of roads and eco­nomic zones in sev­eral cities to move the focus away from Port-au-Prince.

Pro­po­nents of agri­cul­tural devel­op­ment acknowl­edge there are issues: The com­mon trend world­wide is move­ment toward cities in search of employ­ment and gov­ern­ment ser­vices lack­ing in the regions. Most coun­tries, devel­op­ing or devel­oped, have trou­ble attract­ing or retain­ing pro­fes­sion­als like doc­tors, nurses and teach­ers to remote rural areas,which in turn dis­suades oth­ers from set­tling there. Most young, edu­cated city dwellers are not han­ker­ing to head out to the fields and wield a hoe in the blaz­ing sun all day in locales that don’t even have electricity.

But, the pro­po­nents say, agri­cul­tural renewal can pro­vide food secu­rity and dig­ni­fied, self-sufficient liveli­hoods to mil­lions who cur­rently have nei­ther, and form the basis for social and eco­nomic growth.

Farmer Roland Hyp­po­lite notes the chal­lenge for farm­ers is great, and while he appre­ci­ates the efforts, he has seen lit­tle of NGOs or gov­ern­ment offi­cials in Lasc­a­hobas, located 50 kilo­me­tres north­west of Port-au-Prince.

Farm­ers, he said, need tech­ni­cal train­ing in how to cre­ate nurs­eries that won’t be washed away dur­ing the four-month rainy sea­son; they need money to buy pumps to get them through the dry sea­son. There are few places to store their goods, be it cold rooms or ware­houses to pro­tect food from the ele­ments and ani­mals (Baker esti­mates half of Haiti’s total crop rots because of the lack), so farm­ers bring their pro­duce to mar­ket at the same time, dri­ving down prices and leav­ing much unsold. Although Port-au-Prince is only 50 kilo­me­tres away, get­ting pro­duce there by local trans­port can take hours over roads that resem­ble dried out riverbeds.

In the Cen­tral Plateau, it’s esti­mated 40 per cent of chil­dren are mal­nour­ished. Many die because their par­ents can­not find work. Revive the agri­cul­tural base, Hyp­po­lite says, and wealth will fol­low: Fac­to­ries that need labour­ers, man­agers and tech­ni­cians will be built to trans­form the food and ready it for export; schools and hos­pi­tals will be built; light indus­try offer­ing decent wages can then move to the countryside.

Hyp­po­lite has shown it can be done — he is a mem­ber of a group of six farm­ing co-operatives made up of two to four farms each that have com­bined to share costs and labour and put together a large mix of prod­ucts to inter­est for­eign buyers.

In one year, just one of the co-operatives pro­duced 30,000 kilo­grams of yams, 9,000 kilos of pota­toes, 1,000 kilos of pears, 25,000 kilos of red beans and 25,000 kilos of black beans, among other crops.

Hyp­po­lite found Brooks Pep­per­fire Foods based in Rigaud on the Inter­net, and has since opened con­tracts with other Cana­dian importers.

“I have farm­ing in my blood,” said Hyp­po­lite, the son of a farmer. “The choice to go into agri­cul­ture is not with­out chal­lenges, espe­cially in a coun­try like mine. But my heart and my spirit are there.”

http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/Farming+hailed+rebuilding+Haiti+from+soil/3117801/story.html