It is not at all what NGOs or Haitians mean–any of them—when they say “dozen.” Not those in the mango business anyway.
First off, for the poor Haitian producers, they do not measure in weight and they seldom measure in number. They measure in volume. Hence when trading locally in mangos they do not use the dozen. They use the panye (basket)—a volume of mangos– and the lo, which as Lidwine Hypolite (2012) explains in her Master’s thesis about mangos in Haiti, is a measure that varies according to quantity, size, freshness and quality of the fruit. “Dozen”, on the other hand, is emphatically an export value chain measurement category.
Whenever someone in Haiti says “dozen” in reference to mangos one can be sure they are talking about Francique mangos and those mangos are headed to the packing house. And they are not dozens of twelve. When fournisseur (export intermediaries) talk about a douzen they could be referring to anywhere from 9 to 22 mangos (see Hippolite 2012). But it’s not clear if they ever even used the dozen measure when dealing with producers. Not that is to say, before USAID funded HAP and Haiti Hope.
When we asked about douzen during focus groups a common response was that they had never heard of a douzen before Haiti Hope. So it seems that in trying to bypass fournisseur and connect grower cooperatives directly to exporters, HAP and then Haiti Hope introduced the concept of dozen. And in doing so, somewhere along the line both HAP and Haiti Hope staff interpreted lo as a perversion of “dozen.” And that meant, for many of them, that it was an example of fournisseur taking advantage of producers. And it may be so. But there also seems to have been a cultural or linguistic misunderstanding going on.
Not even the export houses and overseas receivers calculate in dozens of twelve. They calculate in boxes. Thirty to forty years ago, a box weighed 5.5 kilograms. And yes, that weight happened to correspond well to 12 Francique mangos. But then, at some point in the late 1980s there was a shift to a 4.5 kg box, which takes an average of not 12, but 10 mangos (9.8 to be exact). Yet, packing houses kept buying in “dozens” of 13 and 14 mangos. And fournisseur continued to calculate with the producers in “lot” (lo) of anywhere from 9 to 22 mangos.
The odyssey of the dozen has become so confusing that Haiti Hope, like HAP before it, takes credit for getting a “dozen” closer to twelve. To be exact Haiti Hope has standardized the dozen sold to the packing houses at fourteen. The extra two mangos, they explain, is to account for rejects and spoilage. But there are problems here as well. First off, the mangos get selected at the packing house and so any subsequent rejects have nothing to do with the producers. But even more to the point here, Haiti Hope uses packing house data on boxes as a proxy for dozens. But if when they get shipped out, they are not really dozens at all. At least not dozens of 12. A “box” is, as seen, a “dozen” of 9-10 mangos.
So forgetting about the official 14 per dozen that when the two super dozen extras meant to compensate for rejects and damaged fruit that have nothing to do with the producers but, so the producers are told, average out somehow to 12, where are the other two mangos?
(for references and more data see here)
