An illustration of how dysfunction ANEM is but how it’s members relish aid and support from international donor community came after the 2010 Haiti earthquake when USAID, Coca Cola, and IDB funded the Haiti Hope project, investing $10 million in the mango sector for the period 2010 to 2015.
The donors and ANEM claimed the investment was primarily meant to help Haiti’s 200,000 small producers. But putting aside Coca Cola’s advertising itself as helping Haiti, the real beneficiaries were ANEMs eight members.
And it was by no means the first time they had gotten help. Even before 2010, the Haiti mango industry had been getting massive aid. In the 10 years leading up to the 2010 earthquake, NGOs and the international community had invested another US$60 million in Haiti’s mango industry. And now, at the same time the $10 million Haiti Hope Project was being launched, a flood of other donor money was poured into the industry. The for-profit US development contractor Chemonics showcased mangos among its featured crops in a $127 million USAID project; The Haitian NGO ORE got several million US dollars of European Union money to invest in mango trees and drying mango for export; Catholic Relief Services used untold millions of USAID MYAP funds for invest in the mango sector. Mercy Corp spent some $7.5 million of earthquake donations ostensibly to help 37,500 mango growers improve the quality of mangos and get them to the eight ANEM mango exporters. As if all that wasn’t enough, between 2010-2012 the OAS NGO (IICA) invested 1.5 million Euros in Mangos. All totaled we’re talking about at least US $60 million invested in the Haiti mango industry in the 5 years 2010/11 to 2014/15. If we include the 10 years before the earthquake, then it’s another $60 million. All that money was almost exclusively meant to promote the production almost exclusively of Fransique mangos, something that only the ANEM cartel members could export.
Mind you, this is an industry that only exports $12 million worth of fruit each year. And no matter what they said, they were not going to export any more mangos. Nor was it in their interest to do so. Nor did they.
Of course, they did not tell donors that. On the contrary. The MarChE (USAID) report for the 2010 National Mango Forum was subtitled, “Export 5 million cases of USDA-certified mangoes by 2015”, This was a reflection of the ANEM members claim that if they were given support they could double exports from 2.5 million boxes to 5 million boxes—there are about 9 mangos to a box–and that they could do so in five years (TaiwanICDF 2012; USAID/MarChE 2011).
To the donors, it seemed reasonable. As the US Embassy Press release pointed out, “less than 5 percent [of Haiti’s mangos] reaches the profitable export market” because of “inefficient harvesting practices and transportation challenges” (see US Embassy Press Release, 2010).
Didn’t happen. Between 2010 and 2015 mango exports increased by a mere 10 percent, or 8% more than the last high point in 2006, at the height of the last USAID funded project (HAP). ANEM did not break the 2.5 million box ceiling, much less achieve the hoped for exportation of 5 million boxes. ANEM exported only 20% more boxes in 2015, at the end of a total $120 million in aid to the industry, as it did in 1990. In meantime, the neighboring Dominican Republic went from exporting 8,222 boxes in 1999 to 2.5 million in 2014. And they reportedly got more money for it, $12 million for Haiti’s ~2.5 million boxes sold in 2015 vs a reported $17 million for the Dominicans ~2.5 million boxes sold in 2015.
(for references and more data see here)
