Prepackaged Industrial Snack Food Industry in Haiti

Imported snack foods are another solution to what I have defined elsewhere as the Food Preparation Conundrum (The Storage problem, The Water Problem, The Fuel Problem, The Labor Problem) that has come about with rapid urbanization of the past 50 years. They are inexpensive, ready to eat, available everywhere, have a long shelf-life and areRead More

FOOD AID Part II: Food Security and USAID, WFP and Destruction of Haitian Ag Economy

In 2008, two events occurred that suggested hope for Haiti’s agricultural sector, hope that the Machiavellian forces seen in FOOD AID PART I would be eliminated and in their place the United States, its allies, and the humanitarian aid agencies that had for four decades carried out politically charged food relief programs would effect newRead More

Irony of the Exports: Superiority of the Local Market for Haitian Mangoes

A closer look at evidence and trends in the market suggests that the local market for mangos is better than that of the export market. It offers producers more money. Indeed, to get mangos from producers, the exporters, their voltije and fourniseur agents have to resort to trickery and financial advances on trees 9 monthsRead More

Lying Sack of Mango: Travesty of Export Prices

This article summarizes how USG funded aid agencies and contractors have manipulated price data to make it appear that they have improved the export market chain price for mangoes. As seen below, they’ve rather boldly misrepresented their own data to make their case.

Cheaper by the Dozen Mango Travesty I

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 useRead More

The Travesty of Haiti Hope and Haiti’s ANEM Mango Cartel: Part I

Ninety-five percent of all Haitian mango exports go to the US and they all must go through a cartel composed of eight export packing houses, ANEM (Association Nationale des Exportateurs de Mangues). A cartel is a group of sellers or buyers that have been granted government sanctioned authority to organize themselves to behave like aRead More

The Travesty of Haiti Hope and Haiti’s ANEM Mango Cartel: Part II

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 theRead More

Travesty of the Haiti vs. Dominican Mango Industry

While Haiti absorbed some US $120 million of investments in the mango sector and did not significantly increase mango exports, the Dominican Republic created a mango export industry. In 1989 they only had 1,250 hectares planted in orchards. By 2006 that figure had tripled to 4,400 hectares. As for exports, they went from 8,222 boxesRead More

Post Earthquake Jacmel (Haiti) Report and EMMA (Red Cross 2010)

The objective of the Department du Southeast study (per Scope of Work 1-2) was, expand AMAP learning about value chains in conflict- and disaster-affected environments with the goal of helping design early responses for ensuring survival (market systems could supply food and essential items or services related to priority survival needs), provide useful information forRead More

Low Cost & Effective Alternative to the HDVI: Frequency Listing (WFP 2017)

The freelisting based Frequency Listing (“Freq Listing”) is a statistically robust methodology developed by Timothy Schwartz of Socio-Dig (Haiti) for identifying local leader-experts (notab) and ultimately humanitarian aid beneficiaries. It comes to us from anthropology and mathematical models for studying informal sector and non-literate cultures and rests on the premise of “Culture as Consensus.” TheRead More

Food Security