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.
Belying Basket of Mango: TRAVESTY OF EXPORT VS. LOCAL MANGO PRICES Part II
If we consider the value of a panye (basket) in terms of a poor market woman selling mangoes in the local market, where 95% or more of all Haiti’s mangos get sold, there is clearly a price floor at which point it makes no sense to harvest and sell mangos. There is a point whereRead More
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
Cheaper by the Dozen Mango Travesty II
Puzzling regarding change in prices, size of dozens and reject rates is that HAP made claims in 2005 almost identical to those of Haiti Hope project claims in 2014 and 2015. Quoting directly from the HAP 2005 evaluation, Field interviews indicated that ten years ago producers were paid four gourdes for a dozen mangos, andRead More
Haiti, Not Open for Business: Another Dried Mango Export Travesty
Despite a whole lot promises and some $120 million donor dollars invested in the domestic mango industry over a period of 20 years, as of 2015, Haiti had no new mango processing facilities. A 2012 TNS feasibility study showed that a Coca Cola supported juice and pulp processing factory would be profitable only after 10Read 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
USAID Funded Chemonics Mango Travesty: WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?
Based on market analyses, USAID/IDB/Coca Cola funded Haiti Hope project decided not to invest in processing enterprises. A good example of the problems that afflicted those processing enterprises that other projects invested in comes from Mirebalais, Haiti. With support from USAID/WINNER’s $127 million Feed the Future West project, the Mirebalais association ADAIM (Association pour leRead More
The Joining of Science, Art and Aid: Visual Ethnography and MEVMS (Multidimensional Ethnographic Value-Chain Mapping Strategy)
A picture is indeed worth a thousand words. What is the MEVM Strategy? MEVMS (Multi-Dimensional Ethnographic Value-Chain Mapping Strategy) is an intuitive, user-friendly research and presentation strategy for creatively documenting, organizing, understanding, and explaining Value Chain networks for a product or service that generates critical income to an economically insecure population. Data on a valueRead More
Resiklaj Digital (Digital Recycling) and a MOP (Mode of Production) Map for Rural Haiti
The imaga above–and the fuller version below–is an example of what we are calling “resiklaj dijital.” The idea first occurred to me when I was working with an organization called Ethical Fashion Initiative. Like the artisan genre from which we got the name (resiklaj), resiklaj digital involves, salvaging, cutting, and collating any medium we canRead 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
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