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

The 2008 Food Crisis

Between 2006 and the first months of 2008, global food prices for staples such as rice and corn increased 217 percent. That meant the cheapest foods, those that the urban poor of the world survive on, doubled in price. In a country like Haiti—where almost half the population was living in urban areas, most surviving on less than $2 per day, and where in the prior 30 years local farmers had gone from producing 90 percent of the food for their compatriots to producing less than half—that meant trouble. In April of 2008,  in the southern city of Les Cayes riot broke out over a sudden jump in the price of food. Mobs blockaded roads with burning tires, looted stores, and smashed vehicles. When United Nations soldiers tried to quell the rioters, some among them shot at the troops. The troops shot back. Three protestors were killed. A week later tires were burning in Port-au-Prince where mobs smashed windows, looted food warehouses, set fire to cars, and tried to break into the presidential palace. When the police and United Nations forces tried to intervene, five protestors were killed, one Sri Lankan peacekeeper was killed and three more were struck by bullets. [i] It was not only Haiti. Riots erupted in poor countries across Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America.  With the widespread unrest came agreement that food aid may indeed be anathema to development. The World Food Program announced:

A new approach to secure future food supplies is needed, one that is based on local control of food systems, securing locally-procured and accessible grain stores and building on the knowledge of the world’s main food providers—small-scale producers—that defends their production systems, which work with nature. The multilateral agencies will need to work more effectively together and with States and meso-level institutions to implement such approaches.”

The World Food Programme And Global Food Security 5/14/2008  UK Food Group submission to the International Development Committee

Even CARE International, longtime collaborator in the US global food scheme that had so undermined the livelihoods of low-income agricultural producers throughout the world, was now adamantly anti-food aid. They had already declined to monetize U.S. surplus food in 2006, and in 2007. As food prices were rising and tensions in developing countries mounted, they pulled out of food monetization all together, forsaking $45 million in U.S. government funding with the soliloquy, “American food is not only plagued with inefficiencies but also may hurt some of the very poor people it aims to help.”[iii]   When I visited their Port-au-Prince headquarters in October of 2009, 18 months after the food riots and three months before the January 12^th 2010 Earthquake, it sat like an empty old haunted house, weeds grown up in the yard, the driveway unswept, a chain and lock on the front door.

Barack Obama and Haiti

The other major event that sparked hope of impending change for Haiti’s agricultural sector was the 2008 victory of US presidential candidate Barack Obama, son of an Kenyan, champion of the rights of the poor.  When Obama won the election on November 4^th, Haitians cheered. They ran in the streets, they honked horns, and they shot off fireworks. It was as if a Haitian had become the U.S. president. There were peasants who named their children after him. One resort owner changed the name of the local beach to “Obama Beach.” [iv]

Obama’s administration wasted little time convincing impoverished Haitians that he was on their side. The very year he took office, in 2009, Obama went to the L’Aguila, Italy G8 Summit and announced a $3.5 billion 3-year Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative. The “Initiative” was all about “country-specific,” “country-owned” implementation plans. It still prioritized improved nutrition for vulnerable populations, particularly women and children, but it elevated to a top priority achieving food security through increased local production. Other attendees added another 18.5 billion.  At a press conference in  L’Aguila Obama himself explained:

We believe that the purpose of aid must be to create the conditions where it’s no longer needed—to help people become self-sufficient, provide for their families, and lift their standards of living. And that’s why I proposed a new approach to this issue—one endorsed by all the leaders here—a coordinated effort to support comprehensive plans created by the countries themselves, with help from multilateral institutions like the World Bank when appropriate, along with significant and sustained financial commitments from our nations.

Press Conference by the President in L’Aquila, Italy
THE WHITE HOUSE, Office of the Press Secretary, July 10, 2009

It was a radical turnabout from 10 years earlier when the USAID website assured visitors that food-aid helped move developing countries away from being food-producing countries and into being food-dependent consumers of U.S. produce. Soon renamed Feed the Future, the U.S. upped their stake to a $10.15 billion commitment over 3 years. Haiti was one of the 19 countries that would be the focus of the Feed the Future initiative.

By six months after L’Aguila summit, quite literally on the eve of the earthquake, the US government had thrashed out a New American Plan for Haiti, one right in line with Obama’s Feed the Future Initiative. [v] It spoke to Haiti’s “country-owned agricultural development plan” and the importance of linking domestic agricultural to food security, of working with “peasant farmer groups (“producer groups”), of “strengthening local farmers governance of water use” of “seeds, fertilizer and tools”, “use of applicable research, and access to finance.” It set a five-year target of doubling Haitian exports of cocoa and mangos. It was a smorgasbord of promise, a delight to anyone who hoped to turn the clock back to the time when Haitian farmers fed themselves, each other, and the urban population; a time when Haitian farmers earned revenues from exports. Instead of the vast agro-industrial enterprises of the first American Plan seen in Food Aid Part 1, the new plan recognized the “65% of the population dependent on agriculture,” it recognized small farmers as “central to the Haitian economy,” it identified them as the “near-term engine for economic recovery and employment opportunities”, it highlighted “the importance of jump-starting agricultural productivity immediately” and the importance of not “bypassing the majority of Haitians who make their livelihoods in agriculture.” The agriculture and food security section of the report concluded with an incisive declaration that:

The USG strategy focuses heavily on creating income earning opportunities for farmers and improving the overall efficiency and competitiveness of Haiti’s rural economy, targeting sustained livelihood improvements for over 100,000 smallholders farmers households, corresponding to 8%-10% of the rural population in Haiti (sic). This allows farmers to ultimately sustain their livelihoods from selling their produce in domestic and international markets, without the need for continued U.S. assistance over the long-term. [vi]^,[vii]

So the richest, most politically and economically proactive country on earth, the same country responsible for having brought the Haitian economy to its knees, now reversed policy and would now be investing millions in Haitian farmers and local production. Prospects for the Haitian economy looked good.

Then came WFP and the earthquake.

Swamping Haiti with Food–again

In the two months after the earthquake the United Nations World Food Program, WFP, distributed 26,500 tons of food. Most of it came from none other than the US government, the country that supposedly had reversed its policy of crashing Haiti’s agricultural economy and was now engaged in reconstructing it. The food was enough to meet all the calorific needs for 110,000 adults for an entire year.  And that was only the beginning. On February 19th, before they had even finished delivering the first shipments of food, WFP ordered “an additional” 245,000 metric tons of food.[viii]

Was it really necessary?  Did the earthquake create a crisis that necessitated feeding one third the population of Port-au-Prince for an entire year?

The food US government and WFP was giving away was in addition to tens of thousands of tons of food looted from private and NGO warehouses. It was in addition to the thousands of trucks that poured across the border from the Dominican Republic loaded with 100s of thousands of tons of food to giveaway. It was in addition to the 60,000 hot meals that Dominican government mobile kitchens gave away in Port-au-Prince every day for two months after the earthquake. It was in addition to the 10s of thousands of tons of food that corporations sent to Haiti, such as the 25,000 boxes of food that Gildan sent, each box with enough to feed a family for five days or Food for the Poor’s 1,465 tractor-trailers containing 7,100 tons of mostly donated food. And it was in additional to hundreds of smaller organizations that were sending food.

Three weeks after the earthquake, when I was working with USA Today reporter Ken Dilanian, store owners were telling us that sales were fine, not because Haitians were buying, but because preachers and Haitians that had returned from overseas to help, and even people who had never been to Haiti before flying in, buying out their entire stock, and simply giving the food away.

People were flying to the Dominican Republic and purchasing loads of food to give away. Good-hearted wealthy Dominicans were, as seen, sending thousands of trucks with food across the border. A Dominican Jujutsu teacher I know sent five trucks across the border. Indeed, the border post was wide open. The Dominicans simply let anyone drive through. For the first two months after the earthquake you could stand on the border and see the trucks lined up for miles, every single day. They didn’t even know what to do with the aid once they crossed the border. Most trucks would randomly pull into a Port-au-Prince neighborhood and allow people to pillage the truck. Less honest truck drivers were driving up into the mountains and selling the food at bargain-basement prices.

Then-president of Haiti Rene Preval protested:

When I saw all the food and water they receive in the camps that comes from overseas, I told the foreigners, stop! It would be better to give money. The markets are full of food.

Take a bottle of water for example. They put it in a plane and fly it to Haiti. It costs 50 times what the same water costs in Haiti. Why can’t they buy it here? People who process water in Haiti can’t sell it because of the aid. But I’m not in a position to control them. They bring a lot of water. All I can do is say thank you for the water. They bring a lot of medicine. All I can do is say thank you for the medicine. They bring a lot of food. All I can say is thank you for the food. If Haiti had a strong State they couldn’t do this. But we’re weak. [ix] [x]

Preval tried to stop them. In March, two months after the earthquake, Rene Preval, democratically elected president of Haiti, went to Washington to speak to US president Barrack Obama, in person. On March 8th, the day he left, he stood in front of the cracked and broken Haitian National Palace and he told the Haitian press that:

I will tell him (Obama) that this first phase of assistance is finished. If they continue to send us aid from abroad—water and food—it will be in competition with the national Haitian production and Haitian commerce. [xi]

Even the U.S. Embassy acknowledged the problem. That same week a U.S. Embassy official told the Wall Street Journal that food aid from overseas depressed prices for local producers and that the food aid was “temporary” and that, the U.N. World Food Program, “will begin trying to buy as much locally grown food as possible.”

They never did.

In the next four months WFP distributed another 74,000 tons of food, bringing the total food aid to more than twice what the international community had been sending to Haiti before the earthquake. Meanwhile, the March rice harvest on Haiti’s Artibonite flood plain did not sell until June, and when it finally did sell it sold for exactly two-thirds of what it would have fetched before the earthquake: US$13.27 a sack versus US$20.77. ^[xii] [xiii]

Why? Why didn’t the US and WFP take advantage of the massive opportunity to stimulate local agriculture, as Obama claimed they would in Aguila in July 2009, only six months before the earthquake? Why instead did they crush the Haitian economy? What had happened to the New American Plan’s recognition of agriculture as the, “near-term engine for economic recovery and employment opportunities”? And what about “the importance of jumpstarting agricultural productivity immediately”? The impact of not “bypassing the majority of Haitians who make their livelihoods in agriculture”? It was the perfect opportunity to jump-start agricultural activity. Why didn’t WFP buy the local harvest? They had money coming out of their ears. Why was the international community permitted to swamp Haiti with aid, indiscriminately giving it away? [xiv] [xv] [xvi]

Realizing Your Mistake, and Still Not Being Able to do Anything About It

Once again, as in FOOD AID PART I, I’m not saying the NGO workers, politicians and bureaucrats are bad folks. Nor am I saying that they’re stupid and don’t understand developing country economics. They get it. Oxfam, Christian Aid, CARE, and even the U.S. government Accounting Office have all, despite participating in the process, railed against food aid as deleterious to the Haitian economy.[xvii] The earthquake did not make them forget. On the contrary. On March 10, 2010, in the midst of Preval’s visit to Washington, the U.N. special envoy to Haiti, Bill Clinton himself, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that his 1990s decisions to force Haiti to accept lower tariffs on imported rice were an error.

It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake…I had to live every day with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else. [xviii]                                                                 Statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee March 10th, 2010

And it wasn’t only Bill Clinton. The chief humanitarian coordinator for the U.N., John Holmes, followed up saying to AP reporters that:

A combination of food aid, but also cheap imports have … resulted in a lack of investment in Haitian farming, and that has to be reversed…. That’s a global phenomenon, but Haiti’s a prime example. I think this is where we should start.  [xix]

      See: Katz, Jonathan. (Associated Press). 2010

They didn’t.

Following up on Preval’s visit to Obama, Haiti’s government proposed massive aid to the Haitian farmer, asking for $722 million for agriculture. It may have seemed like a lot of aid, but it was only 6.4 percent of an overall request of $11.5 billion package, and in a country where half the population is directly dependent on agricultural production as a livelihood strategy, that doesn’t amount to much.

They never got it. What they got instead was more food aid.

By the end of the 2010 the World Food Program (WFP) had distributed a total of 310,000 metric tons of emergency food aid in Haiti, some four times what they were sending before the earthquake. It was enough to provide for all the calorific needs of 1.3 million adults. One-third of it—121,000 tons—came from the U.S.  But that wasn’t all the food aid that came from the United States government. Despite the fact that even the U.S. government’s Accountability Office had urged Congress to stop giving NGOs food aid for monetization, in 2010 they monetized another 38,000 tons on the Haitian market.

None of the preceding went unnoticed by aid critiques. A growing chorus of complaints was rising from activists and journalists. The critics were increasingly accusing the U.S. government and WFP of reneging on their pledge to make Haiti food-sovereign and instead turning the earthquake into an opportunity to finish the pre-Obama crusade to destroy Haiti’s agricultural economy:

“With Cheap Food Imports, Haiti Can’t Feed Itself”

AP Jonathan M. Katz,  Huffington Post, March 20, 2010

“Long-term food aid risk to Haiti economy”

Reuters, Matthew Bigg, March 8, 2010

“Haitian farmers undermined by food aid U.S. spent $140 million on
controversial post-quake food exports”

Jacob Kushner, Public Integrity, January 11, 2012

 

Defenders of USAID and WFP say that is not fair to disparage them for unleashing too much food aid. After all, there had been an earthquake. And whatever wrecked the economy, whether it was the disaster or the aid itself, there were people in need. In September of 2011, I had lunch with four high-level WFP directors. They had invited me to discuss a WFP survey that I had participated in. Three were senior directors from Washington D.C. and a fourth was Myrta Kaulard, country director of WFP in Haiti. When I said that I thought there had been no need for food after the earthquake their reaction was consternation. But they all agreed the long-term plan was to boost local production. They had, in fact, been doing just that. And that’s where the story arguably gets worse. Or rather, that’s where the story seems to be a continuation of the past.

Programs that Look Good But do the Opposite of What They Claim

It was precisely the year 2010 that Obama launched Feed the Future. WFP was behind Feed the Future too. They too promoted it. We saw that at the beginning of this article. And despite the earthquake and all the food aid seen above that was dumped in Haiti, in that same year—2010—USAID gave WFP $35 million to create a Haiti food stamp-type program through which needy recipients could buy food locally. It was a great idea, one in-line with the new food sovereignty goals. Any one of the millions of supporters of the new American Plan would have been heartened to read about it. ^[xx]

It was also about this time that the new U.S. supported Martelly government took power in Haiti. One of the first things they did was create a program called Aba Grangou (Down With Hunger), a tour de force strategy crafted by a Swiss food-security guru name Raphy Favre. The plan was to integrate school and emergency feeding programs with purchases from local farmers. Finally, after more than half a century of being complicit in destructive food importation policies, a Haitian government was going to defend the farmer.

The Aba Grangou program was launched under massive fanfare and proclamations on public radio. The reaction among the Haitian population was electric. Popularity of the new government soared. USAID officially embraced Aba Grangou as well. They heralded U.S. government support and participation as the beginning of the shift to sourcing local food, touting food vouchers in a USAID message on local radio and a USAID press release as “Groundbreaking” and targeted to “help earthquake-affected families meet their food needs from local markets.”

USAID expanded the project in 2011. All the big international NGOs, what USAID calls “partners,” got a piece of the action: CRS, Mercy Corps, ACF, and World Vision. Very significantly CARE was back. CARE, having collected $45 million in earthquake donations, had reopened their Port-au-Prince headquarters and was once again the principal torch carrier for U.S. government humanitarian aid programs in Haiti. This time at least one of them was intend to work for the Haitian agricultural economy. Cash vouchers for local produce was perfectly suited to CARE and their new agenda of helping the poor feed themselves, right in line with promotion of local production. In a press release, CARE echoed USAID, claiming the voucher “supports consumption of locally produced, traditionally appropriate, products which are readily available in all communities.”

In November 2012, CARE even hired me, the guy who had written a popular book with a chapter in it called CARE, Dedicated to Serving Themselves. I had slammed them for distributing US food aid and participating in destroying the Haitian agricultural economy. Yet, to my great surprise, the directors invited me to a meeting. They agreed with my critiques and asked me to write a proposal to help guide their return to northwestern Haiti and the implementation of a new USAID funded program that would promote local agriculture in the spirit of the Aba Grangou. Needless to say, I was elated.

What I was to learn working once again for CARE was that almost none of the hype about food production was real. It was rhetoric. Indeed, it was very much a repeat of the past seen in FOOD AID PART I.

First off, most of the money for the “Groundbreaking” vouchers was spent, not on local, but imported food. Recipients got US$50 per month. Of that, $12.50 could be spent on fresh local produce. The other $37.50 had to be spent on imported cooking oil, pasta and rice. The incongruities between the claims and reality did not go unnoticed by Haitian farmers who were supposed to benefit. Dejoie Dadignac, a coordinator of a local farmer’s cooperative in the South of Haiti complained to journalists that: [xxi]

In their radio advertising they say they [the USAID partners] are giving people plantains and breadfruit, but that’s not what we see. We see [imported] rice, spaghetti, oil, while our products are left out. …We didn’t think we’d end up seeing all this imported food here! … As everyone knows, Grande Anse [where the aid was distributed] is a breadbasket for vegetables and fruit. And we see that this food aid program is taking place during our harvest months, when a lot of vegetables and fruits go to waste.

 

NEW COLLABORATORS

The rhetorically well-intended United Nations and the US Government missed the earthquake opportunity to bolster the local economy with local purchases of food. Instead, they flooded it once again, indeed flooded it with unprecedented quantities of agro-industrial surplus food from developed countries. But it was not the US government and WFP alone. Nor was the process as unilaterally driven by developed world agro-industrial producers and their governments as it had been in the past.

In the forty years since the US, Germany and France had first begin to undermine the Haitian farmer with surplus food and wooed the NGOs into participating with fat contracts, the process had been in part inverted. NGOs had found that journalists relished accounts of impending famine and starvation. It was good press. Images of tens of thousands of people on the cusp of starvation attracted readers.  With no one to vet fact from fiction—except the aid agencies themselves– journalists, pseudo-scholars and NGO press mongers readily printed exaggerated accounts of crisis and impending doom. In other White papers I’ve written about the exaggerations and in the 2017 book The Great Haiti Humanitarian Aid Swindle I detail dozens of examples, not least of all how the 2010 Earthquake death toll got inflated from a realistic ~60,000 dead to 230,000 claimed by the UN and 316,000 claimed by the Haitian government.  In the context of food aid, other examples came with the storms of 2011 and 2012.

Hurricane Tomas supposedly struck Haiti on November 5, 2010. Anyone listening to the news or aid agencies or reading the BBC claims that the storm “battered western Haiti” and “Fatal floods as Hurricane Tomas sweeps over Haiti” would have thought it was a major disaster. A total of four people were “killed.” Eleven months later, August 2012, Tropical Storm Isaac “slammed Haiti” with heavy rain and strong winds. Twenty-four people lost their lives (PBS). Two months after Isaac, in October 2012, came the knockout punch when Hurricane Sandy left behind “Death and Devastation.” Eighty people were “killed.”[xxii]

Following Sandy, the U.N. declared 2.5 million Haitians food-insecure and 1.5 million suffering severe food insecurity. They claimed that the corn harvest was down 42 percent; sorghum and rice by 33 percent; bananas by 37 percent; potatoes by 22 percent and vegetables by 6 percent. Commercial production of coffee, banana, avocado, mangoes and oranges had been devastated. First they called for $39 million in donations, $24 million of it scheduled to feed 625,000 people. By November 6, they had upped the estimated losses to $74 million.[xxiii]

To get the data needed to show just how desperate the situation was, the United Nations hired scholars Athena Kolbe, Robert Muggah. and Marie Puccio. The trio conducted a major survey and wrote a report entitled, “After the Storm: Haiti’s Coming Food Crisis,” in which they claimed that in addition to those who had been left homeless by the earthquake three years earlier, now, “government officials estimate tens of thousands more were made homeless.” They concluded that their survey data showed rural Haitians in the storm-stricken south faced a “looming crisis.” Not because of the conditions at that moment, but because of the famine that would strike in six months. More aid was needed, lots of it. The last paragraph of the report declared that:

Lessons learned from responses to the 2010 earthquake can be put in place… expanded and tested (thus creating an evidence base for post-disaster response in Haiti), and resources can be fairly distributed to the intended beneficiaries without excessive waste. A coordinated and effective response is possible. But this effort demands the will of international donors, NGOs, indigenous community associations, and the Haitian government to act—rather than react—to prevent the coming food crisis.

Lest the point be missed, the scholars were urging a new, more extreme approach to emergency food aid: rather than waiting for the crisis to hit and then swamping Haiti with food aid, swamp it before the crisis comes. The report was a resounding success.  NGOs and U.N. agencies working in Haiti circulated an e-mail message among themselves bearing in the subject header: “Important : Insécurité alimentaire : une bombe à retardement?” (Important: Food security: a time bomb?). The Associated Press, jumped on the bandwagon sending out the alarm in a foretelling Sunday morning piece that claimed, “Study underscores widespread hunger problems facing storm-torn Haiti” and quoting Kolbe, warned that,

We look at all these things and expect to see there’s going to be food insecurity in six months. There are going to be a lot of areas where there is not a lot food and we know what happens when there’s not a lot of food. It’s pretty bleak.[xxiv]

Associated Press, 2012 Study: Widespread Hunger in Haiti After Storm. By TRENTON DANIEL December 7, 2012

Citing the lead author, Athena Kolbe, the Associated Press concluded that:

Kolbe and humanitarian workers fear Haiti could see a repeat of what happened in 2008. That year, a jump in food prices triggered more than a week of deadly rioting that ended in the ouster of the prime minister and his Cabinet.      Ibid

Behind the Curtain

For anyone who looked beyond the hype, there were problems. The 2010 Hurricane Tomas had, in fact, never touched Haiti. It did not make landfall. It did not increase wind speeds on mainland Haiti. It did not even cause exceptional rainfall. Isaac passed Haiti in August 2012, it was a tropical storm, not a hurricane, and it too never made landfall. Sandy struck two months later, in late October, but after the corn and bean harvests had been brought in. And it too was not a hurricane when it passed Haiti. It too never made land fall but rather passed over Jamaica, 100 miles away from Haiti. So we’re talking about three storms that never made landfall.  So while there may have been some increased rain and some flooding it was nothing like what the media portrayed.

There was also some questions about the food security experts–Kolbe, Muggah, and Puccio–who had pushed the panic button with their report of impending famines. None had any experience in food security or rural livelihood strategies, or even agronomy for that matter. Muggah had degrees in Economics, International Affairs and Development; Kolbe had degrees in Social Work; Puccio was a Political Scientist. None had never systematically studied or written about anything about life in rural Haiti.  The two most experienced in Haiti, Muggah and Kolbe, billed themselves online as experts in urban crime. The trios major claim to expertise in Haiti was that Kolbe had analyzed a slew of surveys, reports and newspapers articles—some with Muggah and Puccio– going back to a controversial 2006 rape and homicide survey after which it was revealed that Kolbe was also an outspoken leftist activist journalist who went by the name of Lynn Duff and whose academic research carried out under the name of Athena Kolbe suspiciously corroborated some of her most extreme claims made as journalist Lynn Duff, claims that just happened to support the deposed leftist regime of Jean Bertrand Aristide of whom Duff had been a partisan.

There was no impending crisis. Had Kolbe, Muggah, and Puccio or any of the aid agencies clambering for more money and more food had expertise in the matter they would have known that. Or perhaps I should say, if they cared to know that.

Haiti’s southern peninsula has been hit since year 1851 with 18 hurricanes and 25 tropical storms: that’s one severe storm every 3.7 years. Haitian farmers—indeed, Caribbean poor Caribbean farmers in general—plant crops uniquely adapted to surviving storms and drought. For example, for of four of the six main crops—pigeon peas, manioc, yams, and sweet potatoes—are all perennials that can be stripped of their leaves and yet bounce back to life in weeks; all four benefit from the heavy rain that comes with the storms and can even be expected to yield bumper harvests six to eight weeks after the storm. And sure enough, in the end there was no famine, no scarcity of crops, and no increased malnutrition. None of which was a surprise to anyone who knows rural Haiti and understands the cropping strategies described. But what there was–thanks to Kolbe, Muggah, Puccio and the humanitarian aid agencies that celebrated their claims –was a whole lot of food aid, food aid once again wantonly distributed and much of which wound up on the local market, food aid that would continue for years, indeed, eventually morph into a massive attempt to create a welfare system for the poorest 10 percent of the Haitian population, what would become another massive conduit for US surplus food (which will be documented in an upcoming article, FOOD AID PART III).

It was the 1990s all over again. Even the timing was reminiscent of aid under the first American Plan. The food relief for 2010 Tropical storm Tomas came in 2012 and 2013. In July 2013, the Red Cross hired me to conduct emergency evaluations of 2012, hurricane Sandy. They hired me 11 months after Sandy passed specifically to employ an emergency technique that is supposed to be used within six weeks of a disaster, and that was used to justify the distribution of thousands of tons of food aid.

*****

In retrospect, one has to ask: Was it all deliberate?  Did USAID, WFP and the NGOs deliberately sabotage their own plan to re-invigorate Haitian agricultural production?

There was something happening behind the scenes that makes sense of what seems like whimsical rhetoric of the aid agencies and the flow of US food aid seen above.  The Obama administration thought they were going to overturn the politics of food aid. Responding to their rhetoric—and the money that would follow it–the humanitarian aid agencies such as CARE international jumped aboard. But what everyone seems to have forgotten about is the US Congress.

In 2012, exactly when I was working for CARE devising a new pro-local production strategy for Northwest Haiti, a bill was been debated in US Congress. The bill would have changed the US mandate from 80 percent of all foreign food aid having to be from U.S. farmers to 45 percent. Had the bill passed, US aid dollars could have begun purchasing 55 percent of food aid from farmers in the countries where the food was being given away[xxv]   With the sea-change that came with Feed the Future and now anticipating the passage of that bill, the aid agencies had been ramping up with their own rhetoric and plans for projects that reinforced local production and that would win them US government contracts, like the one I was working on for CARE.

But with the integrity of $52 billion in government subsidies threatened, the US Food Lobby was not happy. Neither was the US Shipping Lobby. At least half the money for shipping food aid has to go to U.S. flag ships, meaning pork-barrel politics for the US Merchant Marines and their union lobbyists. In January 2013, the bill was defeated.[xxvi]

In January of 2013, when I came into CARE headquarters in Port-au-Prince Haiti to give the presentation for my report, I had the surreal experience of standing in the hall while the CARE country directed Jean-Michel Vigreux shook his head and explained to me that, “we have so much U.S. surplus food now we don’t know what to do with it all.”[xxvii] [xxviii]

USAID wasted no time putting a massive government and school feeding program into action, one that dwarfed that described in the FOOD AID PART I: Instead of 200,000 children, this one targeted 2 million children. And they would go on to begin planning a welfare system targeting the bottom 10 percent of the entire Haitian population: another 1 million people.

So once again, as we’ve seen so often in recent Haitian history, following the turn around in food aid US policy, we had the perfect convergence of NGOs, United Nations, overseas governments, Haiti’s own aid hungry bureaucrats who have come to depend on the aid, and not least of all, the press and the pseudo-scholars who make their careers on exaggerating disaster and feeding the humanitarian institutions information that justifies their aid campaigns and brings in donations. Indeed, food aid is perhaps the best example of how those interests converged to undermine even their own long-term plans to invigorate the Haitian economy. With the first sign that the US government would continue to give away massive quantities of surplus food, disaster donors and the aid agencies cried famine and self-sabotaged their own promises and plans. And it is almost impossible to ignore that what was in it for them was windfall donations, U.S. and United Nations funds that come with short-term emergency aid. No emergency, and the funds dry up; private donors don’t give and the developed world governments dump their food aid on someone else. [xxix] [xxx] ^{[xxxi] [xxxii]}

Then came Hurricane Matthew.

 

NOTES

[i] World News. “Food riots grip Haiti.” Orla Ryan and agencies. April 9, 2008. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/apr/09/11

World News. “EDT Haiti’s government falls after food riots.” By By Joseph Guyler Delva and Jim Loney. April 12, 2008 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-haiti-idUSN1228245020080413

[ii]

^[iii]  See New York Times, CARE Turns Down Federal Food Aid, August 16, 2007 https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/world/africa/16food.html

For the White paper see, CARE, June 6, 2006, White Paper on Food Aid Policy CARE USA CARE International Vision: https://www.care.org/sites/default/files/documents/CARE%20monetization%20farm%20bill%20white%20paper%5B3%5D.pdf

 

[iv] For non-Haiti reference to the election reactions in Haiti, see “Seeing Obamas Election through the Black Americas: Ethnographic Perspectives as a Mirror.”

Schuller, Mark, 2015 Seeing Obamas Election Through the Black Americas: Ethnographic Perspectives as a Mirror. Transforming Anthropology, Vol. 23, Number 2,  pp. 63-68  Journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists. https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/wiley/introduction-to-special-issue-seeing-obama-s-election-through-the-bz7MPJ04FH?articleList=%2Fsearch-related%3Fto%3DaEKh0dMjCN%26page%3D15

[v] The plan was completed before the earthquake and was getting final input from Haiti USAID staff literally when the earthquake hit. It was not published as official US policy until one year later, on January 3, 2011.

[vi] Post-Earthquake USG Haiti Strategy Toward Renewal and Economic Opportunity January 3, 2011. Page 42

[vii] Unless the USG is operating on estimates different than it usually does or the official demographic profile of Haiti, the figure should not be “over 100,000 smallholders farmers households, corresponding to 8%-10% of the rural population in Haiti.” It should be, “corresponding to 5% or the rural population.” Today Haiti has an estimated 10 million to 11 million people. Thirty percent live in metropolitan Port-au-Prince, 20% in other cities, and 50 percent live in villages, hamlets or isolated homesteads scattered across the rural landscape.  It is that latter 50 percent they are referring to. But even that does not give an adequate accounting of the population dependent on agriculture because there is a relatively large but unknown floating population that moves between rural and urban areas. Moreover, many people living in provincial cities, and even many people in Port-au-Prince, cultivate farmland.

[viii] The food/person estimates are approximate and they are conservative, and to estimate the amount of food/ person days, 1) I am using wheat as a base nutritional and cost indicator, 2) I am using the average cost of U.S. wheat flour, in bulk, during the period 1979 through 1983 (US$0.13 per lb., see Kite and Pryor  1983: 8d), 3) I am using the standard value of 1,545 kcal per lb., 4)  I am using a nutritional need of 2,200 kcal per person per day, 5) I am applying this 2,200 kcal/day across the population, which means infants, children, adolescents adults, and the aged are all assumed to have the same caloric intake (which contributes to the conservative nature of the estimate because the aged, infant and young children have lower needs), and, 6) I am using a base population rate of 10 million, approximately the population estimated for the year 2010.

Estimate of Post-Earth Food Relief and Number of People Potentially Fed.

	Metric Tons	Pounds	Person days of calories	Calorie Days for all 10 million Haitians (if all were healthy adults)	Proportion yearly food for all Haiti (if all were healthy adults)	Population it could feed for given period (if all were healthy adults)
First 2 months	26,000	57,200,000	40,170,000	4.02	0.01	110,054
Ordered in February	245,000	539,000,000	378,525,000	37.85	0.10	1,037,054
Total given away and ordered in February for the year	271,000	596,200,000	418,695,000	41.87	0.11	1,147,109
Total given away for the year	310,000	682,000,000	478,950,000	47.90	0.13	1,312,191

 

[ix]  From the excellent documentary film Fatal Assistance by the excellent Haitian director Raoul Peck. Preval’s words:

“Le m we tout manje de yo resevwa nan les camps, tout dlo resevwa nan camps, se deyo li soti. M di blan, kanpe sa. Li miye pou bay lajan.  .. paske tout mache yo plen manje. An al pran yon boutey dlo. Y mete l nan avion pou pote l Ayiti, Li koute 50 fwa sa li koute pou de l an ayiti. Moun k fabrike gentan gen pwoblem yo pa ka van ni. Poukisa yo pa ka van ni. Min m pa nan situasyon m ka kontrole yo.  Yo pote boukou dlo mesi pou dlo a.  Yo pote boukou de medicaman. Mesi pou medikaman. Yo pote boukou de manje. Mesi pou manje. Si leta Ayiti te fo, yo pa t ka paret sou mwen konsa. Min nou feb.”

[x] Much of the pre-packaged rations and bottled spring water was destined, not for the poor, but to feed and quench the thirst of thousands of foreign rescue workers, NGO employees, volunteers and soldiers. On day four after the earthquake, a senior USID official complained to me, “My biggest task isn’t taking care of earthquake survivors. It’s feeding and getting water to all overweight rescue workers form New Jersey.”

[xi] Reuters . 2010. “Long-term food aid risk to Haiti economy—Preval.” Matthew Bigg. March 8.

[xii] Associated Press. 2010. “With Cheap Food Imports, Haiti Can’t Feed Itself.”  Jonathan M. Katz. March 20.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/20/with-cheap-food-imports-h_n_507228.html

[xiii]  Their total expenditures for the year were US$475,288,804.

[xiv] On the evening of day nine after the earthquake, Joseph and I were back at his house from our respective forays into the post-earthquake world of aid fiasco and I’m asking him why I can’t find any food distributions.

“It’s a catch 22,” he explains, “General Keene has told USAID and WFP that they will not go out ‘unless there is an incident’—meaning violence,” He sips his beer, “And if they don’t go out and help distribute then the food, it’s not going to get distributed, not with the restrictions that the U.N. has in place now.” He shakes his head, “And the longer we wait, the more desperate the population gets. Which means that with every day there is more likely that there will be an ‘incident.’

“Meaning violence that will justice the military delivering  the food.”

“Right, that’s the paradox. But now, Obama just cut through the red tape with an executive decision to do airdrops.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, but only outside of Port-au-Prince.”

“But 90 percent of all the damage is Port-au-Prince.”

“Well, at least they made a decision. Now we can move.”

“And what does that mean”

“That means we have to identify the sites.” Joseph sips his beer again.

“Nobody has identified the sites yet? We’re almost two weeks since the earthquake.”

“Let me finish. The trucks, they need 72 hours’ notice which site they’ll be going to.”

“Seventy two hours’ notice?”

“That’s what they say. And there’s more.  The military, they’ve identified 136 sites in Port-au-Prince.”

“That’s great!”

“Not exactly. I asked the military what they have to deliver and they said they didn’t know. They don’t even know what’s on the pallets they’re supposed to fly out and give away. They don’t even know what’s in the ships.”

“They don’t know what they brought over here?”

“Can you believe it?  But I’m not done.”

“You’re not done?”

“There’s this woman under General Keene, she’s responsible for liaison with USAID and WFP.”

“Yeah”

“Yeah, the deal is that there is a division of responsibility: military will make drops and provide security but USAID with the help of WFP and the NGOs have to coordinate the actual distribution of the food.  “We gotta get USAID to decide which NGOs go where”

“Yeah”

“Yeah, so I’m saying to her, ‘OK, give me the sites where you feel comfortable’ and she responds, ‘There’s two sides to that coin. You get USAID to give me the sites that you can get distributors to.’ Well how the fuck am I supposed to know that.  WFP hasn’t given USAID the sites. It’s taken them 20 years for them to divide the country up. But they never divided Port-au-Prince. Ah man. So anyway, we’re both sitting there saying, ‘no you give me your sites. Ok,’ Joseph is miming the conversation, ‘but give me the sites you have’.” He smirks. “They gave me two sites. And that was two days ago. I haven’t heard anything from them since.”

[xv] Two months after the earthquake, President Preval ordered the aid groups to stop giving food away in the camps. The NGOs never stopped supplying water and they rechanneled the food into nutrition programs. Indeed, the same moment that Preval asked them to stop (in early March) the World Food program was ordering shipments that amounted to 10 times the food already given away (270,000 vs. 26,000 tons).

[xvi] One site was at the Petion Ville Country Club in the hills above Port-au-Prince. It was a homecoming, of sorts. The former officers club for U.S. Marines, according to the club’s website:

Once upon a time in Haiti there were non-Haitians at the reins of virtually all business, banking, and industry. The U.S. Government controlled the Customs House and the Security forces. The Petionville Club was formed as an “English Language Sports and Social Venue” for these people. Preceding The Petionville Club (PVC) was the Officers’ Club of the U.S. Marines with a parallel wives library club called The Cosmopolitan Club…

The Petionville Club started in 1928 as a venue for sport and social activities for Expats from many nations in Haiti as the U.S. Occupation was drawing to a close. Although the Club entertained a few top ranked U.S. military leaders, the grand majority were leaders of industry and commerce in the newly thriving economy of Haiti. Some of the companies represented included:

Compagnie D’Eclairage Électrique (Haitian American Electricity Company)

National Railroad of Haiti

National City Bank of New York

Compagnie Haitienne Du Wharf de Port au Prince

Hamburg-American Atlas Line

Compagnie des Chemins de Fer de la Plaine du Cul de Sac

French West Indian Steamship Company

Matthews & Sons Tobacco

Armour and Swift

The Haitian Pineapple Company

American Dyewood Co.,

Texas Company

Gold Medal Flour Company

Haitian American Sugar Company

Reinbold & Company

Oloffson, Lucas & Co.

Robert Nortz & Co.

Tropical Dyewood Co.,

National Railroad Corporation Trust of America

SHADA  Rubber Company

Luckett-Wake Tobacco Company

American Tobacco Company

Fairbanks and Babbitt Soap

Proctor and Gamble Distributing Company

Haiti Company – W.R. Grace and Company

Simmonds Frères

The Petionville Club, S.A.  was incorporated and shares issued December 1, 1932.  The founding fathers and first Board of Directors were largely American businessmen working and residing in Haiti:

President – Ralph Barnes

1. President – B. W. Dorch

Secretary – Treasurer – R.D.Lowell

Governor – R.U. Strong

Governor – H Stalnaker

R.H.Davis

H.D. Barker

E.J.Farrell.

H.M.Wells

1. Hulsizer,

Olin Beall

Everett Shrewsberry

The Clubhouse was built in 1932 (photo) on land adjacent to the U.S. Ambassador’s Residence and was the center of activity for a Foreign Population residing in country. The Petionville Club enjoyed an active Tennis membership and hosted cultural events, dances, and social activities both day and night. The Colony Club English Library was a hub of activity and a social center for an English speaking population in Haiti.

In 1936 Mr. Ralph Barnes arranged the sale of a large parcel of land to The Petionville Club purposed for a Golf Course which was designed and built to international standards.  The golf course officially opened to great fanfare on Feb.24,1938.

 

In the days after the earthquake, the club’s director, a pretty cool American guy named Bill Evans, had realized Port-au-Prince was unraveling, and he figured—correctly—that people would be getting desperate.  Where were they going to go for help? To the rich, of course. So Evans—son of a one time U.S. presidential candidate and who came to Haiti in the ‘70s from New Jersey, and married into one of the country’s richest families—went next door to the U.S. ambassador’s house and handed over the keys, along with a letter authorizing the U.S. to use the golf course as it saw fit. He then hopped on a helicopter and left.

It wasn’t a bad idea. Let the U.S. military use the place as a staging ground. Squatters looking for a safe place to go wouldn’t be able to take over the golf course.  Wrong. The 82^nd Airborne started indiscriminately giving out food and tents and over the next 7 months the fairways and greens transformed into one of Port-au-Prince’s main tent cities.

When Sean Penn got to Haiti, he headed to the country club. The movie star became an indefatigable aid worker and the golf course became the site of the best organized and most successful camp for displaced people in Haiti. Everyone from supermodel Naomi Campbell to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon to Oprah Winfrey to president-turned-aid-czar Bill Clinton would visit the country club tent city to see how it was done.

As for Director Bill Evans:  although himself no dupe and fully understanding the opportunism, Evans became a skilled and sensitive defender of those poor encamped on the golf course. He patiently supported and paid his own staff for three years while he effectively negotiated a humanitarian solution to the 25,000-50,000 people camped on the golf course. In the end the World Bank gave some $8 million for their relocation. Each family was given $500 to leave the golf course.

[xvii] “HAITI: Aid or Trade? The Nefarious Effects of U.S. Policies.” By Haiti Grassroots Watch Global Research, November 07, 2013. Haïti Liberté 6 November 2013.

HAITI: Aid or Trade? The Nefarious Effects of U.S. Policies

[xviii]  From a statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 10, 2010. See: Democracy Now. 2010. “ “We Made a Devil’s Bargain”: Fmr. President Clinton Apologizes for Trade Policies that Destroyed Haitian Rice Farming.” http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/1/clinton_rice

[xix] For John Holmes, chief humanitarian coordinator for the U.N., quote, see: Katz, Jonathan. Associated Press. 2010. “With Cheap Food Imports, Haiti Can’t Feed Itself.”  Huffington Post. March 20.

[xx] One example of the local procurement comes from: World Food Program, 2012. “Haiti 2010-2013 Working Toward Sustainable Solutions.” Here is a direct excerpt from page 87:

During the summer of 2011, WFP purchased 500 tons of rice from Ylmo, Thélicène and their neighbours. The Government of Canada provided the funds with the condition that the rice be purchased from small-scale farmers and used in the school meals program. Brazil and France have also provided important financing to purchase cereals produced locally. At the end of 2012, a total of 8,340 mt of cereals had been bought in Haiti and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) had joined the initiative as a donor.

And from page 83,

Since 2010, WFP purchased 3,334,000 milk bottles from Let Agogo. This has meant that, on top of the daily hot meal they receive under the national school meals programme, some 17,700 children from 48 schools have also been getting two bottles of milk per week.

[xxi] For the most part the vendors were not even local. In many cases, USAID “partners” recruiting urban vendors who would come on voucher day, set up their goods, trade the vouchers in for imported produce and then leave.

[xxii] For hurricane Tomas and the four killed, see: BBC. 2010. “Fatal floods as Hurricane Tomas sweeps over Haiti.”  November 6. From the section: Latin America & Caribbean. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-11700977

For other dramatic headlines, see:

Reyes, Elaine. 2010.  “Tomas Batters Haiti: A Local Haitian Priest Reflects,” NBC, November 6. http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/health/Tomas_Batters_Haiti___A_Local_Haitian_Priest_Reflects_Washington_DC-106795113.html

TBO.com. 2010. “Local organizations gathering supplies as Tomas batters Haiti Staff.” November 5. http://www.tbo.com/news/breaking-news/2010/nov/05/local-organizations-gathering-supplies-as-tomas-ba-ar-18025/

For Hurricane Isaac:

MacMath, Jillian. 2012.  “Video of Isaac Slamming Haiti, Shelters Torn Apart,” AccuWeather.com,

August 27. http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/footage-of-isaac-unleashing-on/70952?partner=MSN

CBS. 2012. “Isaac Death Toll Rises In Haiti & Dominican Republic,” August 26. http://miami.cbslocal.com/2012/08/26/isaac-death-toll-rises-in-haiti-dominican-republic/

[xxiii] For Sandy destruction, see:

United Nations. 2012.  “Haiti: UN and authorities seek $74 million to help farm sector recover from Hurricane Sandy.” http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=43423#.WAjtjPkrLX4

U.N. News Centre. 2010. “UN relief agency estimates 1.8 million Haitians have been affected by Hurricane Sandy.” http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=43405

Reuters. 2012. “Haiti’s rising food insecurity risks social tension, says FAO.” November 22. http://www.reuters.com/article/haiti-food-idUSL5E8MMCRR20121122

Daniel, Trenton. 2012. “Study: Widespread hunger in Haiti after storms,” Associated Press, December 7.

[xxv] For the merchant marine lobby defeating the new aid bill, see:  Chavkin, Sasha. 2013. “How shipping unions sunk food aid reform Maritime interests pressured Congress to maintain controversial status quo,”  Public Integrity, November 6.  http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/11/06/13687/how-shipping-unions-sunk-food-aid-reform.

[xxvi] For the report I wrote for CARE that included plan for them going back into North West, Haiti, see: Schwartz, Timothy T., Guy Pavilus and Stephanie Pierre. 2013. “Report: Assessment and Programme Guidance for Food Security—Health Programming in North-West and Artibonite, Haiti.” January 27.

[xxvii] The timing and evolution of the shift in food aid politics had been another perfect storm of interests that encouraged exaggeration and prevarication. Almost exactly as the Merchant Marine, Textile interests, Food Lobby and NGOs were gearing up to defeat the congressional bill that would have mandated 80 percent of food aid be purchased locally in the country where it was given away, Haiti was being ravaged by storms: Hurricane Tomas hit (November 5th 2011), Isaac (August 23rd 2012), and then hurricane Sandy hit Haiti (October 23rd 2012).  Although none were hurricanes when they passed Haiti, none made landfall, there were claims of massive losses. Something Kolbe, Muggah and Puccio had written their aid report  “After the Storm: Haiti’s Coming Food Crisis,”  claiming “tens of thousands” of people homeless,” Haiti faced a “looming crisis.” The aid agencies circulated the message, “Important : Insécurité alimentaire : une bombe à retardement ?”  (Important: Food security: a time bomb?) and the Associated Press put out in the Sunday morning wire, “…widespread hunger problems facing storm-torn Haiti.”

None had made landfall. And the one portrayed as the most devastating, Sandy, was a tropical storm when it passed Haiti.

Six months after the Sandy crisis I was sitting with Ben Corrigan, a field director for the German Red Cross. Ben was in charge of Food Security for the Nippes and the Grand Anse, two of the three Haiti departments hit the hardest by the storms. He was exasperated, “The Red Cross is insisting that I do a massive food distribution,” he told me, “But there is no famine.” Ben had gone to Medicines de Monde, the NGO tasked itself with collecting data on nutrition for the region and learned that malnutrition had actually going down since the storms. “When I checked myself it was true, malnutrition was less than it had been when the storms hit. But,” Ben sputtered, “they’re telling me that we’ve got to do a distribution. We’re talking major distribution. Thousands of tons of food. Now what would that do to the market prices?” He looked at me, “I was in the market and the prices have been going down too. And there is plenty of food in the market.”

[xxviii] When I wrote a senior foreign service fried and high ranking USAID office and asked him what the hell was going on he wrote back and referring USAID’s new Food for Peace Officer, Carell Laurent—who had also been the USAID Food for Peace Officer in the 1990s—said, “I tried to stop her” and then went on to conclude, “I’ll give you three words that describe her mission, ‘Create Food Empire.’”

[xxix]  Here is the complete press release hailing the USAID local procurement undertaking and the great good it would do.

Two New Grants Utilize Cash and Food Vouchers to Complement In-Kind Food Aid For Immediate Release  Friday, August 13, 2010 USAID Press Office202-712-4320

PORT-AU-PRINCE -The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) announced today that it will award two separate, high-impact grants in Haiti to help earthquake-affected families meet their food needs from local markets with cash or vouchers. The innovative grants, the first two made in Haiti under USAID’s new Emergency Food Security Program, were awarded to the World Food Programme (WFP) and Mercy Corps.

The Emergency Food Security Program is a new initiative managed by USAID’s Office of Food for Peace. It provides grants for local or regional procurement of food commodities or for the use of cash or vouchers for the purchase of food in response to an emergency. It complements the use of U.S. Title II in-kind food aid when food purchased in the United States cannot arrive fast enough to respond to the emergency; when local or regional procurement, cash transfers or food voucher programs may be more appropriate than in-kind food aid from the United States due to market conditions; or when significantly more beneficiaries can be served through the use of local procurement, regional procurement, cash or vouchers.

These grants will be executed in conjunction with longer-term efforts to improve Haiti’s food security through Feed the Future, the U.S. government’s global hunger and food security initiative. Haiti is one of 20 focus countries where Feed the Future is working to accelerate inclusive agriculture sector growth through improved agricultural productivity; expanded markets and trade; and increased economic resilience in Haiti’s vulnerable rural communities. In doing so, Feed the Future is addressing the root causes of hunger and building a lasting foundation for Haiti and other countries to better meet the needs and promote the security of their citizens. The United States is committed to aligning our investments with Haiti’s priorities and building Haiti’s capacity to engage in results-based planning and stakeholder consultation.

The grant to WFP, in the amount of $35 million, will cover the cash portion of WFP’s cash and food-for-work program. The program has employed nearly 50,000 food-insecure men and women to date and, with this grant, will grow to 140,000 by the end of this year. Workers are paid with a mix of food and cash for activities including debris clearing and irrigation canal repair and drainage. With an average family size of five, the income earned by each worker is predicted to help improve the food security of more than 700,000 Haitians.

The grant to Mercy Corps, in the amount of $12.5 million, will provide food vouchers for 20,000 households totaling approximately 100,000 people in the Central Plateau and Lower Artibonite regions. Beneficiaries eligible to receive vouchers include those who have been displaced by the earthquake, households that have taken in displaced people, or households with a vulnerable member such as an elderly person, nursing mother or person living with HIV/AIDS.

The Mercy Corps program has registered 135 vendors in local markets to participate in its voucher distribution program, which runs through the end of March 2011. The vouchers, distributed each month to selected households, are redeemable among registered vendors for food staples such as grains, cooking oil and beans. Working with local vendors encourages the quick recovery of small businesses in the food supply/market chain and helps to spur local production by increasing the purchasing power of beneficiaries.

Research has shown that the benefits from cash and voucher programs such as these will extend not just to those participating in the programs, but also to the local food vendors and farmers who supply the food. These investments will help stimulate the food supply/market chain and maximize benefits for local agriculture and neighborhood markets.

These innovative programs allow USAID to address Haiti’s short-term needs with an eye toward its long-term economic development,” said Jon Brause, USAID’s Deputy Assistant Administrator for the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict & Humanitarian Assistance. “The cash and food vouchers we provide to Haitians will increase their ability to access critically needed food. At the same time, the beneficiaries will use the cash to buy food sold in local markets, supporting Haiti’s agricultural sector.

As one of the four key areas in which USAID has focused its reconstruction efforts, agriculture is a critical component of Haiti’s long-term recovery and a lynchpin of its economic development. We believe that these important grants are an innovative investment in both the immediate food security needs of the Haitian people and in their country’s long-term success” said USAID’s Haiti Task Team Coordinator, Paul Weisenfeld.

The American people, through the U.S. Agency for International Development, have provided economic and humanitarian assistance worldwide for nearly 50 years. For more information about USAID’s programs, please visit: usaid.gov. To read IMPACT blog, see blog.usaid.gov
Last updated: June 13, 202

 

[xxx] For a good and short summary of detrimental food aid after the earthquake, see: Kushner, Jacob. 2012. “Haitian farmers undermined by food aid  U.S. spent $140 million on controversial post-quake food exports.” Public Integrity, January 11. https://www.publicintegrity.org/2012/01/11/7844/haitian-farmers-undermined-food-aid

[xxxi] Far from having had strategically located food throughout Haiti prior to the earthquake, on day nine after the earthquake they still had not decided where or how they were going to give the food away. One can simply peruse the article in the media published in the weeks after the earthquake to confirm that the food relief effort was a massive cluster fuck.  Those of us on the ground didn’t have to read the papers. With Joseph, I got an inside view of just how much of a mess the administration was. And with the rescues, it would not be so bad if when assessing the mess, they did not lie so much.

As for those new stocks of food that in anticipation of another crisis were pre-positioned after the earthquake, they became another example of the WFP/NGO ineptness turned UN-NGO-Government-Press fund raising opportunity. Riots and fights over of the stocked food became common. WFP would bring the food into an area and when it was clear there was no use for it, that there was no crisis and the food was spoiling, not be able to remove it. People thought the food had come for distribution. They sacked the warehouses. And when they tried to remove the food, they would block the street and remove the food from the trucks. These are all facts that WFP kept a tight lid on from the press and that I would have had known if I didn’t work for WFP several times in the years after the earthquake.

[xxxii] I’m not personally inclined to forgive organizations spending hundreds or millions of tax-payers money in the name of the helping the needy, failing, and then lying about it, but just for arguments sake, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say it is not be entirely fair to disparage USAID and WFP for unleashing too much food aid in the wake of the earthquake. After all, there had indeed been an earthquake. Even if overeager NGO workers and the press exaggerated the need, the need was nevertheless great. And while they could have developed a system to source foods locally from the markets—as President Preval requested—the existing bureaucracies are torpid at every level. It takes time to turn a ship as large as the U.S. government, or USAID, or WFP.  On top of all that, sourcing food locally is a far more complicated task in Haiti, where the average farmer works only 2 acres and intercrops as many as 15 to 20 different cultivars. Moreover, there is good reason to believe that most people working in the NGOS were really trying to change the system. And that they were excited about. So let’s accept that the most expedient plan was to feed everyone and when the crisis was over worry about building up production. As for the untruths—such as USAID claiming food stamps were for local produce and WFP retrojecting preparedness—i.e., its pre-earthquake, strategically located warehouses—we can dismiss that as having their hearts in the right place and at least recognizing what should have been. And if in fact, they did begin to put in a massive plan for local production as they declared and promised and kept telling us they were doing, yes, it would be forgivable. But it’s what happened next, to that plan, and what happened next, to me personally that really destroys any faith I have in those organizations, the promises from the politicians who designed the new system, and the system itself. Indeed, it’s what happened next that reveals how the system works and how easily all the donation hungry NGOs and U.N. agencies get bought.