Haiti: A Case Study in British Empire Genocide
The International Monetary Fund (IMF), and
more recently the World Trade Organization (WTO), have destroyed
Haiti's agriculture and starved its population to death, to the
point that many desperately-hungry Haitians today fall prey to
unscrupulous vendors who sell them "dirt cookies" -- biscuits
made of clay, salt and oil.
This is the same policy of enslavement and extermination
that the British Empire practiced in its Caribbean colonies,
exposed so graphically by American System economist and patriot
Henry C. Carey, in his 1853 book {The Slave Trade, Domestic and
Foreign}. Alexander von Humboldt made the same observations in
his early 19th century writings about British enslavement of its
colonial populations in the region.
Up until the mid-1980s, when trade liberalization was
introduced, Haiti was self-sufficient in rice production, its
main staple. By the mid-1990s, the situation had changed
dramatically, especially after the government signed a
"structural adjustment" agreement with the IMF in 1994. The
latter included even more trade liberalization measures,
including the slashing of the 35% tariff on rice imports to 3%,
as well as privatization of health care and other services. Haiti
joined the WTO in 1996, and has continued to be victimized by it
and the IMF to the present time -- accumulating an unpayable
foreign debt along the way.
According to a 2004 report prepared by American University,
doing the IMF's and WTO's bidding earned Haiti the top spot in
the IMF's 1999 Index of Trade Restrictiveness. But it didn't
prevent its people from becoming more impoverished, and the
country from maintaining its status as the least-developed nation
in the Western Hemisphere. Today, 80% of the population lives on
less than $2 a day, and about half live on $1 a day or less. Yet
incredibly, because of unequal income distribution, Haiti has the
most millionaires per capita in the region!
It is also the second-largest importer of rice among Central
American and Caribbean nations, importing 82% of total rice
consumption from the U.S. Hundreds of thousands of rice farmers,
millers, and those engaged in other aspects of the trade, were
displaced by the flood of cheap imports, with no options for
other employment. Those who migrated to the cities usually ended
up in the "informal" sector, petty commerce, or as destitute
slumdwellers.
While two-thirds of Haitians are still engaged in
agriculture today, that activity often consists of literally
scratching something out of the dirt. Desperate to produce
anything edible, many farmers resorted to intensive cultivation
techniques, which accelerated soil erosion. Soil erosion causes
the loss of 15,000 hectares of cultivated land annually. One
hundred and fifty years ago, 93% of Haiti was covered by forests;
today only 3% remains.
|