The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [101]
On the drive back to Port-au-Prince, I watched the Haitian countryside roll past, my head pressed against the glass of the van window. As harsh as eking out a living from that depleted countryside would be, it still seemed vastly preferable to the crowded urban slums.
The next day I went to USAID, a government organization that describes itself as “the principal U.S. agency to extend assistance to countries recovering from disaster, trying to escape poverty, and engaging in democratic reforms.”124 I didn’t know much about international development agencies back then, and I eagerly anticipated learning about strategies to restore the rural environment and get those farms back in working order again, to allow those who wanted to farm to be able to earn a sustainable, dignified living while producing food locally. It seemed crazy to me that a once-lush tropical island was abandoning farming and importing food. Local food means less packaging, less transportation, more local jobs, and fresher, healthier food. How could anyone not want that?
The USAID office was in downtown Port-au-Prince. When I went there, it was the first time I had felt air-conditioning, seen men in suits, or been surrounded by white people since arriving in Haiti. For the first time since I had been in the country, I worried my dress and sandals weren’t nice enough for the setting.
The USAID representative began explaining his agency’s vision for “developing” Haiti. To my utter amazement, he laid out the same plan as the whispering farmer had. But he wasn’t saying it while leaning closer, in hushed tones, with wild eyes. He sat up straight and tall and announced that USAID did not feel it was “efficient” for Haitians to produce food. Instead, he felt, they should participate in the global economy, leveraging their best resources, which apparently meant many thousands of people so near starvation that they would be willing to sew Sleeping Beauty pajamas from morning to night, endure physical and sexual threats, live in slums, only to be able to feed their kids half a meal a day.
He flat out proclaimed that local food sufficiency was not desirable or needed. He explained that a better concept is “food security,” which means that a population didn’t need to grow its own food but should instead import food, in this case from the United States. Since U.S. farmers (heavily subsidized, I’d like to point out) can grow rice more “efficiently” than can small Haitian farmers, USAID preferred that the rice from the United States be sent to Haiti and Haitians leave their farms to work in the garment factories—a job that, he felt, was less suited to the U.S. population.
I blurted out that “efficiency” was not the only criteria. A farmer’s relationship to the land, healthy and dignified work, a parent’s ability to spend time with his or her kids after school, a community staying intact generation after generation—all these things had value, and a real development plan would prioritize them. “Well,” he said, “if a Haitian really wants to farm, there is room for a handful of them to grow things like organic mangoes for the high-end export market.” I almost fell off my chair. I realized that the ideas that the Haitian farmer had shared were no conspiracy theory. A conspiracy requires some attempt at secrecy. But here was USAID just laying out its grand plan for the people of Haiti