05 Jan 2011
Does International Aid Keep Haiti Poor?

Your tax dollars at work.

In the 1970s, Haiti imported just 19 percent of its food. During that decade, the U.S. government, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund began creating development plans designed to spur growth in the country's manufacturing sector and to move large parts of the workforce into urban communities. As part of the strategy, Haitian governments after François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who ruled for 15 years until 1971, lowered the country's tariffs for food imports to as low as 3 percent, while the United States raised barriers to exports from Haiti. As Alex Dupuy, a sociology professor at Wesleyan University, wrote on Anthropologyworks.com recently, the island "went from being self-sufficient in the production of rice, sugar, poultry, and pork to becoming the fourth-largest importer of subsidized US rice in the world and the largest importer of foodstuffs from the US in the Caribbean."

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20:21 /Agriculture | 2 comments | permanent link