U.S. AID in Haiti

TORBECK, HAITI-Peasant women and children gather along the steep walls of this concrete irrigation canal every morning to bathe in the mountain-fed current and gather the day's drinking water in hollow gourds and brightly colored vinyl washtubs. Adjacent to the canal, however, the cornfields have been parched by yet another season of slack rainfall in this remote rural community on Haiti's southern peninsula.

The life-giving waters have flowed untapped past wilting crops for over twenty years now because secondary canals are incomplete. Local farmers are frustrated, so frustrated they broke the main canal early last year to drench their fields.

"We're tired of being lied to by the district officials," shouts one farmer, dismayed that frequent funding cutoffs have delayed this irrigation project for so many years. Noting he hasn't seen a government check for nearly four months, a district agronomist explains that the irrigation project would be more popular if it had devoted more resources to working with the peasants and less to building its elaborate and now virtually empty headquarters in Torbeck.

The scene stands as a stoic, and all too typical reminder of the failings of U.S. "development assistance" in Haiti, the most impoverished nation in the western hemisphere and a country for which the Reagan administration is seeking greater foreign aid for the third consecutive year, over the objections of human rights advocates, grassroots development workers, and activists in the Haitian exile community in the U.S.

Back in the mid-1970s, the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) allocated some $3.7 million to providing irrigation for over 20,000 acres of prime farmland in this watershed area surrounding Torbeck and in northern Haiti. But after nearly $1 million of project funds has been spent on "technical services" from a Port-au-Prince consulting firm, the farmers around Torbeck have yet to see any substantive benefits, except for sporadic low-wage construction work on a few still incomplete secondary canals.

The irrigation scheme around Torbeck is, indeed, the lone surviving component of what was once the most ambitious AID development initiative in Haiti-the $22.6 million "Integrated Agriculture Development Project" designed to revamp the operations of the Ministry of Agriculture and assist the country's half-million small landholders to grow more food and increase their meager incomes, which average only about $150 annually. But more than six years later, shortages of Haitian matching funds and difficulties in moving the entrenched Haitian bureaucracy have led AID officials to slash planned efforts in soil conservation, agricultural research and extension, and management training. They now label the entire venture "a fiasco."

In this predominantly rural country where an estimated 80 percent of the five million people suffer from varying degrees of malnutrition, aiding the rural poor became the raison d'etre of the U.S. AID program in Haiti when it was reactivated in 1973, after a ten-year suspension initiated by President John Kennedy, who was repulsed by the ruthless rule of Francoise "Papa Doc" Duvalier. With the succession of son Jean Claude to the office of "President for Life," AID launched a panoply of new development projects from rural roads and peasant cooperatives to population control which, together with sizeable shipments of "Food for Peace," cost more than $250 million over the past decade.

But despite volumes of rhetoric about "meeting basic needs" in project planning documents, a comprehensive evaluation produced in 1982 by the U.S. Government Accounting Office stated, "The AID program has had a limited impact on Haiti's dire poverty. . Project results are generally unsatisfactory." Indeed, a special report prepared for the U.S. AID Haiti mission in 1982 warned, "Haiti is a country facing a severe, protracted and apparently cumulative economic crisis. ... Per capita food and agricultural production has been declining for the last decade, if not longer."

Internal AID evaluations disclose that most development projects suffered from delusions about what could be accomplished working with the notoriously currupt, backward Haitian bureaucracy. Road projects designed to stimulate rural commerce, for instance, had to be drastically scaled-back due to organizational mismanagement, equipment misuse, and outright theft. Government administered farm credit programs took little initiative in granting loans to the neediest producers and instead lent to better-off "modernized" operators who, more often than not, failed to repay.

And projects aimed at stimulating production of coffee-Haiti's chief cash crop and foreign exchange earner-through formation of peasant cooperatives miscalculated farmer behavior. With coffee producers being taxed at a rate equivalent to an urban dweller earning $40-50,000 per year, it's little wonder that smallholders shifted to growing more food while coffee exports plunged throughout the past decade.

Responding to the deepening economic crisis in Haiti, the arrival of hundreds of illegal "boat people" on Florida shores, and the Reagan administration's rhetoric of "supply-side foreign assistance," U.S. aid agencies have initiated a drastic reformulation of development strategies for Haiti in the 1980s. Under the "Caribbean Basin Initiative" proposed by President Reagan in 1982 and enacted in August 1983, the focal point of U.S. foreign aid in Haiti has shifted to assisting development of the private sector.

Sporting a modish safari suit, the energetic AID Mission Director in Haiti, Harlan Hobgood, explains that almost half of AID project funds had been going to support the Haitian bureaucracy and build physical infrastructure and not directly reaching the people. Now, by channelling AID funds to groups such as CARE, Catholic Relief Services, and others, Hobgood proudly notes, "We get more out of our money."

Using some of the $10 million Haiti is receiving through the Caribbean Basin Initiative, AID is providing business loans to small and medium size enterprises and helping to organize these interests into a formidable business pressure group. Using terminology he attributed to Walter Mondale, Hobgood says that the new AID role can be that of a "civilizing mission... fostering an evolutionary change in the Haitian government." The current Haitian elite can maintain their present income levels, but distribution of income, he explains, needs to be broadened through taxation of the wealthy and greater opportunities for economic growth. "With economic pluralism will come political pluralism in Haiti," he claims.

The former U.S. ambassador to Haiti, Ernest Preeg, points out that the country stands to benefit substantially from trade provisions of the Caribbean Basin Initiative, which give Haiti 12 years of tariff--free access for most exports to the U.S. market. Citing the by now well-worn formula for growth in Third World countries, the ambassador says that U.S. aid agencies are encouraging an "exportoriented" development strategy in Haiti through a combination of "aid, trade and private investment."

This development strategy reinforces recent efforts by AID, the World Bank, and the IMF to shift Haiti's economy toward greater production for the U.S. market and increased dependence on the U.S. for grain and consumer products. With massive and continuing erosion of overcultivated farmland in many parts of the country and the resulting migration to urban areas, development strategists have turned toward labor-intensive manufacturing as the answer to Haiti's economic problems. Until recently, Haiti could boast of lower wages than Mexico, Jamaica, and Barbados, an advantage that attracted investments from U.S. sporting goods firms (see MM, August 1982), followed by electronics, toy, garment, and food processing firms.

But Haiti has been hard hit by the recession and new contracts have dried up as many multinationals have moved to even cheaper frontiers of sweatshop manufacturing like Indonesia and the Philippines. Though the World Bank and AID have established new lending facilities in an effort to support new ventures in manufacturing and agroindustry in places like Haiti, the funds are attracting few takers in an uncertain business climate.

Even with greater financial and technical aid and the new trade advantages, it remains doubtful that the Haitian government will achieve a sufficiently attractive investment climate to spur continuing growth in industry and agribusiness. Sitting in the plush offices of the Haitian American Chamber of Commerce was one very flustered New Jersey manufacturer who had been fretting for more than five weeks while his plastic cassette-tape components sat on the steamy docks of Port-au-Prince awaiting customs clearance.

Whether the Duvalier government itself can be convinced to give up its lucrative coffee tax revenues is also in doubt. U.S. AID has long insisted that heavy taxation has discouraged new investment and greater production of coffee, but has been negotiating for over four years for a food aid agreement which would give Haiti long term commitments of food aid in exchange for a coffee tax phase-out.

And whether American food aid is in fact being handled better by private aid groups than by the Haitian government has been questioned by studies conducted by U.S. AID's Audit Office showing that in the Catholic Relief programs alone "over 90 tons of commodities deteriorated, were stolen or disappeared during [Fiscal Year] 1982 without a satisfactory explanation." .

What is most certain about Haiti is that development progress, if any, has been extremely slow, while the pressures on the population and environment rapidly mount. Already, about one million Haitians live outside their native land having emigrated, legally or otherwise, to other Caribbean islands or the U.S. Every morning hundreds of applicants line up in front of the U.S. consulate seeking a temporary visa to visit the U.S. and work for a few days, weeks, or months. And lurking just outside Haitian territorial waters U.S. Coast Guard cutters comb the open seas-at a cost of $1 million a month -picking up Haitian "boat people" bound for the promised land, Miami.

David Kinley is a freelance journalist based in San Francisco and co-author of two books: Development Debacle: The World Bank in the Philippines and Aid As Obstacle.