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Beginning in the 1980s, the U.S.-led World Bank tightened
its grip on Haitian economic policy. Essentially, it decided that the
dysfunctional Haitian elite should encourage international investment
in export-oriented assembly sweatshops. This was called a “structural
adjustment program.” Haiti’s trade tariffs
on foreign goods were to be removed, public utilities privatized, and
all state subsidies removed—including on essential items like gasoline,
subject to sharp price fluctuations that can greatly increase
transportation costs for workers and street vendors.
Assembling the goods, of course, would be the
super-exploited Haitian worker, considered by World Bank experts to be Haiti’s greatest
asset. The ideal was to make Haiti “the Taiwan of the Caribbean.” Today,
textile assembly plants produce 90% of exports.
There are about 20,000 assembly workers in Haiti. They make
about 20 cents an hour, about 70 Haitian gourdes
a day (40 gourdes equals around $1). A study
by the Haitian government showed that a subsistence salary would be
closer to 300-400g a day.
Despite heavy quake damage to assembly-plant buildings,
Haitian workers in some plants have been ordered back to work. Said Laurance Merzy, 32, a
worker at DKDR Haiti in Port au Prince, “The walls are still standing,
but they are cracked. It is not safe in there.” The New York Times reports
that the Palm Apparel T-shirt factory in Carrefour, a few miles outside
of the capital and at the epicenter of the quake, collapsed, killing at
least 500 people.
An essential player in maintaining the virtual plantation
system in Haiti is Obama asset Bill Clinton, who, in addition to
promoting tourism and sweatshops in Haiti, successfully
campaigned for passage of the Hope I and Hope II trade bills. Hope I
and II require yearly certification that Caribbean countries are
complying with guidelines that mirror World Bank policies—that is,
super-low wages that attract foreign investors.
Last summer, a struggle erupted for passage of a
minimum-wage increase from 70g to 400g a day. Tens of thousands of
workers took to the streets in August, but a massive deployment of UN
troops blocked their entry to the assembly sector. In the end, Preval bowed to pressure from Bill Clinton to
increase the minimum daily wage to 125g ($3) in 2009, which would rise
to 200g ($5) in 2012. Assembly workers are exempt from the new wage
levels and will only receive the 200 gourdes
in 2012.
In reality, the initial 125 gourdes
is worth less than half of the minimum wage that existed in 1980 under
the U.S.-backed dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier.
Annual inflation in Haiti over the last
decade was about 12-14%, although it’s hard to get accurate figures are
hard to come by.
Another key goal of the World Bank plan was to redirect
food production away from satisfying the nutritional needs of Haitians
to producing food for the export market. A 1982 document of the
US Agency for International Development (USAID), a federal “aid” agency
often linked to the CIA, proposed the “gradual but systematic removal”
of domestic crops from 30% of all tilled land, whose products can then
be exported.
The result was the massive migration of Haitian rural
farmers and workers from the countryside, where most Haitians live, to
already over-crowded urban centers like Port-au-Prince, where
unemployment stood at 70-80% before the earthquake.
Rice, a staple of the Haitian diet, used to be produced in
quantities that would satisfy domestic needs. However, World Bank
economic policy meant dropping tariffs on imported goods. Within a few
years, cheaper “Miami rice” flooded
the Haitian market, resulting in the destruction of domestic rice
farming.
In 2008, after a 45% jump in the price of Miami rice in two
years, there were “food riots,” as thousands poured into the streets in
the capital shouting, “We’re hungry. Feed us!” Some described their
hunger pains as “swallowing Clorox.” UN troops killed about a dozen
protesters throughout Haiti. The practice of eating mud laced with
sugar is not uncommon in Haiti.
Keeping Haiti politically dependent
on the World Bank and Western capital are loans from the World Bank and
imperialist governments that come with political strings attached, as
do the “structural adjustment” programs. Today, over 50% of the almost
$1 billion Haitian budget originates from so-called foreign aid.
Foreign debt had multiplied 17.5 times between 1957 and
1986, the years of the Duvalier family
dictatorship. In 2001, the yearly debt servicing alone was $321 million.
However, last June the WB, IMF, and Paris Club reduced the
current debt by $1.2 billion out of $1.4 billion to make payments
“bearable” as part of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative
(HIPC), after years of delay. New loans will increase the debt again
unless a genuine debt cancellation is enacted. In order to qualify for
HIPC, however, Haiti had to be
certified by imperialist institutions as being in compliance with World
Bank/IMF policies of “structural adjustment,” the privatization of
public utilities, the elimination of tariffs on foreign goods, and the
elimination of all price subsidies, etc.
A government study of the public phone company found that
its annual revenues amounted to approximately $600 million, but as a
result of privatization, this amount was lost to the Haitian people for
schools, roads, and medical care—as well as debt repayment.
Although in the wake of the crisis there has been an
international call to cancel Haiti’s debt, much of
it having originated with dictatorships, Haiti is still on the
hook for about $764 million to U.S.-dominated lending institutions,
which constitute about 80% of all Haitian debt.
Activists in the Jubilee USA network and author Naomi
Klein launched a campaign that pressured the World Bank’s International
Monetary Fund into restructuring a recent $100 million loan into a
no-interest loan, with the possibility that the IMF might decide that
it does not have to be repaid at all.
What is needed is a powerful workers’ movement in Haiti that will
challenge the entire system of vulture capitalism and imperialism and reconstruct
Haiti under the
democratic control of Haiti’s working
masses. It would enforce the cancellation of all foreign debts. That
would require building a revolutionary party and working for a
socialist revolution in Haiti, and building a
powerful solidarity movement in the U.S.
As the early 20th-century revolutionary leader Rosa
Luxemburg put it, the choice faced by humanity is a choice between
“socialism and barbarism.”
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