The US Role in Haiti’s Food Riots- GM WILL NOT SOLVE WORLD HUNGER

Amy Goodman from Democracy Now has an interview with human rights lawyer Bill Quigley. He talks about the REAL reasons for the hunger crisis going on right now in Haiti.  

Amy: ”Thirty years ago, Haiti had all the rice it needed. Then in 1986, Haiti turned to the IMF for a loan. Now, after cutting tariff protections on local rice, Haiti imports most of its rice from the United States, which in turn remains heavily subsidized. (Rice farmers in the US get paid by the US government. The US government gets the money from us, the taxpayers, to pay these subsidies.) US rice farmers get one billion dollars a year in government subsidies.  The Haitians quit growing rice because they can’t compete. They grow other crops to export.  When the price of rice doubles they can’t afford to eat. Meanwhile in Haiti, hungry people are rioting in the streets because they cannot afford to buy rice.” 

BILL QUIGLEY:

The problem really is, is that the United States and the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, all of which we, the United States, dominate, have for the last twenty-five, thirty years have insisted that in order to get the loans, Haiti had to change their economic system so that their country was open to competition from other countries on agriculture, trade, a number of other things.

The people of the United States have no idea that they are paying taxes, and our government has destroyed not just Haiti, but the agricultural bases of lots and lots of very poor countries. And so, our money is going to these huge farmers, mostly in Arkansas. They’re in about five different states, some of them getting hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. There’s one that has gotten over half-a-billion dollars over the last ten years. And so, we are directly subsidizing these huge agribusinesses which are putting the small farmers and even the regional farmers out of business and really creating this hunger problem that the world is seeing right now, because the people in Haiti, it takes awhile to irrigate, farm and all this other stuff, and the industry has been broken down. A lot of the workers moved from the country into the city, not just in Haiti, but in every place else. So it’s a great little lens for those of us in the United States who care about hunger and care about justice to look and see it’s not just mismanagement in Haiti, it’s not just the fact that they have problems, which they certainly do, but also our country plays a huge role in creating the hunger that has led to the riots.

 

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/4/24/the_us_role_in_haitis_food

~ by Lorina Coble on April 28, 2008.