Haiti Research File

Bill Clinton’s Heavy Hand on

Haiti’s Vulnerable Agricultural

Economy: The American Rice

Scandal

Did President Clinton and other recent White House tenants condemn Haiti to a future of endemic poverty through a self-serving U.S. rice export policy? An examination of Haiti’s economic liberalization strategies of the 1980s and 1990s indicates that the answer is “yes.”

Haiti’s economic liberalization began in the early 1980s as a result of a Reagan Administration initiative. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), among other agencies, encouraged Haiti to start exporting manufactured and processed agricultural products, in tandem with emphasizing the need to import grain staples on the international market. In 1983, under Reagan’s Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI), there was a vast increase in the amount of subsidized food, like rice, began to be exported to Haiti by U.S. agro-industries. Moreover, with the help of CBI provisions, U.S. experts worked to disassemble Haiti’s rural economy, even though USAID officials recognized that such a move could increase poverty and contribute to a decline in average Haitian income and health standards.

During the 1980s, USAID workers along with industrialists and large landholders dedicated themselves to create agro-processing facilities while simultaneously promoting the release of surplus subsidized U.S. agricultural products onto the Haitian market. The main goal of these restructuring exercises was to develop Haiti’s cities into exporting bases (i.e. manufacturing sites for American companies, particularly textiles). This restructuring program, in conjunction with the dismantling of the island’s rural economy, spurred massive migration of former Haitian farmers from the countryside to urban centers. However, upon their arrival, it quickly became apparent that there were not sufficient tangible opportunities available.. Seemingly, this imbalance was created by design: Haiti otherwise would lack the comparative advantage in any market. So, by spurring mass migration to the cities, workers would have to vie for even the least desirable jobs, thus creating an ideal situation in which workers would readily be vulnerable to exploitation. The abundance of dirt-cheap labor was and still is Haiti’s most reliable “comparative advantage,” and the process soon saw Haiti serving as an export platform for island rice grown by foreign agro industry that was too expensive for domestic consumption.

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This analysis was prepared by COHA Research Associate Leah Chavla