Neoliberal roots of Haiti's food crisis | SocialistWorker.org

From that time on, the only way to receive U.S. foreign assistance was to embrace a dichotomy that dictated the only way to help the poor was to create more business opportunities for the wealthy. It was an export of the “trickle-down” theory and what became known as “Reaganomics,” which over time became the major thrust of U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Caribbean and Latin America.

Collective solutions along with nationalization and protection of local resources and production were demonized and attacked by the proponents of this new ideology that placed profits ahead of what they called socialist and communist systems that offered any resistance. Remember this was during the Cold War and before the fall of the USSR.

During that same period, a major transition occurred in Haiti. The Mevs, one of the wealthiest families in Haiti, bought the Haitian American Sugar Company, or HASCO, which had been one of the major sugar producers in the world.

The Mevs realized they would never be allowed to penetrate the U.S. market while it was controlled by the American company C&H Sugar, based in Hawaii. It made more economic sense for them to buy HASCO and sell off its equipment in exchange for positioning themselves as the major importer of sugar to Haiti.

This became the contemporary economic model for Haiti’s wealthy elite that constitutes 1 percent of the population but controls more than 50 percent of Haiti’s collective wealth today. Haiti’s elite eventually did the same for rice, beans and corn because they realized they could maximize profits by controlling the importation of basic food products, rather than investing in national production. Controlling a monopoly on the importation of basic foodstuffs was far more profitable than investing in locally grown products.

(via Instapaper)