Bill Clinton Apologizes to Haiti

See also Weisbrot's column:
Thousands of Haitians will die unless U.S. beefs-up relief efforts

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By Mark Weisbrot

Source: Sacramento BeeFriday, March 26, 2010

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President Clinton apologized on March 10 for the role that his government played in destroying a big part of Haitian agriculture: “It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked . . . I have to live every day with the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti, to feed those people, because of what I did.”

Beginning in the 1980s, subsidized U.S. rice wiped out thousands of Haitian rice farmers and made the country dependent on imported food.

Clinton’s apology is important and presents an opportunity to change U.S. policy towards Haiti, which has been a major cause of suffering in this desperately poor country.

Most urgently, the current relief effort has to be ramped up immediately to help the 1.3 million homeless Haitians before thousands are killed by rains or the hurricane season. A relatively brief rain on March 19 brought images of Haitians struggling through mud in squalid camps to try and keep from being overwhelmed by flooding.

The rainy season is just beginning and it will get much worse, especially for some 200,000 homeless in 29 camps that could get washed away when the rains get heavy.

Danny Glover is an actor and chair of the board of the TransAfrica Forum. Both he and TransAfrica have worked to help Haiti for many years. “It doesn’t make sense that they can’t even get people tents two and a half months after the earthquake,” he told me in Washington. Indeed it does not: The needed tents cost about $100 apiece; even if we double the government’s request for 200,000 tents, the cost is $40 million, not even two percent of the public and private donations coming from the U.S. and other countries.

Congress needs to turn up the heat by immediately announcing that it will fulfill its oversight role, complete with hearings and a report on how U.S. dollars – taxpayer and private donations – have been spent in Haiti. This would give some incentive to the larger organizations and U.S. government contractors to help save thousands of Haitian before they are killed by rains or the hurricane season (which begins in June).

Chemonics, which has received multiple contracts totaling tens of millions of dollars from USAID, is a subsidiary of ERLY Industries, which is also the parent company of American Rice Corporation, a major beneficiary of the policies that Clinton apologized for.

The American Red Cross has received an estimated one-third of the billion dollars that American relief organizations have raised for Haiti. It has had some scandals in recent years involving the receipt of some hundred of millions of dollars of funds that were not spent on the particular relief efforts for which they were raised.

The most urgent needs are clear: in addition to the necessary shelter and relocations, there needs to be more aid provided outside Port-au-Prince so that people are more able to live elsewhere. More aid to agriculture for the current planting season is also urgent. The international community, which is currently providing most of Haiti’s food, should commit to buying at least the current and next season’s crop of locally produced rice at a profitable, guaranteed price, before distributing any imported rice. Currently, as has happened in the past, imported rice is pushing down the price of local rice and can make it difficult or impossible for farmers to survive.

The Haitian government also needs budget support; it is currently getting only a tiny fraction of U.S. government dollars, not nearly enough to even have a functioning government that is necessary for the reconstruction effort. It is both wrong and counter-productive to try to exclude Haitians from having a voice in the future of their own country.

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He has written numerous research papers on economic policy, especially on Latin America and international economic policy. He is also co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2000) and president of Just Foreign Policy

Decent of Bill to admit he made a mistake . Now , lets see what he does about it .

We historically did not develop through free trade despite our now pushing it on others. Please Read Ha-Joon Chang's article here: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2009/chang230109.html

My Six-year-old Son Should Get a Job:
What Is Wrong with the Present Global Economic Order?

It's good to see that people as influential as Clinton are reavaluating the destructive policies they pushed on other countries.

On US involvement see Chomsky:

NC: It started with Woodrow Wilson. When Wilson invaded all of Hispaniola, Haiti and the DR, the Wilson invasion was pretty brutal in both parts of Hispaniola. But it was much worse in Haiti. And the reasons were very clearly stated.

KB: Racism.

NC: Yeah. The State Department said, well, the Dominicans have some European blood so they’re not quite so bad. But the Haitians are pure nigger. So Wilson sent the marines to disband the Haitian parliament because they wouldn’t permit US corporations to buy up Haitian lands. And he forced them to do it. Well, that’s one of the many atrocities and crimes. Just keeping to this, that accelerated the destruction of Haitian agriculture and the flight of people from the countryside to the cities. Now that continued under Reagan. Under Reagan, USAID and the World Bank set up very explicit programs, explicitly designed to destroy Haitian agriculture. They didn’t cover it up. They gave an argument that Haiti shouldn’t have an agricultural system, it should have assembly plants; women working to stitch baseballs in miserable conditions. Well that was another blow to Haitian agriculture, but nevertheless even under Reagan, Haiti was producing most of its own rice when Clinton came along.

When Clinton restored Aristide—Clinton of course supported the military junta, another little hidden story...he strongly supported it in fact. He even allowed the Texaco Oil Company to send oil to the junta in violation of presidential directives; Bush Sr. did so as well—well, he finally allowed the president to return, but on condition that he accept the programs of Marc Bazin, the US candidate that he had defeated in the 1990 election. And that meant a harsh neoliberal program, no import barriers. That means that Haiti has to import rice and other agricultural commodities from the US from US agribusiness, which is getting a huge part of its profits from state subsidies. So you get highly subsidized US agribusiness pouring commodities into Haiti; I mean, Haitian rice farmers are efficient but nobody can compete with that, so that accelerated the flight into the cities. And it wasn’t that they didn’t know it was going to happen. USAID was publishing reports in 1995 saying, yes this is going to destroy Haitian agriculture and that’s a good thing. And you get the flight into the cities and you get food riots in 2008, because they can’t produce their own food. And now you get this class-based catastrophe. After this history—it’s only a tiny piece of it—the United States should be paying massive reparations, not just aid. And France as well. The French role is grotesque.

KB: May I ask, regarding Aristide’s languishing in exile, was he right to go back to Haiti in 1994 in the way that he did, with US troops? Also, was he right to agree, under enormous pressure of course, to the neoliberal reforms laid out in the Paris Accords?

NC: Well, I happened to be in Haiti almost at that time—1993. I was there for a while; this was the peak of the terror. And I’ve been in a lot of awful places in the world. Some of the worst, in fact. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like the misery and the terror that was going on in Haiti under the junta, with Clinton’s backing at that time. And there was a lot of discussion, I talked for example to the late Father Gerard Jean-Juste, one of the most popular figures in Haiti, who the government recently forced out, he was then underground in a church but Haitian friends took me to him. He was very close to large parts of the population. I talked to labor leaders who’d been beaten and tortured but were willing to talk, and to activists and others. And what most of them said is, Father Jean-Juste for example, what he said is, “Look, I don’t want a marine invasion, I think it’s a bad idea. But on the other hand,” he said, “my people, the people in the slums—La Saline, Cite Soleil and so on, they just can’t take it anymore.” He said, “the torture is too awful, the terror is too awful. They’ll accept anything that’ll put an end to it.” And that was the dilemma. I don’t have an answer to that.

....The United States and France, the two traditional torturers of Haiti, essentially kidnapped Aristide in 2004 after having blocked any international aid to the country under very dubious pretexts, not credible grounds, which of course extremely harmed this fragile economy. There was chaos and the US and France and Canada flew in, kidnapped Aristide—they said they rescued him, they actually kidnapped him—they flew him off to Central Africa, his party Fanmi Lavalas is banned, which probably accounts for the very low turnout in the recent elections, and the United States has been trying to keep Aristide not only from Haiti, but from the entire hemisphere.

http://www.zcommunications.org/haiti-post-earthquake-by-noam-chomsky