Riots in Haiti over explosive rises in food costs have claimed the lives of six people.  There have also been food riots world-wide in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivorie, Egypt, Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

The Economist, which calls the current crisis the silent tsunami, reports that last year wheat prices rose 77% and rice 16%, but since January rice prices have risen 141%. The reasons include rising fuel costs, weather problems, increased demand in China and India, as well as the push to create biofuels from cereal crops.

            Hermite Joseph, a mother working in the markets of Port au Prince, told journalist Nick Whalen that her two kids are “like toothpicks – they’re not getting enough nourishment.  Before, if you had a dollar twenty-five cents, you could buy vegetables, some rice, 10 cents of charcoal and a little cooking oil. Right now, a little can of rice alone costs 65 cents, and is not good rice at all.  Oil is 25 cents.  Charcoal is 25 cents.  With a dollar twenty-five, you can’t even make a plate of rice for one child.”

            The St. Claire’s Church Food program, in the Tiplas Kazo neighborhood of Port au Prince, serves 1000 free meals a day, almost all to hungry children – five times a week in partnership with the What If Foundation.  Children from Cite Soleil have been known to walk the five miles to the church for a meal. The cost of rice, beans, vegetables, a little meat, spices, cooking oil, propane for the stoves, have gone up dramatically. Because of the rise in the cost of food, the portions are now smaller.  But hunger is on the rise and more and more children come for the free meal.  Hungry adults used to be allowed to eat the leftovers once all the children were fed, but now there are few leftovers.   

            The New York Times lectured Haiti on April 18 that “Haiti, its agriculture industry in shambles, needs to better feed itself.”  Unfortunately, the article did not talk at all about one of the main causes of the shortages – the fact that the U.S. and other international financial bodies destroyed Haitian rice farmers to create a major market for the heavily subsidized rice from U.S. farmers.  This is not the only cause of hunger in Haiti and other poor countries, but it is a major force.

            Thirty years ago, Haiti raised nearly all the rice it needed.  What happened? 

In 1986, after the expulsion of Haitian dictator Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loaned Haiti $24.6 million in desperately needed funds (Baby Doc had raided the treasury on the way out).  But, in order to get the IMF loan, Haiti was required to reduce tariff protections for their Haitian rice and other agricultural products and some industries to open up the country’s markets to competition from outside countries.  The U.S. has by far the largest voice in decisions of the IMF.

            Doctor Paul Farmer was in Haiti then and saw what happened.  “Within less than two years, it became impossible for Haitian farmers to compete with what they called ‘Miami rice.’  The whole local rice market in Haiti fell apart as cheap, U.S. subsidized rice, some of it in the form of ‘food aid,’ flooded the market. There was violence, ‘rice wars,’ and lives were lost.”

            “American rice invaded the country,” recalled Charles Suffrard, a leading rice grower in Haiti in an interview with the Washington Post in 2000.  By 1987 and 1988, there was so much rice coming into the country that many stopped working the land.

            Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste, a Haitian priest who has been the pastor at St. Claire and an outspoken human rights advocate, agrees.  “In the 1980s, imported rice poured into Haiti, below the cost of what our farmers could produce it.  Farmers lost their businesses.  People from the countryside started losing their jobs and moving to the cities.  After a few years of cheap imported rice, local production went way down.”

            Still the international business community was not satisfied.  In 1994, as a condition for U.S. assistance in returning to Haiti to resume his elected Presidency, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced by the U.S., the IMF, and the World Bank to open up the markets in Haiti even more.

But, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, what reason could the U.S. have in destroying the rice market of this tiny country?  

Haiti is definitely poor.  The U.S. Agency for International Development reports the annual per capita income is less than $400.   The United Nations reports life expectancy in Haiti is 59, while in the US it is 78.  Over 78% of Haitians live on less than $2 a day, more than half live on less than $1 a day.

            Yet Haiti has become one of the very top importers of rice from the U.S.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture 2008 numbers show Haiti is the third largest importer of US rice - at over 240,000 metric tons of rice.  (One metric ton is 2200 pounds).

            Rice is a heavily subsidized business in the U.S.  Rice subsidies in the U.S. totaled $11 billion from 1995 to 2006.  One producer alone, Riceland Foods Inc of Stuttgart Arkansas, received over $500 million dollars in rice subsidies between 1995 and 2006. 

            The Cato Institute recently reported that rice is one of the most heavily supported commodities in the U.S. – with three different subsidies together averaging over $1 billion a year since 1998 and projected to average over $700 million a year through 2015. The result?  “Tens of millions of rice farmers in poor countries find it hard to lift their families out of poverty because of the lower, more volatile prices caused by the interventionist policies of other countries.”

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