“Griot" is a traditional Haitian dish consisting of well-seasoned chunks of pork usually served with fried plantains, a lettuce and tomato salad, and pickles. Today's special in Haiti, though, appallingly enough, is mudpies.
“It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.” At last, the Haitian food crisis makes
the front page of the NYT .
Indeed, as it roils developing nations, the spike in commodity prices — the biggest since the Nixon administration — has pitted the globe’s poorer south against the relatively wealthy north, adding to demands for reform of rich nations’ farm and environmental policies. But experts say there are few quick fixes to a crisis tied to so many factors, from strong demand for food from emerging economies like China’s to rising oil prices to the diversion of food resources to make biofuels.
Another clue to the crisis lies in this excerpt from a past report on Haiti from the U.S. Institute for Peace:
In 2002, only four percent of the population controlled 66 percent of the country's assets. Meanwhile, a series of ruinous agricultural trade policies destroyed Haiti's previously successful small farmers, a sector that had produced exports of rice, pork, and chicken. Haiti became a net importer of agricultural products with growing food insecurity and malnutrition for the majority of its people.
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Read the article below in an e-mail just before reading this article, and the two seemed to go together.
Hunger Hypocrites
Le Monde | Editorial
Wednesday 16 April 2008
Hunger riots having erupted on the television news, it's time for mobilization. From Paris to Washington, everyone has their own idea about how to come to the aid of poor countries' populations unable to withstand the price increases in basic foodstuffs, notably rice. We can only commend this surge of generosity. To fail to respond would be criminal and would provide a very tarnished image of the West.
Nonetheless, how is it possible not to feel ill at ease with these tender impulses? For those who are the most generous today are those perhaps the most responsible for this planetary malfunction. The new eating habits of emerging countries, largely imported from developed countries, explain a large part of the explosion in demand and consequently price tensions.
That's not the only reason. Biofuel competition is another, essential, cause. Now, the United States - so generous with the World Food Program - has confirmed its resolve to double the already-very-significant surface it devotes to biofuels. Opposite the American driver, the Haitian peasant doesn't carry much weight. The same is true for Europe. Not only does it want to develop biofuels, but in international negotiations, it maintains a protectionist policy that has long destabilized third-world agriculture and slowed down poverty reduction.
The responsibility of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund is also considerable. For decades, these institutions have explained to emerging countries that the future of agriculture was behind it. So, emerging countries favored export crops in order to bring in foreign currency; they are harvesting the bitter fruits of that policy today. Thus does Senegal export food products - which Europe taxes when Senegal has the gall to want to process them domestically - but has to import 80 percent of the rice it consumes. Now not only has rice become scarce, but speculators are making its price climb as much as 30 percent in a day. The West's sudden generosity cannot erase its share of responsibility for the major crisis that threatens today.
Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.
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