It may sound a little funny but this, to me, is the saddest, most cruel thing that was ever done to the Haitian peasant. When their pigs were cruelly, deliberately slaughtered, they knew what slavery awaited them in factories because they had no other way to live. They were machiavellically shifted from independent peasants to enslaved penny-earning factory workers. People wept and cried for a long time, literally screamed and fought as their pigs were slaughtered. Note how Aristide tried to return their pigs so they would have some form of independence again...
Thanks for all your information.
Peasants' lives ruined by capitalist pigs
By George Monbiot, The Guardian, 2 April 1996
AFRICAN swine fever came to Dominica by way of a ham sandwich on a Spanish airliner. It soon spread down the Artibonite River and over the border into Haiti. The epidemic swiftly killed one-third of that country's pigs. but, by late 1981, it seemed to be fizzling out. The US was taking no chances, however. It funded a programme to slaughter every pig in Haiti.
To the peasants producing most of Haiti's food, the programme was devastating. Their small black pigs, which largely fended for themselves, were so critical to their economy that the same word was used for pig and for bank. People hid their pigs in holes and caves, but President Duvalier's dreaded Tontons Macoutes rooted the animals out and had them shot. Even quarantined herds were exterminated.
The US Agency for International Development (USAID) argued that the slaughter should be seen as less of a problem than an opportunity. By replacing the small black pigs with large white ones from the US, Haiti could become a pork exporter, and a lucky new participant in the modern agricultural economy. The new pigs grew fast, but needed as much pampering as the Duvaliers. While the peasants lived in bamboo shacks and ate only the food they grew for themselves. the white pigs needed concrete houses, showers and imported food and medicine. Pig-breeding became the preserve of big business, leaving the peasants with nothing. It is no exaggeration to say that the demise of the creole pig sped the demise of Baby Doc.
President Aristide's new government began to import black pigs from other islands and distribute them to the peasants. As a result, when Aristide was overthrown the new military leaders declared that the black pigs were communist pigs, whose owners should be rounded up as subversives. The white pigs, by contrast, were capitalist pigs, and a source of national pride. By the time Aristide returned, in 1994, the peasant economy had been strangled, and much of the peasants' land had been bought up by companies growing coffee or flowers for export to America.
<snip>
In Haiti, USAID's objective was a shift of 30 per cent of all cultivated land from the production of food to the production of export crops. At first this was impossible, as the peasant economy was too strong. After the pig- stickings it became achievable. While the world's most powerful pigs have their snouts in the trough. only self- reliance will deliver food security.
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43a/317.html============
OAS Foundation Riles Haitian Peasants
from This Week in Haiti
Ask almost any peasant in Haiti, and he or she will tell you that the "American plan" for Haiti began in 1982. That was the year that the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in collaboration with dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier launched a program called PEPPADEP, which stood for the "Project for Eradication of the African Swine Fever and the Development of Pig Raising."
Under this highfalutin title, Haitian and US authorities proceeded with the mass extermination of Haiti's famous "kochon kreyol" or Creole pigs, the hardy, black-haired swine which were for generations the back-bone of the peasant economy.
Once the indigenous pigs were wiped out, the US sold to the few Haitian peasants who could afford them "kochon grimel" or white pigs, a large fatty American breed which fared poorly under the rigorous conditions of the Haitian countryside.
Peasants around the northern town of Plaisance fear that they may be witnessing today a new attack on another mainstay of their economy: yams. On June 15, peasants took to the airwaves of the local community radio station, "Zeb Ginen," to say that the representatives from the Pan American Development Foundation (PADF) were buying up all the yams in the region, particularly in the remote mountain areas of Martineau and Champagne, where peasants live off the root year-round. Was the yam purchasing campaign another PEPPADEP, they asked.
<snip>
http://www.ibiblio.org/prism/sep98/foundation.html=====
<snip>
The story continued after the government was handed over to Haitian overseers. In 1941, the Haitian-American Company for Agricultural Development (SHADA) was set up as an aid project under the guidance of US agronomists, who dismissed the advice and protests of Haitian experts with the usual contempt. With millions of dollars of US government credits, SHADA undertook to raise sisal and rubber, needed at the time for war purposes. The project acquired 5 percent of Haiti's finest agricultural lands, expelling 40,000 peasant families, who, if lucky, might be rehired as day laborers. After four years of production, the project harvested a laughable five tons of rubber. It was then abandoned, in part because the market was gone. Some peasants returned to their former lands, but were unable to resume cultivation because the land had been ruined by the SHADA project. Many could not even find their own fields after trees, hills and bushes had been bulldozed away.
<snip>
In 1978, US experts became concerned that swine fever in the Dominican Republic might threaten the US pig industry. The US initiated a $23 million extermination and restocking program aimed at replacing all of the 1.3 million pigs in Haiti, which were among the peasants' most important possessions, even considered a "bank account" in case of need. Though some Haitian pigs had been found to be infected, few had died, possibly because of their remarkable disease-resistance, some veterinary experts felt. Peasants were skeptical, speculating that the affair had been staged so that "Americans could make money selling their pigs." The program was initiated in 1982, well after traces of disease had disappeared. Two years later, there were no pigs in Haiti.
Peasants regarded this as "the very last thing left in the possible punishments that have afflicted us." A Haitian economist described the enterprise as "the worst calamity to ever befall the peasant," even apart from the $600 million value of the destroyed livestock: "The real loss to the peasant is incalculable...
is reeling from the impact of being without pigs. A whole way of life has been destroyed in this survival economy." School registration dropped 40-50 percent and sales of merchandise plummeted, as the marginal economy collapsed. A USAID-OAS program then sent pigs from Iowa -- for many peasants, confirming their suspicions. These were, however, to be made available only to peasants who could show that they had the capital necessary to feed the new arrivals and to house them according to specifications. Unlike the native Haitian pigs, the Iowa replacements often succumbed to disease, and could survive only on expensive feed, at a cost that ran up to $250 a year, a huge sum for impoverished peasants. One predictable result was new fortunes for the Duvalier clique and their successors who gained control of the feed market. A Church-based Haitian development program that had sought to deal with the problems abandoned the effort as "a waste of time." "These pigs will never become acclimated to Haiti... Next they'll ask us to install a generator and air conditioning."3
<snip>
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/year/year-c09-s01.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
