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« Back to Haiti Country Overview

Food Security

Before Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) were imposed on Haiti in the 1980s, 70 percent of Haitians were peasant farmers. Most of the country's food came from small family plots. In order to qualify for IMF loans in the 1980s, however, Haiti was forced to comply with the usual prescription of SAPs, including slashing tariffs on US-grown rice from 30 percent to just three percent (the lowest tariff in the hemisphere). US agribusinesses soon flooded Haiti with cheap US rice; by the mid-1990s imports of US rice had increased 27-fold, bankrupting peasant farmers throughout the countryside. Malnutrition rates skyrocketed, causing an alarming rise in preventable deaths among children.

Today, Haiti is forced to import half of all its food—the highest percentage in the hemisphere. Haitian women report price increases upwards of 100 percent on the imported food they are forced to buy.

Haiti's 'food dependency,' also the hemisphere's worst, holds the government captive to further IMF demands, like the 1990s injunction against raising the minimum wage. A key ingredient of the neo-liberal recipe, 'wage repression' was a disaster for Haitians and a boon to the many US-based assembly plants that set up shop in Port-au-Prince. Disney, Nike, and other corporations continue to take advantage of a huge reserve of workers, including the tens of thousands of women who were driven off their land by US agribusiness and left with little choice but to accept jobs with US companies for rock-bottom wages under miserable conditions. Many women have been pushed into even less desirable, sometimes dangerous jobs in the informal sector (the part of the economy not counted in government statistics), such as working as maids or prostitutes.