International Food Crisis and Haiti

Floor Speech

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Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Thank you so much, Congresswoman Clarke, for convening us tonight for this Special Order dealing with our close friend and a great friend of the United States, and that's our neighbor Haiti.

I first went to Haiti in January of 2003. And I went with the RFK Foundation, Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Foundation, and Ethel Kennedy was on that trip, to give an award to Partners in Health Clinic on the Central Plateau of Haiti. It's actually the one that was featured recently on ``60 Minutes'' where you saw Dr. David Walton, who actually comes from my district; Dr. Paul Farmer; Loune Viaud, who is the director of that clinic, serving people on the very poor Central Plateau of Haiti. And I have to tell you I think it was Representative Green who said his first trip he was thunderstruck. That's a good word for it. You get on the plane in Miami and you start reading the newspaper, and before you've even finished reading it, you're landing in the poorest country in our hemisphere.

But let's be clear. This is a country with beautiful and brave and hard-working people. This is a country where some of our colleagues of a certain age may have even gone for their honeymoon. This is a tropical island in the Caribbean with so much potential and such beautiful people and such incredible poverty.

I went again to Haiti in 2006 with Wyclef Jean, a son of Haiti and a musical artist who has created a foundation called Yele Haiti, who's hard at work right now in providing food for the people of Haiti.

So we can talk about the crisis first. There is a horrible hunger crisis in Haiti. They started out poor. They started out malnourished when these food prices went up so high. And in fact, the average daily requirement for calories is about 2,100 calories per day. In Haiti it's 460 calories below that as the average. So you know some people are eating more than their 2,100 and lots of people are eating less.

I implore parents who may be listening to us tonight to think about what kind of desperation it might take to feed your child to quench the hunger in their belly a mud cake, a mud cake, a cake literally made out of mud with a little flour in it, because you can't stand to leave that tiny stomach hungry. It's just more than one can even bear to think how one gets to that point.

And so the high price of food and the hunger crisis has begun riots in Haiti. There have been some political ramifications, and the United States has to some important extent responded. We're sending money. We're sending food. And all of this is really, really important.

But the other thing I found out in Haiti is that it's not just oh, poor, Haiti, we need to do more. The fact of the matter is, and I am embarrassed to say, is that the United States of America has had its heel on the neck of the country of Haiti and has actually been part of the problem that we are facing today.

Over the past 7 years, the Bush administration has absolutely turned a blind eye and has, in fact, actively stopped the Inter-American Development Bank from releasing loans to Haiti for projects on water and health and education and rural roads, the kinds of things that would actually make Haiti self-sustainable. Through the U.S. Treasury, the Bush administration officials, and this is all about ideology and politics, have repeatedly held back vital loans for Haiti in an attempt to force political change in Haiti, actions in direct violation of the Inter-American Development Bank charter, IDB.

In e-mails released in response to a Freedom of Information request, Treasury Department employees repeatedly discuss how to ``slow'' the release of loans to Haiti. In a Treasury Department e-mail in 2001, this employee stated that the loans would be released based on ``our assessment of progress on reaching a comprehensive political settlement.'' That is, a settlement to the liking of the United States of America.

In another shocking e-mail, a Treasury lawyer reveals just how deliberately they were working to stop the loans from being released to Haiti, despite the great need. Bruce Juba, Special Counsel, wrote: ``While this is not a 'bullet-proof' way to stop IDB disbursements, it certainly will put a few more large rocks in the road.''

It is astounding and unacceptable that the entire time that the Bush administration has talked about helping poor Haiti, they have been working behind the scenes to put ``rocks in the road'' to Haiti's development. By 2002 the Bush administration's plan to block the loans to Haiti by slowing them down has succeeded. Haiti fell into arrears long enough to trigger an Inter-American Development Bank policy that prevents the bank from releasing the loans when arrears have accumulated for too long. Success.

Instead of receiving the vital loans for public projects, loans that could have helped bring thousands out of poverty, reduced water-borne diseases, and aided in long-term development, the Bush administration successfully cut off Haiti's IDB funding in an effort to push Aristide out of power.

The United States has been directly involved in Haiti's food crisis in another way. The U.S. has forced Haiti to open its market to our subsidized crops, decimating the ability of Haitian farmers to compete. Thirty years ago Haiti raised nearly all of the rice it needed. It was exporting sugar. But because of U.S. intervention, Haiti is now reliant on food imports for survival. The International Monetary Fund forced Haiti to open its market to U.S. rice first in 1986 as a condition for loans, making it impossible for Haitian farmers to compete with subsidized U.S. rice. Then 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.

So, look, if we want to do more than put a temporary Band-Aid on the developing food crisis in Haiti, we're going to have to do more than allocate money for emergency food relief. We're going to need to recognize how forcing poor countries to open their markets to our heavily subsidized crops cripples their ability to sustain themselves.

As President Lula of Brazil said when he was visiting Haiti recently, ``Rich countries need to reduce farm subsidies and trade barriers to allow poor countries to generate income with food exports. Either the world solves the unfair trade system or every time there's unrest in Haiti, we adopt emergency measures and send a little bit of food to temporarily ease hunger.''

You talked about the level of unemployment in Haiti. Well, a number of these people are rural people who are at least sustaining themselves. Even if they weren't exporting food, the country was able to provide the rice and the beans that it needed to sustain itself.

So we need to have a sane and rational policy when it comes to Haiti, a policy of friendship to this country in our hemisphere, not a policy that cripples Haiti's ability to actually flourish. We have a huge responsibility here for the hunger that's going on here now, and we should understand that and not just feel so good about our ourselves when we send food aid to Haiti, which, of course, we should do and we should do even more of.

So I appreciate the opportunity to join you tonight, Congresswoman Clarke. I appreciate your leadership as a new Member of Congress. I so welcome your leadership on this issue and just want to offer my support in absolutely any way that I can so that we can be a good neighbor to Haiti and to the rest of the developing world.

Thank you for allowing me to speak tonight.

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