A Day in the Life of Cite Soleil

CITE SOLEIL, HAITI — "This kind of living is fit for animals!," Fifine Mattieu roared as she swatted flies from her leathery skin. We were in Cite Soleil, the "city of the sun" — the largest slum in Haiti. Fifine was wearing a white tank top and black jean shorts, her hair brushed back in a Mohawk style. She lives in the slum with three of her kids; two more were picked up by adoption agencies when it was deemed they were not eating enough.

Like many in Haiti, Fifine couldn't afford to feed her entire family after the exponential rise in food price. Between January and April, the cost of a cup of rice increased from 13 gourdes to 40 gourdes (in US currency, from 37 cents to $1.14). In a country already entrenched in poverty, with over 80 percent of Haitians earning less than $2 a day, the price hike meant that many Haitians had to go without rice.

At one point in April, Haitians were so hungry that new expressions sprung into colloquial usage. "Battery acid insides" and "Clorox stomach" are now the common ways to describe the corrosive hunger felt by so many. Haitians even started eating mud. The AP broke a story that said that Haitians were eating "dirt cakes," made from mixing dirt and water with vegetable shortening and baking in the sun. A block down from Finfine's shack I came across a teenage girl selling these.

Hunger brings anger, and in Haiti, in April, hunger and anger combined in a vicious cocktail that left the country paralyzed. When I arrived two months later, people were still hungry. Fifine had to give up two of her kids; Haiti had to give up its prime minister.

Fifine's street was lively that blazing hot afternoon. Packs of malnourished toddlers, most of them naked and barefoot, ran around while playing with a dirty truck tire. Mangy dogs covered in a cloud of flies slept in the shade. Fifine's comments about living like animals resonated as I walked around the back of her corrugated iron house. There, just steps from her front door and past trails of human excrement, was a vast cesspool. Plastic bags, bottles and other garbage lined the shores. On the left edge stood a giant hog, feeding away.

The largest slum in the Western hemisphere, Cite Soleil sits on the northern edge of Port-Au-Prince. To get there, you have to drive down two long, desolate roads — a no-man's land occupied only by smoke-emitting towers and gated factories. "You can tell you're approaching Cite Soleil with your eyes closed," one of the Brazilian UN peacekeepers told me while we headed in on a Friday morning. He held his nose as the stench of burning trash and feces and factory refuse filled the air.

How did Fifine end up here?

Her path is a well trodden one. She was born in the countryside and grew up on a farm. In the early 1990s, like hundreds of thousands of her compatriots, she migrated to the capital, Port Au Prince. Like the rest of them, she was nudged off her farm by reduced agriculture subsidies and promises of steady work in the capital.

It's a oft-told story, but twenty years ago, the IMF and the World Bank laid the plans that would not only essentially demolish the agricultural industry in Haiti, but also make the country perpetually dependent on American food. This created a permanent, nearby market for US agriculture and made Haiti an indentured servant to the Western financial institutions.

Here's how it happened: up to the mid-1980s, Haiti grew nearly all it ate. Imports were minimal, and small peasant farmers could provide all the country needed. The staple starches were corn, tubers, yams and other roots — not rice. Back then, Haitians only ate rice once a week. "Rice was a Sunday treat," Fifine told me.

Then, in 1986, prodded by the IMF and the World Bank, Haiti dropped import tariffs from 30 percent to less than 3 percent. Today they sit at about 2.5 percent. Almost all Haitians I interviewed blamed this disastrous decision as the root cause of Haiti's current catastrophe.

So why did Haiti abruptly change its policy? First, the two organizations bought Haiti's acceptance by offering vast loans (Haiti is still struggling to pay them back today). Second, the deal was part of a grandiose proposal meant to form the country into manufacturing-based economy. The IMF and the World Bank made this same mistake in many other poor countries, and today the two organizations admit the reckless policies contributed to today's global food crisis.

The drastic move from protectionism to an open market was welcomed at first. Cheap US rice flooded the market, driving down locally produced crops. As Fifine said, "food was so cheap right after the 1986 decision — rice was everywhere." But the explosion of American rice was a short-lived gain and a harbinger of future disaster.

Small Haitian farms were the hardest hit. Prices plunged with the deluge of cheap imported food, making it impossible for small Haitian farmers to compete with factory farms in Florida. The local agriculture industry collapsed. Many farmers, like Fifine, left their land and moved to Port Au Prince.

Today, Haiti's land is egregiously underutilized. It has the land to grow 200,000 metric tons of rice a year, but current production is at a dismal 90,000. Once self-sustaining, the country now produces less than half of what it eats.

The drying up of farming was accompanied by an enormous shift in eating habits. Using a strange kind of Pavlovian economic conditioning — bizarrely analogous to how American ranchers changed the diet of US cattle from grass to corn — Haiti was led to change its diet to US-produced rice. What 20 years ago was a weekly meal has become a daily necessity. Ask any Haitian today and they'll tell you a meal in Haiti isn't a meal without rice.

Fifine's tragic move from working on a small farm to struggling to feed her family in Cite Soleil encapsulates the arc of Haiti's food crisis. But in this beleaguered country, hunger is not only a perennial problem; it is also just one among a web of interconnected, never-ending maladies. Kidnappings happen daily. There is still no prime minister. Trash appears organically. Traffic is preternaturally horrid. People are hungry. And on and on.

From the air, Haiti is a beautiful country. Port-Au-Prince sits at the middle of a vast bay of the same name, surrounded by lush green mountains. Narrow lanes snake around the hills, past barber shops and colorful lottery stands. Hundreds of shanties cut into the sides of the surrounding hills. About two-thirds of the country is mountainous. Haiti's mountains inspired a local saying that's an apt way to put the problems the country has faced. Deye mon, gen mon — "behind the mountains, there are more mountains."