Kicking Away the Ladder in Haiti

By Joe Emersberger
Source: teleSUR English
February 21, 2015

An overtly bigoted writer was recently given space in the New York Times op-ed pages to advocate his version of what the U.S. government has been imposing on Haitians for several decades – basically a sweatshop model of development.

Haitians are told to use extremely low wages to attract foreign investors to make as many products for export as they can. It has been done already and anybody who is interested can check the results. By 1985, under the U.S.-backed dictator Jean Claude Duvalier, Haiti became the ninth largest assembler of goods for the U.S. market. [1] Figure 1 shows that Haiti’s real GDP per capita declined throughout the 1980s. The golden age of the Haitian sweatshop model was a miserable failure – at least for the vast majority of Haitians. [2]

In addition to U.S.-led coups and economic sanctions, the destruction of local agriculture (points 1,2 and 5) is a huge part of the story of Haiti’s economic disaster since 1980. In 1980, 79 percent of Haitians lived in rural areas. About 43 percent still do today. Ruined farmers poured into the cities and exerted downward pressure on wages. The mass exodus also created huge urban shantytowns where people are vulnerable to earthquakes and floods.

Anyone interested in economic development should study Ha-Joon Chang’s concise and very readable “Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective.” Chang shows that when the USA was a developing country during the 19th century it used tariffs that averaged 40 percent to protect against rivals who were only 30 percent more productive. U.S. agriculture must be at least ten times (or 900 percent) more productive than Haiti’s which exposes the malevolence of forcing Haiti’s tariffs down from triple digit levels in the 1980s to single digit levels by the 1990s.[4] The World Bank doesn’t list agricultural productivity values for Haiti but does for neighboring states that are not as poor as Haiti. See Table 3 below.