Peasants and Poverty (Routledge Revivals)

A Study of Haiti

Mats Lundahl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317593904
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economía
• Subtopic: Economía del desarrollo

Haiti is a country which, until the earthquake of 2010, remained largely outside the focus of world interest and outside the important international historical currents during its existence as a free nation. The nineteenth century was the decisive period in Haitian history, serving to shape the class structure, the political tradition and the economic system. During most of this period, Haiti had little contact with both its immediate neighbours and the industrialised nations of the world, which led to the development of Haiti as a peasant nation. This title, first published in 1979, examines the factors responsible for the poverty of the Haitian peasant, by using both traditional economic models as well as a multidisciplinary approach incorporating economics and other branches of social science. The analysis deals primarily with the Haitian peasant economy from the early 1950s to the early 1970s, examining in depth the explanations for the secular tendency of rural per capita incomes to decline during this period.

1 INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY

Haiti is a country which with few exceptions has remained outside the focus of world interest and outside the important international historical currents during its entire existence as a free nation. At best, Haiti has been a ‘pawn’ in the game of international politics. Often, it has been an ‘outcast’.¹ The decisive period in Haitian history, the period when the Haitian institutions, the class structure, the political tradition and the economic system were shaped, was the nineteenth century. During most of this period, the country was isolated, left to itself. Haitian society developed without much contact with the industrialized or industrializing nations of the world, and indeed, without much contact with its immediate neighbors. In the course of less than a century of relative isolation, Haiti became a peasant nation.

Basically, it remains so today. During the 1950s and 1960s, agriculture accounted for approximately one-half of the gross domestic product. This figure fell during the first half of the 1970s, but still, the share of the agricultural sector exceeds 40 percent.² At the beginning of the 1950s, 95 percent of the value of Haiti’s exports derived from agricultural products. Subsequently, as other exports increased (bauxite, copper, essential oils,* light manufactures) the percentage of agriculture declined, but 45 percent in the mid-1970s still represents an important share.³

Most of the agricultural production comes from small peasant farms. Around 80 percent of the Haitian population lived in rural areas in 1971, and the same year, according to official statistics, almost 75 percent of the labor force were occupied in the agricultural sector.⁴ The importance of the peasants to the national economy is high. However, the peasants only derive a meager living out of their cultures. The per capita income in the agricultural sector in 1971 only amounted to US $63.5 according to official statistics.⁵ The exact figure is impossible to determine, but for the great majority of peasants, real incomes probably lie well under US $100.⁶

The present work analyzes the Haitian peasant economy and its problems, mainly from the early 1950s to the early 1970s, but often the time perspective has been extended backwards, since a full comprehension of today’s problems requires thorough acquaintance with events that took place during the nineteenth century and in certain instances during the colonial period.

The book deals with the secular tendency of rural per capita incomes to decline and offers a number of explanations as to the causes of this decline. The core of the argument is advanced in economic terms. We have attempted in the main to rely on traditional economic analysis. However, it is not possible to understand Haiti’s plight fully without venturing outside the scope of economics proper. Account must be taken of a number of political and social factors as well. Therefore, when the need has arisen, additional considerations have been introduced. Hence, much of the book is interdisciplinary in character.

Methodologically, our work relies almost exclusively on written sources – published and unpublished. No major or minor field study to gather primary material has been undertaken. The reason lies in the state of economic research on Haitian agriculture. Contrary to what may be thought, the material on Haiti is abundant.⁷ The main problem is that it is not systematized. On the one hand, the concentration of most students of Haitian life has not been on the economy. ‘For each anthropological paper on peasant economy, for instance, there must be at least a hundred on voudoun, folklore, music, and dance,’ writes Sidney W. Mintz.⁸ On the other hand, it is not possible rigorously to separate the material on for example folklore from the material dealing with economic questions. Hence, anybody looking for material regarding the economy must be prepared to read a huge amount of sociological, anthropological, cultural and political material as well, to find the necessary facts. The economic data, especially for earlier periods, are often scattered in a wide variety of sources. Frequently, important information is to be found where a priori one would not expect to find it. To systematize and synthesize this written material is a major task in itself, and this task has to be undertaken before field studies to gather supplementary material to confirm or refute the hypotheses emanating from the study of the written sources can be successfully attempted.

The present work represents an effort to create what I hope amounts to a coherent picture of the peasant economy out of some of the available written material. Few major monographs dealing with the peasant sector are available, and none has been published where systematic use has been made of principles of economic theory in the interpretation of the empirical material. The contribution of the present work, if any, lies precisely here – in the interpretation of existing data in the light of the findings of economic theory to understand the causes of stagnation and retrogression in the Haitian peasant sector. Ideally, this study should point to a number of areas where fruitful empirical research may be undertaken to fill the gaps of our knowledge of the peasant economy. The book is intended as a starting point rather than as a summary.

Peasants and Peasant Economies

The subject matter of our study is the Haitian peasant in his capacity as an economic agent and the stagnation of the Haitian peasant economy. What then constitutes a peasant, or what is a peasant economy? Sometimes it has been claimed that peasants and peasant economies are specific economic or historical categories which must be analyzed with the aid of a conceptual and theoretical apparatus which differs from the one to be applied, for example, to the study of farmers in industrialized nations.⁹ Without going to these methodological extremes it may still be useful to list some of the most commonly adduced economic characteristics of peasants and hence also of peasant economies. The characteristics should be read, and this must be emphasized, keeping in mind that it is not possible to draw up any clear limits between peasants and other similar groups. As always in the social sciences, it is difficult to make a rigorous separation of categories. The borderlines between peasants, tenants, farmers, etc. are often floating in practice.

The first requirement is that a peasant must be an agriculturalist.¹⁰ He must derive his main subsistence and his main cash income from crop-raising. This does not exclude supplementary activities such as livestock-raising, hunting, gathering, fishing, trading, processing or handicrafts, but the bulk of the income of a peasant family must come from crop production. Whatever other incomes the family has must be secondary to that deriving from agriculture.

The requirement that a peasant must be an agriculturalist excludes certain groups who do not rely on cultivation of crops for their main living. Raymond Firth has suggested that the concept of peasant can be extended to encompass groups like fishermen or rural craftsmen as well as agriculturalists because of similarities in other respects than their main occupation.¹¹ Most definitions of peasants and peasant economies, however, exclude these groups, for example ‘because the economic and cultural implications. . .are sufficiently different from those of agriculture to warrant separate treatment’.¹²

The second characteristic of a peasant is that he somehow controls the land which he is cultivating.¹³ The peasant does not have to pay dues to outside landowners who supply him with land. This feature distinguishes peasants from tenants or sharecroppers whose access to land is controlled by others and who have to pay rents in cash or in kind to these groups. Peasant control of land does not exclude part-time tenancy or sharecropping. As in the case of occupation, we only require that the main portion of the land they cultivate should not be subject to control by outside groups.

Thirdly, production in a peasant economy is carried out with the aid of simple capital equipment only.¹⁴ Sophisticated machinery is ruled out but not simple plows, animal traction, etc. Often, however, hand-tools constitute the most typical capital inputs.

The fourth characteristic of peasants and peasant economies is that the predominant unit of production is the small family farm.¹⁵ Typically, peasant societies contain mostly minifundia holdings, exclusively or side by side with larger units. A common pattern, for example in Latin America, is that family farms and large plantations or latifundia can be found together. The second part of the requirement is that these farms should be cultivated mainly with the aid of family labor. Outside labor, in the form of wage labor, collective work teams or otherwise may complement the picture, but the owner family provides most of the labor input required. The size and the family labor requirement distinguish the peasant farm from commercial farms, plantations, latifundia, collective farms, etc.

Peasant production aims mainly at consumption, not so much at reinvestment and expansion of activities.¹⁶ This establishes the dividing line between peasants and farmers. The latter regard agriculture as a business enterprise which in principle does not differ from any other type of business in, for example, the manufacturing sector. The net income obtained by a farmer goes partly to consumption of goods and services but is used to cover amortization as well and perhaps also to expand the scope of the business enterprise. Not so with the peasant. The latter’s basic aim is to provide his family with goods and services to be consumed either for the purpose of subsistence or to enhance the peasant’s social status in the community, while investment considerations usually play a very minor role, if any at all.

A word of caution is in order here. The peasant must not be thought of in terms of a more or less pure subsistence economy where only a minuscule fraction of the goods produced enters the market. Some peasants mainly cultivate to fulfill subsistence requirements. Others are heavily involved in the market economy. The peasants cannot produce everything t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Tables
• Preface
• Map of Haiti
• 1. Introduction and Summary
• 2. The Peasant Economy
• 3. The Cumulative Process: Falling Rural Incomes
• 4. Poverty and the Market
• 5. Erosion
• 6. Land Reform
• 7. The Passive Government
• 8. Haitian Public Finance
• 9. Malnutrition and Disease
• 10. The Role of Education
• 11. Problems of Rural Credit
• 12. Resistance to Innovation
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index