Free Trade Reaches Haiti, Destroys Lives

[AntiLempa]

I apologize for the formatting, but this is how it appears on the website. The original might be easier to read. It can be found at http://www.haitireborn.org/news/haitireport/

Free Trade Zone in Northwest Haiti moves Forward, Trade Agreements Considered:
Farmer Jean Eugene gazes wistfully through the tall wire fence that has been built across his farmland, shaking his head as he reflects on the bad fortune it represents for his family. Just weeks ago, his fields were rich with corn and vegetables – treasured assets in Haiti. But then the bulldozers arrived. Eugene's crops were ripped from the soil by government contractors and he has been barred from his own land to make way for the construction of an industrial free trade zone (FTZ) that will house cheap labor factories producing clothes for leading brands like Levi's, GAP, Tommy Hilfiger and Hugo Boss. "This is a crime against humanity," says Eugene, 43, whose elderly father was chased away by Haitian police when he tried to access the plot to pick ripened mangoes from a tree. "While these big companies are getting rich, we will be struggling to even feed ourselves. Planting crops is how we survive here – our life comes from the earth. We cannot eat rocks and cement, we need plantains and corn." The Maribahoux Plain is one of the country's most fertile agricultural regions. Located on Haiti's border with the Dominican Republic, it has a production capacity of more than 30,500 tons of food per year, enough to feed half a million people. But under a scheme jointly approved by the two countries' governments and funded by the World Bank, 54 peasant farmers including Eugene have been evicted to free up land for the first phase of the FTZ. Ultimately there will be around 40 factories along the 360 km border, creating a 500,000 square meter trading park from which goods will be exported free of taxes and tariffs. The first phase involves building a 150,000 square meter worksite for Grupo M, a Dominican Republic textile company that will lease the land from the Haitian government for 25 years. It supplies some of the world's top clothing outlets, boasting: "We dress the world, stitch by stitch." Grupo M and the World Bank say the first phase will generate up to 4,500 jobs for Haitians, while the entire project could provide more than ten times that number. The firm will provide workers with housing, a training unit, a day care center and a clinic. "There has been a lot of discussion about the social and environmental aspects and we have offered to move farmers to new land. We are very sensitive to the issues," said a spokeswoman at the company's headquarters in Santiago, DR. But Eugene claims the bulldozer teams that seized his fields in March came unannounced and there has been no offer of new land. Whereas he could previously expect annual crop profits of 70,000 Haitian gourdes, he says the government has offered around a third of that sum as total compensation. "I don't want the money," he said defiantly. "My land is not for sale." Gaston Etienne, coordinator of the Komite Defens Pitobert, a farmers' advocacy group, said: "you will be buying your fashion items while we are earning a pittance making them." For each of the 54 farmers that lost their land, up to 50 farmworkers – many of them elderly – have also lost their livelihoods, but only those under the age of 35 will be offered factory jobs. It is not yet known how many others will lose land in the next phases of development. In addition, critics condemn the factories as "sweatshops," farmworkers who have been offered jobs there report their wages will be just 10% of what they used to earn. Leading Haitian economist Camille Chalmers, citing the example set by FTZ sweatshops established in Haiti in the 1960s under former president Jean Claude Duvalier, predicts a swift "ghetto-isation" of the Maribahoux area as cheap housing springs up and thousands pour in searching for work. "The job creation rhetoric is propaganda," said Chalmers, founder of PAPDA, the Haitian Platform to Advocate for an Alternative Development. "They talk about jobs being created, not the jobs that are being lost. There will be a real human cost. They should work with farmers to increase agricultural productivity and feed Haiti's people, rather than destroying the country's bread basket to benefit foreign investors." (The Sunday Times, 7/6)