Martin Wisse

I’m sure I’ve read about this recently in another context, but in Haiti mud cakes have become a staple diet of the poor:

At first sight the business resembles a thriving pottery. In a dusty courtyard women mould clay and water into hundreds of little platters and lay them out to harden under the Caribbean sun.

The craftsmanship is rough and the finished products are uneven. But customers do not object. This is Cité Soleil, Haiti’s most notorious slum, and these platters are not to hold food. They are food.

Brittle and gritty – and as revolting as they sound – these are “mud cakes”. For years they have been consumed by impoverished pregnant women seeking calcium, a risky and medically unproven supplement, but now the cakes have become a staple for entire families.

It is not for the taste and nutrition – smidgins of salt and margarine do not disguise what is essentially dirt, and the Guardian can testify that the aftertaste lingers – but because they are the cheapest and increasingly only way to fill bellies.

“It stops the hunger,” said Marie-Carmelle Baptiste, 35, a producer, eyeing up her stock laid out in rows. She did not embroider their appeal. “You eat them when you have to.”

These days many people have to. The global food and fuel crisis has hit Haiti harder than perhaps any other country, pushing a population mired in extreme poverty towards starvation and revolt. Hunger burns are called “swallowing Clorox”, a brand of bleach.

I’ve been reading a fair few history books this year and I remember reading about this exact same practise, perhaps in Braudel’s The Structures of Everyday Life, but this was in the context of a pre-industrial, agricultural society still tightly bound to the vagracies of nature. It’s impressive how modern capitalism has enabled us to repeat the experiences of the most primitive of societies. Because while The Guardian article might give you the impression that all this is just the unfortunate result of the rise in food and fuel prices worldwide, much of the Haitian crisis is actually due to years and decades of capitalist profitering by the richest 1 percent of Haiti’s population, as they systematically dismantled most of Haiti’s domestic food production in order to have a monopoly on food imports, as explained back in May on Prog Gold.

And of course it has not been just domestic profiteers who’ve caused the crisis. Haiti started its existence as one of France’s most profitable slave colonies, succesfully rebelled against them in 1803 after a long and brutal war, but had to pay its former masters 150 million francs as compensation. Since then it has been a semi-colony of the United States, with American companies working hand in glove with the succession of dictators and their cronies to exploit its natural wealth and people. In recent decades IMF restructuring programmes have worsened the situation even further, by privatising and hence destroying the state sector, opening up the country to the free market and tying its government to strict spending controls. But the democratically elected Aristide government refused to privatise public utilities and actually increased the tacx burden on the wealthiest, which meant that sooner or later it would have to go. Under Clinton Haiti was put under pressure to chose the right government by slashing development aid to the country, under Bush the solution was more simple: a UN sponsored invasion and occupation. See Peter Hallward’s excellent article in The New Left Review for more information.

Haiti is the best example, because it’s the most blatant example, of how capitalism causes starvation and mass deprivation around the globe, usually hidden from view because it’s built into the system, with no clear bad guy to put the blame on. Blood and Treasure, comparing Haiti to China during the Great Leap Forward, put it best:

Slash and burn in the GLF was down to the rural industrialization programme. Hillsides were denuded by people creating charcoal for backyard furnaces, when they should have been, say, growing food. That policy could be traced neatly and accurately back to Mao. Distributed authorship of mass starvation has always been a structural political advantage of capitalism. Who, specifically, was responsible for the Irish or Bengal famines? And how about the IMF? Did it really just “applaud” or did it have a bit less of a spectator’s role in helping destroy Haitian farming?