CAP HAITIEN, Mar 7 (IPS) – Haiti’s new government is being forced to balance the contending needs of peasants demanding state support and collective farms — and the insistence of international financial agencies on free market economic reforms.

President Rene Preval, an agricultural expert, regards food production as a top political and economic priority, a fact underlined by the appointment last month of agronomist Rosny Smarth as prime minister.

But the atmosphere of heightened expections among peasant groups as Smarth’s government officially took office Wednesday, was stifled somewhat by realisation that its policy preference was not in line with the model of export-led growth being imposed by donor agencies.

As part of a World Bank-sponsored Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) many import tariffs have been slashed in the last year, and lending agencies are demanding yet more reforms in return for 130 million dollars in grants and loans.

This contrasts with the desire of peasants for land distribution, improved irrigation systems, and state intervention to protect local production from cheaper foreign food imports.

Haiti’s economy is still largely rural-based. Peasants represent 80 percent of the population. They form the core of political support for the ruling Lavalas coalition.

But like elsewhere in Haiti, agricultural production has been declining here on the northern plain surrounding the second city, Cap-Haitien.

‘’You can see we don’t have anything here. We voted for Preval so that he would help us peasants,’’ said Lucien Orelus, the secretary of the Peasant Organisation for the Development of Limonade (OPDL), a village 10 miles south of Cap-Haitien.

Distribution of farm land is a key issue for the peasants of Limonade and the nearby village of Milot. Much of the area comprises state-owned land, leased to absentee landlords and farmed by share-cropping peasants.

According to Ronel Charles, a leader of the Milot Peasant Organisation (OPM), this system urgently needs reforming if the peasants are to see any improvement in their living standards.

‘’Small plots cannot support the population. Our vision is collective farms, peasants working together on large plots to benefit all of us,’’ he said.

But he criticised the practice of land seizures – a tactic used by some peasant organisations in the area. ‘’The peasants need land but it should not be done in an illegal, anarchic way. What we say is that the government should hear and then respond to our demands,’’ he said.

The National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INARA), provided for in the 1987 Constitution, was finally created in June 1995. OPM leaders hope the body will be activated, though it has only two employees thus far.

One of the largest peasant organisations in the northern department is based in the countryside surrounding the town of Acul du Nord. The Peasant Movement of Acul (MPA), formed in 1988, now claims nearly 4,000 members organised in small groups of between 12 and 15 peasants.

During 1991-1994, when a a military regime ruled the country and the elected President (Jean Bertrand Aristide) was exiled, the MPA suffered severe repression at the hands of the Haitian military and local section chiefs. One of the MPA co-ordinators, Joseph Ducatel, said during those years he and 20 other leaders had to hide in the mountains.

Following the U.S.-led intervention of Sep. 1994 the Haitian military structure in the north collapsed, and Ducatel points to the subsequent abolition of the military as the most important action carried out by Aristide after his return.

‘’We can meet openly now without having the worry about getting beaten, arrested or killed,’’ he says.

But Ducatel expressed his concerns about the new U.S.-trained Haitian National Police formed to replace the military.

‘’There has been some infiltration by attaches (paramilitary assistants to the former military regime). Recruits have been badly chosen, and our experience is that the force is incapable of doing its job properly,’’ he added.

Leaders of the MPA explained that the main focus of their work was political education and the training of more local organisers.

Through the organisation’s link with the older and more established Peasant Movement of Papaye (MPP), based in the Central Plateau region, the MPA has secured funding from a Belgian non- government organisation (NGO), Protos, to begin the construction of a meeting and training centre in the hamlet of Camp Louise.

One of the main crops grown in the Acul area is rice. Farming methods here have changed little over centuries. Peasants work the rice fields with only the most rudimentary tools.

Antoine St. Fleur, secretary of Peasant Movement of Acul, outlined the difficulties created by the lack of any mechanised equipment and the poor state of irrigation canals. But he pointed to more serious problems.

‘’Without storage facilities for the rice we have to sell right after the harvest when the market price is low,’’ St. Fleur said.

‘’And then there is the threat to our production in the form of rice imported from the United States. Miami rice is undercutting us,’’ he said. (END/IPS/CA/DC/fn/96)

Origin: Amsterdam/HAITI-AGRICULTURE/ ----

[c] 1996, InterPress Third World News Agency (IPS) All rights reserved

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