The barefoot farmer oversees three teenage workers as they attack weeds with spades in a sunbaked field of peanut plants, a vital cash crop often grown on Haiti’s marginal farmland.
If he’s lucky, Francois Merilus will reap a meager harvest amid a lengthy drought that has shriveled yields and worsened Haiti’s chronic hunger. Now the subsistence farmer is dismayed by what he believes could be the latest challenge to his ability to eke out a living: free peanuts arriving from the US as humanitarian aid.
“Foreign peanuts can only make things harder for us,” said Merilus, whose organic farm in central Haiti is plowed by oxen and maintained without pesticides or chemical fertilizers only because he could never dream of affording them.
A recently announced plan to ship 500 metric tons of surplus American peanuts to help feed 140,000 malnourished schoolchildren in Haiti has set off a fierce debate over whether such food aid is a humanitarian necessity or a counterproductive gesture.
Critics say agricultural surplus aid and heavily subsidized food imports do more harm than good by undercutting local farmers and pushing the hemisphere’s poorest nation farther from self-sufficiency.
“This program does nothing to boost capacity in Haiti and does nothing to address consistent food insecurity,” said Oxfam America senior researcher Marc Cohen.
While an online petition is circulating calling for President Barack Obama’s administration to stop surplus “dumping” on Haiti, the US government and the UN food agency are defending the aid program, which they say represents only 1.4 percent of Haiti’s average annual peanut production.
They say critics don’t take into account how dismal Haitian harvests have been and how badly struggling children need more nutrition. As many as 30 percent of Haitian youngsters suffer from chronic malnutrition, and the cumulative impact of a three-year drought is so severe that Haiti is facing “unprecedented food insecurity,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says.
“If this donation arrives in Haiti, it is doubtful it will make any difference to the economy, but for sure it will make a difference in improving the diets of the most vulnerable children attending schools,” said Alejandro Chicheri, a UN World Food Program spokesman.
The humanitarian program calls for packaged, dry-roasted peanuts from a vast US stockpile to be distributed as morning snacks to youngsters in rural schools. Over 600 schools are already receiving daily hot meals with donated US bulgur wheat, green peas and vegetable oil.
To prevent leakage into the Haitian marketplace, the US is designing a monitoring program with the UN food agency to ensure the peanuts go only to the targeted children, said Matt Herrick, communications director with the US Agriculture Department.
Herrick said the argument that the US should simply source Haitian peanuts doesn’t take into consideration the fact that the local supply has a high incidence of aflatoxin, a carcinogenic fungus that grows on moldy peanuts. While the USDA is funding research into the use of local peanuts in emergency rations and school feeding programs.
Source: Arab News