Dirt For Food

Economic policy is social policy. Treating them separately is a very effective way of giving with one hand and taking with the other, while getting credit for both.

Haiti will never get a break - either from it's original colonial superpower, France, or it's nearest superpower, the United States. Here's why-










30 Years Ago Haiti Grew All the Rice It Needed. What Happened?

The U.S. Role in Haiti's Food Riots

By BILL QUIGLEY

Riots in Haiti over explosive rises in food costs have claimed the lives of six people. There have also been food riots world-wide in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivorie, Egypt, Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

The Economist, which calls the current crisis the silent tsunami, reports that last year wheat prices rose 77% and rice 16%, but since January rice prices have risen 141%. The reasons include rising fuel costs, weather problems, increased demand in China and India, as well as the push to create biofuels from cereal crops.

Hermite Joseph, a mother working in the markets of Port au Prince, told journalist Nick Whalen that her two kids are “like toothpicks” they’ re not getting enough nourishment. Before, if you had a dollar twenty-five cents, you could buy vegetables, some rice, 10 cents of charcoal and a little cooking oil. Right now, a little can of rice alone costs 65 cents, and is not good rice at all. Oil is 25 cents. Charcoal is 25 cents. With a dollar twenty-five, you can’t even make a plate of rice for one child.”

The St. Claire’s Church Food program, in the Tiplas Kazo neighborhood of Port au Prince, serves 1000 free meals a day, almost all to hungry children -- five times a week in partnership with the What If Foundation. Children from Cite Soleil have been known to walk the five miles to the church for a meal. The cost of rice, beans, vegetables, a little meat, spices, cooking oil, propane for the stoves, have gone up dramatically. Because of the rise in the cost of food, the portions are now smaller. But hunger is on the rise and more and more children come for the free meal. Hungry adults used to be allowed to eat the leftovers once all the children were fed, but now there are few leftovers.

The New York Times lectured Haiti on April 18 that “Haiti, its agriculture industry in shambles, needs to better feed itself.”

Unfortunately, the article did not talk at all about one of the main causes of the shortages -- the fact that the U.S. and other international financial bodies destroyed Haitian rice farmers to create a major market for the heavily subsidized rice from U.S. farmers.

This is not the only cause of hunger in Haiti and other poor countries, but it is a major force.

Thirty years ago, Haiti raised nearly all the rice it needed. What happened?

In 1986, after the expulsion of Haitian dictator Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loaned Haiti $24.6 million in desperately needed funds (Baby Doc had raided the treasury on the way out). But, in order to get the IMF loan, Haiti was required to reduce tariff protections for their Haitian rice and other agricultural products and some industries to open up the country’s markets to competition from outside countries. The U.S. has by far the largest voice in decisions of the IMF.

Doctor Paul Farmer was in Haiti then and saw what happened. “Within less than two years, it became impossible for Haitian farmers to compete with what they called ‘Miami rice.’ The whole local rice market in Haiti fell apart as cheap, U.S. subsidized rice, some of it in the form of ‘food aid,’ flooded the market. There was violence, ‘rice wars,’ and lives were lost.”

“American rice invaded the country,” recalled Charles Suffrard, a leading rice grower in Haiti in an interview with the Washington Post in 2000. By 1987 and 1988, there was so much rice coming into the country that many stopped working the land.

Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste, a Haitian priest who has been the pastor at St. Claire and an outspoken human rights advocate, agrees. “In the 1980s, imported rice poured into Haiti, below the cost of what our farmers could produce it. Farmers lost their businesses. People from the countryside started losing their jobs and moving to the cities. After a few years of cheap imported rice, local production went way down.”

Still the international business community was not satisfied. In 1994, as a condition for U.S. assistance in returning to Haiti to resume his elected Presidency, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced by the U.S., the IMF, and the World Bank to open up the markets in Haiti even more.

But, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, what reason could the U.S. have in destroying the rice market of this tiny country?

Haiti is definitely poor. The U.S. Agency for International Development reports the annual per capita income is less than $400. The United Nations reports life expectancy in Haiti is 59, while in the US it is 78. Over 78% of Haitians live on less than $2 a day, more than half live on less than $1 a day.

Yet Haiti has become one of the very top importers of rice from the U.S. The U.S. Department of Agriculture 2008 numbers show Haiti is the third largest importer of US rice - at over 240,000 metric tons of rice. (One metric ton is 2200 pounds).

Rice is a heavily subsidized business in the U.S. Rice subsidies in the U.S. totaled $11 billion from 1995 to 2006. One producer alone, Riceland Foods Inc of Stuttgart Arkansas, received over $500 million dollars in rice subsidies between 1995 and 2006.

The Cato Institute recently reported that rice is one of the most heavily supported commodities in the U.S. -- with three different subsidies together averaging over $1 billion a year since 1998 and projected to average over $700 million a year through 2015. The result? “Tens of millions of rice farmers in poor countries find it hard to lift their families out of poverty because of the lower, more volatile prices caused by the interventionist policies of other countries.”

In addition to three different subsidies for rice farmers in the U.S., there are also direct tariff barriers of 3 to 24 percent, reports Daniel Griswold of the Cato Institute -- the exact same type of protections, though much higher, that the U.S. and the IMF required Haiti to eliminate in the 1980s and 1990s.

U.S. protection for rice farmers goes even further. A 2006 story in the Washington Post found that the federal government has paid at least $1.3 billion in subsidies for rice and other crops since 2000 to individuals who do no farming at all; including $490,000 to a Houston surgeon who owned land near Houston that once grew rice.

And it is not only the Haitian rice farmers who have been hurt.

Paul Farmer saw it happen to the sugar growers as well. “Haiti, once the world's largest exporter of sugar and other tropical produce to Europe, began importing even sugar-- from U.S. controlled sugar production in the Dominican Republic and Florida. It was terrible to see Haitian farmers put out of work. All this sped up the downward spiral that led to this month's food riots.”

After the riots and protests, President Rene Preval of Haiti agreed to reduce the price of rice, which was selling for $51 for a 110 pound bag, to $43 dollars for the next month. No one thinks a one month fix will do anything but delay the severe hunger pains a few weeks.

Haiti is far from alone in this crisis. The Economist reports a billion people worldwide live on $1 a day. The US-backed Voice of America reports about 850 million people were suffering from hunger worldwide before the latest round of price increases.

Thirty three countries are at risk of social upheaval because of rising food prices, World Bank President Robert Zoellick told the Wall Street Journal. When countries have many people who spend half to three-quarters of their daily income on food, “there is no margin of survival.”

In the U.S., people are feeling the world-wide problems at the gas pump and in the grocery. Middle class people may cut back on extra trips or on high price cuts of meat. The number of people on food stamps in the US is at an all-time high. But in poor countries, where malnutrition and hunger were widespread before the rise in prices, there is nothing to cut back on except eating. That leads to hunger riots.

In the short term, the world community is sending bags of rice to Haiti. Venezuela sent 350 tons of food. The US just pledged $200 million extra for worldwide hunger relief. The UN is committed to distributing more food.

Fake News For All

The main staple of every news diet is fast-food, more commonly known as Fake News. Arriving easily, cheaply and frequently, it fills you up without the benefits of real information, facts or context.

For example - here's how Fake News seeps into Local TV broadcasts:











How Local TV Embraced Fake News

Americans' first source in news is overrun by marketing videos.

By Farhad Manjoo

Note: This is an excerpt from my new book, "True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society." (For previous excerpts, see here and here.) The book argues that new communications technologies are loosening the culture's grip on what people once called "objective reality." Here, I look at how fakery has overrun local TV news-

Late in the holiday shopping season of 2005, Robin Raskin began to worry about a hidden danger posed by the world's most popular gadget: Pornography was popping up on the iPod. Raskin, a pert middle-aged woman with short brown hair and a deep, authoritative voice, considered herself an expert on how kids use technology (she'd once written a magazine column called "Internet Mom"). She approached local TV news broadcasts across the country with her iPod worries. They bit.

"There's scores of 'iPorn' everywhere," Raskin warned in an appearance on KGUN, an ABC affiliate in Tucson, Ariz. The iPod had become "a pedophile's playground," she said, and Apple was doing little to stem the smut. On Pittsburgh's Fox affiliate, WPGH Channel 53, Raskin called the iPod one of the "scariest" gifts of the season. The ABC station in Columbus, Ohio, featured Raskin's warnings as part of a report by Kent Justice, a correspondent who produces a regular segment called "On Your Side." Justice told viewers, "If you didn't know it, now prepare for it: Hundreds of Web sites are selling iPorn."

Nine stations aired Raskin's warnings. Her segments had the look and feel of ordinary local news: Super-coifed anchors offer alarmist assessments of everyday objects, story at 11.

But something here was amiss. In addition to panning the iPod, Raskin used her time on TV to push "safer" holiday tech gifts, including products made by Panasonic, Namco and Techno Source. These weren't unbiased reviews. The local stations that featured Raskin were fully aware that the three companies had hired her to pimp their products during news appearances.

I learned of Raskin's ulterior motives from the Center for Media and Democracy, a group based in Madison, Wis., that monitors the public relations industry. Over several years, CMD has investigated an insidious public relations practice that's neither especially new nor uncommon, but is still relatively unknown beyond the cloistered world of television news production. In the trade, they're called VNRs, or video news releases.

A VNR is a short clip of marketing propaganda produced in the language and style of real news. P.R. firms send news stations thousands of such videos every year, the most sophisticated of which are virtually indistinguishable from honest news, featuring interviews with (paid) experts and voice-overs by (fake) reporters who subtly pitch products during their narratives. Surprisingly often, news channels broadcast these videos as real news; many times, CMD has found, the only edits that a station will make to a paid clip is to cut off the disclosure noting that the video was sponsored by a corporation.

VNRs first gained notoriety early in 2005, when the New York Times reported that many local stations aired prepackaged segments produced by federal agencies under the Bush administration. The VNRs cheered the war in Iraq, the Bush Medicare plan and various small-time programs. But Diane Farsetta, a researcher at CMD, says that private VNRs far outnumber federal videos -- and once you start looking for them, they seem to pop up everywhere.

On CMD's Web site, you can watch dozens of local news segments lifted directly from VNRs. The effect would be comical -- four stations ran a piece on how to incorporate Bisquick into your plans for National Pancake Week, to take one example -- if the lying weren't so determined.

A segment may appear to be an in-depth look at the travails of travelers during cold and flu season, but all its experts refer to Zicam nasal spray as a preferred treatment. A consumer-safety piece warns viewers about scam artists who dress up flood-damaged cars and sell them as if they're perfect -- an announcement drenched in irony, considering that the news segment is actually a dressed-up ad for CarFax.com. A Halloween report delves into the origins of the jack-o'-lantern, but the reporter -- who's not actually a reporter but a P.R. man -- ends the story by suggesting holiday recipes from Betty Crocker. All of these pieces made it to news broadcasts near you.

Marketers began creating VNRs in the 1980s, but the practice had a slow start. Producing attractive video was expensive, and VNRs rarely looked slick enough to fit in with a broadcast program. Distribution was also a problem: P.R. firms sent out VNRs by mail on videotape, a system too clumsy for fast-paced newsrooms to work with.

The digital revolution, of course, has changed all that; marketers can now produce and distribute video that looks just as good as anything a TV station can make, and for almost no money.

At the same time, technology has upended how television stations produce news. In many American newsrooms, now, you'll now find computer terminals belonging to a system called Pathfire, which hooks stations into a cloud of video coming in from all over the world -- clips from syndicates such as the Associated Press, from other local stations and from the large broadcast networks.

For producers, Pathfire is a palette from which to create full stories at extremely low cost. Now images of overseas wars, out-of-state disasters, nearby sports victories, freakish weather events, adorable zoo animals and gripping celebrity goings-on are quickly pulled down and cut up into digestible bits of news, with the producer never having to leave the studio. Stations increasingly lean on this third-party footage to pad their broadcasts. According to one study, more than a quarter of the video you see on a typical local newscast isn't at all local, and was collected, instead, from video coming in on the cloud.

But when a producer logs into a system like Pathfire looking for footage for the 11 o'clock broadcast, she doesn't only see videos from legitimate outfits. Such systems also include a smorgasbord of VNRs, which marketers upload into the database daily. P.R. companies don't pay television channels to run the sponsored segments -- that would run afoul of the Federal Communications Commission's "payola" rules -- but the footage is free. For the stations, the offer is sometimes too attractive to refuse.

Although it's subject to tremendous (and, evidently, often justified) ridicule, local TV news has long been -- and remains -- America's first choice for information. Directors of local news stations are uneasy about disclosures that newscasts have routinely aired VNRs; many refused to comment when I asked them about their broadcasts.

The Radio and Television News Directors Association sharply criticized CMD's study, claiming that the findings did not represent typical practices at stations (the group did not respond to my inquiries). Farsetta points out that in surveys, more than 90 percent of news directors have admitted using VNRs -- or parts of VNRs -- in their broadcasts.

Late last year, the FCC began cracking down on the practice, levying fines against Comcast, which owns CN8, a Philadelphia station that has aired VNRs. But CMD, which continues to monitor stations, found that the practice continues.

Robin Raskin, the iPorn-wary tech journalist, told me that between 2002 and 2006, she appeared in almost three dozen TV marketing opportunities -- roughly eight a year, each of which was sponsored by three to five companies and was built around a holiday or news event. Raskin, who no longer does marketing work, says she regrets her decision to promote products on TV. She did it only to make some extra money during a low period in her life, and she says she didn't fully consider how the job would affect her journalistic credibility.

But Raskin adds another line, partly in defense of her actions: Public life is already so commercialized, so suffused with salesmanship, that it seemed nearly naive to recuse herself on mere ethical grounds. Fakery abounds. What's one more on the pile?

"I actually joked with my own colleagues that, 'Hey, I'm off to go do Whore TV," she says. "I was fully aware that that's what it was. And yet it's such a commonplace thing. I mean, there are people hawking drugs, guns, war. The worst that could happen to someone watching my segment is that you might buy a game you don't like."