A full two-thirds of the earthquake casualties in Haiti on January 12, 2010 were directly due to policies that the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), World Bank, and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) put in place to create surplus labor for the country’s sweatshops. The now well-known reductions in the tariffs on agricultural products, flood of subsidized Arkansas rice on the Haitian market, and eradication of the locally adapted creole pig were all components of a well mapped-out plan to impoverish Haitian farmers and force their migration from their villages to the capital city of Port-au-Prince. In this way, about 1.6 million Haitians were added in 30 years to about 800,000 people who were already in the area that would become the earthquake’s epicenter. Since that disaster, there has been a nearly complete eradication of Haitian agriculture and a simultaneous dissipation of the Haitian population to prevent a major famine and popular revolt. This process has required a collaboration of the Latin American member countries of the United Nations’ so-called peacekeeping mission (MINUSTAH) and Haiti’s richest families.
