INTRODUCTION 9

Our planet is entering the new century withfully 1.3 billion people living on less than

one dollar a day. Three billion people, or half thepopulation of the world, live on less than twodollars a day. Yet this same planet is experienc-ing unprecedented economic growth. The statis-tics that describe the accumulation of wealth inthe world are mind-boggling. From where wesit, the most staggering statistics of all are thosethat reflect the polarization of this wealth. In1960 the richest 20% of the world’s populationhad 70% of the world’s wealth, today they have86% of the wealth. In 1960 the poorest 20% of theworld’s population had just 2.3% of the wealthof the world. Today this has shrunk to just bare-ly 1%.

Imagine that the five fingers of your hand rep-resent the world’s population. The hand has$100 to share. Today the thumb, representing therichest 20% of the world’s population, has $86for itself. The little finger has just $1. The thumbis accumulating wealth with breathtaking speed

and never looking back. The little finger is sink-ing deeper into economic misery. The distancebetween them grows larger every day.

Behind the crisis of dollars there is a humancrisis: among the poor, immeasurable humansuffering; among the others, the powerful, thepolicymakers, a poverty of spirit which hasmade a religion of the market and its invisiblehand. A crisis of imagination so profound that theonly measure of value isprofit, the only measureof human progress iseconomic growth.

We have not reachedthe consensus that to eatis a basic human right.This is an ethical crisis.This is a crisis of faith.

Global capitalismbecomes a machinedevouring our planet.The little finger, the men

Globalization: A View from BelowBY JEAN-BERTRAND ARISTIDE

In 1960 the poorest 20% of theworld’s populationhad just 2.3% ofthe wealth of theworld. Today thishas shrunk to justbarely 1%.

A busy street in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

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and women of the poorest 20%, are reduced tocogs in this machine, the bottom rung in globalproduction, valued only as cheap labor, other-wise altogether disposable. The machine cannotand does not measure their suffering. Themachine also does not measure the suffering ofour planet. Every second an area the size of asoccer field is deforested. This fact alone shouldbe mobilizing men and women to protect theirmost basic interest — oxygen. But the machineoverwhelms us. The distance between thethumb and the little finger stretches to thebreaking point.

GLOBALIZATION: A CHOICEBETWEEN DEATH AND DEATH

A morgue worker is preparing to dispose of a dozencorpses. One living soul lifts himself off of the table,shakes his head and declares, “I am not dead!” Towhich the morgue worker answers, “Yes you are. Thedoctors say that you are dead, so lie down.”

In today’s global marketplace trillions of dol-lars are traded each day via a vast network of

computers. In this market no one talks, no onetouches. Only numbers count.

And yet today this faceless economy is alreadyfive times larger than the real, or productive,economy.

We know other marketplaces. On a plain highin the mountains of Haiti, one day a week thou-sands of people still gather. This is the market-place of my childhood in the mountains abovePort Salut. The sights and the smells and thenoise and the color overwhelm you. Everyonecomes. If you don’t come you will miss every-thing. The donkeys tied and waiting in thewoods number in the thousands. Goods are dis-played in every direction: onions, leeks, corn,beans, yams, cabbage, cassava, and avocados,mangoes and every tropical fruit, chickens, pigs,goats, and batteries, and tennis shoes, too.People trade goods and news. This is the center;social, political, and economic life roll together.A woman teases and coaxes her client: “Cherie,the onions are sweet and waiting just for you.”The client laughs and teases back until theymake a deal. They share trade, and laughter, gos-sip, politics, and medical and child-rearing tips.A market exchange, and a human exchange.

We are not against trade, we are not againstfree trade, but our fear is that the global marketintends to annihilate our markets. We will bepushed to the cities, to eat food grown on facto-ry farms in distant countries, food whose pricedepends on the daily numbers game of the firstmarket. “This is more efficient,” the economistssay. “Your market, your way of life, is not effi-cient,” they say. But we ask, “What is left whenyou reduce trade to numbers, when you erase allthat is human?”

Globalization, the integration of world mar-kets, has promised to “lift all boats,” rich andpoor, to bring a global culture of entertainmentand consumer goods to everyone — the promiseof material happiness. And indeed, since 1980most Third World countries have embracedglobalization. They have opened theireconomies to the world, lowered tariffs,embraced free trade, and allowed goods andservices from the industrialized world to flowin. It seems the world is brought closer together.In fact the gap between the thumb and the littlefinger has never been larger.

What happens to poor countries when theyembrace free trade? In Haiti in 1986 we import-ed just 7,000 tons of rice, the main staple food ofthe country. The vast majority was grown inHaiti. In the late 1980s Haiti complied with free

Jean-Bertrand Aristide comforts an orphan at LafanmiSelavi, a center for street children he founded in 1986.

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trade policies advocated by the internationallending agencies and lifted tariffs on riceimports. Cheaper rice immediately flooded infrom the United States, where the rice industry issubsidized. In fact the liberalization of Haiti’smarket coincided with the 1985 Farm Bill in theUnited States which increased subsidies to therice industry, so that 40% of U.S. rice growers’profits came from the government by 1987.Haiti’s peasant farmers could not possibly com-pete. By 1996 Haiti was importing 196,000 tons offoreign rice at the cost of $100 million a year.Haitian rice production became negligible. Oncethe dependence on foreign rice was complete,import prices began to rise, leaving Haiti’s pop-ulation, particularly the urban poor, completelyat the whim of rising world grain prices. And theprices continue to rise.

What lessons do we learn? For poor countriesfree trade is not so free, or so fair. Haiti, underintense pressure from the international lendinginstitutions stopped protecting its domestic agri-culture while subsidies to the U.S. rice industryincreased. A hungry nation became hungrier.

In a globalized economy, foreign investment istrumpeted as the key to alleviating poverty. Butin fact, the top beneficiary of foreign investmentfrom 1985-95 was the United States, with $477billion. Britain ran a distant second at $199 bil-lion, and Mexico, the only Third World countryin the top 10, received only $44 billion in invest-ment. When the majority ofthis money fled the countryovernight during Mexico’sfinancial meltdown in 1995,we learned that foreigninvestment is not reallyinvestment. It is more likespeculation. And in my coun-try, Haiti, it’s very hard tofind investment statistics.

We are still moving frommisery toward poverty withdignity.

Many in the First Worldimagine the amount ofmoney spent on aid to devel-oping countries is massive. Infact, it amounts to only .03%of GNP of the industrializednations. In 1995, the directorof the U.S. aid agency defend-ed his agency by testifying tohis congress that 84¢ of everydollar of aid goes back into

the U.S. economy in goods and services pur-chased. For every dollar the United States putsinto the World Bank, an estimated $2 actuallygoes into the U.S. economy in goods and servic-es. Meanwhile in 1995, severely indebted low-income countries paid $1 billionmore in debt and interest to theInternational Monetary Fund(IMF) than they received from it.For the 46 countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, foreign debtservice was four times theircombined governmental healthand education budgets in 1996.So, we find that aid does not aid.

The little finger knows thatshe is sinking deeper into misery each day, butall the while the thumb is telling her that profitsare increasing, economies are growing and he ispouring millions of dollars of aid into her coun-try. Whose profit? Whose economy? What aid?The logic of global capitalism is not logical forher. We call this economic schizophrenia.

The history of the eradication of the HaitianCreole pig population in the 1980s is a classicparable of globalization. Haiti’s small, black,Creole pigs were at the heart of the peasant econ-omy. An extremely hearty breed, well adapted toHaiti’s climate and conditions, they ate readilyavailable waste products, and could survive for

We have notreached theconsensus that to eat is a basichuman right.

Two boys at Lafanmi Selavi waiting for soccer practice.

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RETHINKING GLOBALIZATION • TEACHING FOR JUSTICE IN AN UNJUST WORLD12

three days without food. Eighty to 85% of ruralhouseholds raised pigs; they played a key role inmaintaining the fertility of the soil and consti-tuted the primary savings bank of the peasantpopulation. Traditionally a pig was sold to payfor emergencies and special occasions (funerals,marriages, baptisms, illnesses and, critically, topay school fees and buy books for the childrenwhen school opened each year in October).

In 1982 international agencies assured Haiti’speasants their pigs were sick and had to bekilled (so that the illness would not spread tocountries to the North.) Promises were madethat better pigs would replace the sick pigs.With an efficiency not since seen among devel-opment projects, all of the Creole pigs werekilled over a period of 13 months.

Two years later the new, better pigs came fromIowa. They were somuch better thatthey required cleandrinking water(unavailable to 80%of the Haitian pop-ulation), importedfeed (costing $90 ayear when the percapita income wasabout $130), andspecial roofed pig-

pens. Haitian peasants quicklydubbed them as “prince à quatrepieds,” (four footed princes). Addinginsult to injury, the meat did not tasteas good. Needless to say, the repopu-lation program was a complete fail-ure. One observer of the process esti-mated that in monetary terms,Haitian peasants lost $600 million.There was a 30% drop in enrollmentin rural schools, there was a dramat-ic decline in the protein consumptionin rural Haiti, a devastating decapi-talization of the peasant economy,and an incalculable negative impacton Haiti’s soil and agricultural pro-ductivity. The Haitian peasantry hasnot recovered to this day.

Most of rural Haiti is still isolatedfrom global markets, so for manypeasants the extermination of theCreole pigs was their first experienceof globalization. The experiencelooms large in the collective memory.

Today, when the peasants are told that“economic reform” and privatization

will benefit them they are understandably wary.The state-owned enterprises are sick, we aretold, and they must be privatized. The peasantsshake their heads and remember the Creole pigs.

The 1997 sale of the state-owned flour millconfirmed their skepticism. The mill sold for amere $9 million, while estimates place potentialyearly profits at $20-30 million a year. The millwas bought by a group of investors linked to oneof Haiti’s largest banks. One outcome seems cer-tain: This sale will further concentrate wealth —in a country where 1% of the population alreadyholds 45% of the wealth of the country.

If we have lingering doubts about where poorcountries fall in this “new” economic order, lis-ten to the World Bank. In September 1996, TheLondon Guardian newspaper cited a draft WorldBank strategy paper that predicted that themajority of Haitian peasants — who make up70% of Haiti’s population — are unlikely to sur-vive bank-advocated free market measures. TheBank concluded: “The small volume of produc-tion and the environmental resource constraintswill leave the rural population with only twopossibilities: to work in the industrial or servicesector, or to emigrate.” At present the industrialsector employs only about 20,000 Haitians.There are already approximately 2.5 million peo-ple living in Port-au-Prince, 70% of them are

We must liftourselves upoff the morguetable and tellthe experts we are not yet dead.

Girls playing jump-rope at Lafanmi Selavi.

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INTRODUCTION 13

officially unemployed and living in perhaps themost desperate conditions in the WesternHemisphere. Given the tragic history of Haiti’sboat people, emigration, the second possibility,can hardly be considered a real option.

The choices that globalization offers the poorremind me of a story. Anatole, one of the boyswho had lived with us at Lafanmi Selavi*, wasworking at the national port. One day a verypowerful businessman offered him money tosabotage the main unloading forklift at the port.Anatole said to the man, “Well, then I am alreadydead.” The man, surprised by the response,asked, “Why?” Anatole answered: “Because if Isneak in here at night and do what you ask theywill shoot me, and if I don’t, you will kill me.”The dilemma is, I believe, the classic dilemma ofthe poor: a choice between death and death.

Either we enter a global economic system, inwhich we know we cannot survive, or we refuse,and face death by slow starvation. With choiceslike these the urgency of finding a third way isclear. We must find some room to maneuver,some open space simply to survive. We must liftourselves up off the morgue table and tell theexperts we are not yet dead. ■

* Lafanmi Selavi is the center for street children in Port-au-Prince founded by Aristide in 1986.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide is a lifelong human rights activistwho was elected president of Haiti in 1990. This article isadapted from his book Eyes of the Heart: Seeking a Pathfor the Poor in the Age of Globalization (CommonCourage Press, 2000).

(For teaching ideas, see page 56.)

Junior Thelusma takes in some shade at the Ministry of Agriculture in Tabarre outside Port-au-Prince,where the children of Lafanmi Selavi tend their own fields of beans, bananas, and mangoes.

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