The context of the food crisis
Since 2020, Haiti has been facing one of the most severe food crises in its history. The latest Humanitarian Response Plan[1] for 2021-2022, estimated the number of Haitians suffering from food insecurity at over 5.2 million, representing almost half the population. This food crisis is the expression of a multi-dimensional crisis that has been exacerbated since 2021, reinforcing the impact of a set of structural and systemic factors that have contributed to making the country one of the most exposed and vulnerable in the world. Haiti has experienced three major disasters in the space of 10 years (the 2010 earthquake, Hurricane Matthew and the 2021 earthquake).
In the same period, the country experienced Tropical Storm Laura, the COVID-19 pandemic and the resurgence of cholera. While the country was already entangled in a deep political and institutional crisis, from 2021 onwards Haiti was plunged into a situation marked by the exacerbation of political struggles, including the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in July 2021, and the extension of gang violence, which control large swathes of the country’s territory, gain control of the country’s main roads, challenge the state’s monopoly on violence and perpetrate increasingly horrific acts against the population (kidnapping, rape, ransom, murder and massacres).
The combination of these factors has led to a deterioration in the population’s living conditions, reducing their purchasing power and their ability to access food. Gang control of the country’s two main roads has cut off access to markets and food supply chains. The roadblocks imposed on the population prevented the free circulation of agricultural goods. The country’s domestic markets could not be supplied with food products. The fuel crisis and the terror exerted by gangs on merchants prevented them from supplying the markets, thus reducing their income.
The war in Ukraine has had a major impact on food prices, and consequently on vulnerable households’ access to food. In September 2022, food prices were 40% higher than a year earlier. Food inflation was accompanied by a 44% rise in fossil fuel prices. The strong dominance of food and fossil fuel imports on Haiti’s consumer markets is a highly vulnerable factor for the Haitian economy, which is experiencing a structural crisis in its balance of payments due to low foreign currency earnings and is under constant pressure to depreciate its currency. To bridge the balance-of-payments gap, in January 2023 Haiti received credits of around $105 million under the IMF’s emergency assistance “food shocks” window. These credits are intended to help finance feeding programs and cash and in-kind transfers to vulnerable households.
Other structural factors explain the recurrence of acute food insecurity crises in Haiti. First and foremost, there is the sector’s low technological level, low productivity, regular crop losses, low levels of private investment and budgetary discrimination. The sector’s contribution to GDP, which was 50% in the 70s and 80s, is now just 20%. At $400 per capita, agricultural GDP per year is much lower than national GDP. Trade liberalization measures taken by the Haitian government in the 80s and 90s dealt a fatal blow to the country’s food self-sufficiency, leaving the local market to imports and contraband products.
The Haitian food system is at the heart of intense struggles for control over resources, in a context marked by the collapse of agricultural production, the increasing concreting of farmland and the exacerbation of the process of urbanization, the growing importance of the market for food imports and the scarcity of the foreign currency needed to finance them.
The first reflections on a Haitian Triple Nexus of development-humanitarianism-peace identified agriculture and food security as an “arena of contestation”, a place of confrontation between the subsistence strategies of the vulnerable populations and the control of productive resources by the elite, a place of expression for popular protests against the high cost of living.
Over and above the structural problems facing Haiti’s agricultural sector, the level of food insecurity is determined by the power of private players who, given the configuration of the imported food market (existence of monopolies and oligopolies on almost the entire range of products), have the ability to impose the price of these goods, making them scarce on the market and exposing vulnerable populations to recurring food security crises.
It follows that the peace component of the Haitian Nexus is closely linked to the solutions that will be found to the dysfunction of the food system. The latter covers a vast field of issues and challenges, ranging from the development of a “legal framework governing land use”, to the “distribution of occupancy and usufruct rights between farmers and owners”, to the protection of agricultural areas.[2] This is a huge challenge that can only be met through reform of the State, the dismantling of gangs and the retreat of the rentier actors who hold the country’s economy and state institutions hostage.
Food crisis response plans
An analysis of the activities announced and undertaken as part of the country’s food crisis response plans specifically over the years 2020/2021 and 2022/2023, reveals a sustained effort to capitalize on the lessons learned since the earthquake of January 12, 2010, against a backdrop of a drastic drop in humanitarian aid to the food sectors, and underfunding of UN-coordinated appeals.
Emergency operations have been marked over time by a series of shortcomings that have clearly reduced the effectiveness of interventions.
First and foremost, there are the problems of coordinating responses to food crises between humanitarian actors. This coordination proved highly deficient due to the fragmentation of actors involved in emergency humanitarian operations: between UN agencies, international humanitarian NGOs, local NGOs, and government bodies, for example, which were not always able to fully play their role of coordinating and ensuring the coherence of emergency interventions. These coordination problems were compounded by the fact that the participating institutions have different orientations, competencies, and mandates.
Another major concern in emergency operations has been the question of targeting the most vulnerable. How can the most vulnerable beneficiaries be reached when the data available from humanitarian organizations in the field or from state administrations is not standardized and is produced on the basis of different methodologies? Even when data does exist and is usable, it only enables us to draw a certain map of the vulnerable populations identified in the area affected by the disaster, but it does not give us a precise idea of the populations directly affected by the disaster and therefore requiring urgent intervention.[3]
The question of the mechanisms to be adopted and put in place to modulate aid in kind, cash transfers or to arbitrate between pure cash and cash+ is of paramount importance, all the more so as these decisions often have to be taken in the absence of financial structures in the disaster zone.
Another problem was the weakness of early warning systems, and the level of availability of stocks of goods and services to formulate an emergency response to a food crisis.
Capitalizing on lessons learned
Analysis of UN humanitarian response plans and other appeals shows that a genuine process of capitalizing on lessons learned over the past 10 years has been evident. Answers have been found to quasi all the problems mentioned above, facilitating the adoption of an integrated approach. The new approach emphasizes the need to build beneficiaries’ resilience so that they can stabilize their food and nutritional security.
In the new response plans, a decompartmentalized approach is favored. The interventions range from the distribution of hot meals and health promotion activities to the implementation of support programs for agricultural, animal and plant production, and the promotion of agricultural cooperatives. At the same time, cash transfers ensure that beneficiaries have the capacity to respond to the impact of shocks well before they occur. Cash transfers thus help to prevent beneficiaries from developing negative behaviors in crisis situations, such as consuming their seeds, selling their assets, etc. The new approach aims both to enable beneficiaries to respond to shocks and to benefit from actions (e.g., distribution of inputs and tools) to boost production.
At the same time, income-generating activities must be supported by credit and savings promotion activities. These activities are not part of a classic sequence in which emergency operations are developed first, followed by development activities, with the result that the latter are neglected once the shock has subsided. From the outset, the aim is to ensure consistency between activities geared towards emergency, i.e., short-term solutions, and medium- and long-term activities to promote production.
As for the coordination of actors, a multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral approach has been adopted, involving UN actors, public administrations at national, departmental, and communal level, international and local NGOs, the private sector, and donors. However, major challenges remain to be addressed to make this coordination more effective. Humanitarian actors have yet to be fully integrated into coordination processes. The massive influence they have had in managing the country’s recurrent crises has led to a weakening of the State’s decision-making structures and an erosion of its crisis management capabilities. Recapturing the State’s emergency humanitarian intervention capacity is a prerequisite for regaining its legitimacy in the eyes of the population. What’s more, local communities continue to suffer from their low level of involvement in humanitarian programs. The humanitarian response to the August 14, 2021, earthquake in the south of the country, for example, was criticized by local communities, who were very dissatisfied with the services provided by emergency aid and felt excluded from decisions taken in their communities.[4]
Towards a new approach to food crises
The effort to capitalize on the lessons learned over the past 10 years has been facilitated by a major effort to reflect on strengthening food security and nutrition in Haiti. Several strategic documents have framed this reflection, such as the Politique et Stratégie Nationale de Souveraineté et Sécurité alimentaire et de Nutrition (2018).[5] The new approaches to food security issues have benefited from a paradigm shift observed among Haiti’s development partner institutions. Indeed, analysis of the latest documents published on Haiti by these institutions testifies to the mobilization of a political economy approach that contrasts with conventional analyses of the country.
This approach has helped to identify the mechanisms by which the country’s economic, political, and social vulnerability is reproduced, and to draw attention to the structural underpinnings of repeated humanitarian crises. The documents in question analyze the configuration of goods and services markets dominated by monopolistic and oligopolistic behaviors (World Bank, 2016; United Nations 2022), the under-capitalization of the food sector, the historical status of the agrarian sector and the role of agrarian rent in the construction of the Haitian state and the issues surrounding the control of this rent, the interplay of actors in the struggles for productive resources, the use of violence as the main instrument for resolving crises, as well as the country’s dependence on imports.[6]
The new approach to food insecurity was facilitated in the institutional field by the One UN Plan, which highlighted the problems linked to the inefficiency of development activities in fragile states like Haiti, and the need to make humanitarian, development, and peace intervention coherent and complementary. This concern was expressed through the adoption in Haiti of a Triple Nexus.
Although the Triple Nexus is not yet operational, a space for discussion has been created between the UN Country Team, the Humanitarian Country Team, and local NGOs on the project of building a common understanding of humanitarian needs in Haiti. The initial work carried out as part of the Triple Nexus defined three objectives to be achieved through the 2021-2022 PRP,[7] namely: a) reducing the need for humanitarian assistance linked to food insecurity, b) social protection with a view to providing safety nets for the most vulnerable, c) environmental restoration and risk and disaster management. The second objective is to develop a social protection system that is reactive to crises and shocks.
I’d like to dwell a little on the second objective, because the social protection component is a fine example of the progress that has been made in mobilizing lessons learned. Haiti’s social protection system is rickety: with a formal component that covers only around 10% of the population, and social assistance and pension institutions with very limited resources and a very low level of governance. Over the past 10 years, this system has undergone a certain transformation with the introduction of cash transfer programs financed with funds from Venezuela’s Petro Caribe program.[8] With the end of Petro Caribe, the multiple cash transfer programs that had been set up by the Haitian state ceased to operate. These programs were characterized by an excessive fragmentation of beneficiaries into multiple groups: mothers, students, etc., which made their administration costly and inefficient in the absence of adequate technical capacity and a sustainable funding horizon.
Some challenges and stakes of the Haitian Triple Nexus
In recent years, technical and financial partners have mobilized substantial resources to move the social protection agenda forward, providing the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor, in charge of social policy, with technical and financial support to help it strengthen its capacity to coordinate and regulate the sector, draw up a Social Protection and Promotion Document[9] and initiate an active social promotion policy in favor of segments of the population in vulnerable situations. The aim is to strengthen their economic autonomy, promote their access to basic social services and develop their capacities.
However, the implementation of this component of the Triple Nexus is fraught with problems. Given that the Haitian economy has been growing at a negative rate for the past four years, that the contributory component of the social protection system represents only 10% of the population, and that the informal sector is the country’s largest employer, there are serious doubts about the sustainability of funding for this program. To implement such a program, a sustainable fiscal space is required. The strategy that was found was to end fuel subsidies, which account for around 12% of budget expenditure, and finance the program with the resources saved. The decision was also taken to make the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor the sole coordinating and regulatory body for the social protection and promotion policy, by granting it budgetary space estimated at around 400 million gourdes (approximatively $ 3 millions) in the 2022-2023 budget.
However, this Ministry is not accustomed to managing such substantial resources; moreover, it has historically been the preferred funding channel for populist political actors. The sustainability of this budgetary space is therefore not guaranteed, even if mechanisms for controlling and monitoring these funds have been put in place. To ensure the success of this aspect of the Triple Nexus, it will also be necessary to systematize and consolidate the information systems available to the vulnerable people who stand to benefit from the promotion and social protection funds.
Another policy area revealed by the Triple Nexus discussions is the need to reduce the country’s heavy dependence on imports, implement a policy to win back the domestic market, and rearm tariffs to support the development of local production capacity.
Strengthening the national food supply circuit must be a goal of the Triple Nexus. Implementing these policies, however, will require adjustments that will have implication for the Peace component of the Triple Nexus. We need to work towards more efficient border management with the Dominican Republic, and rigorous customs control, in order to put an end to large-scale smuggling – an essential element in regaining the domestic market and building food production capacity.
Addressing the peace component of the Triple Nexus is of paramount importance for achieving development objectives and building humanitarian response capacity. However, the conditions for implementing the Triple Nexus remain more than difficult, with the country’s security situation even deteriorating in the course of 2023. To cite just a few examples of the negative repercussions of the security situation on the conduct of the Triple Nexus, the initiatives taken by UN agencies (UNOPS, UNDP, UNFPA) to set up local mediation cells have been slow to bear fruit, given the continuing virulence of gang violence in the communities. What’s more, developments over the past few months have shown that cease-fire proclamations between armed gangs have been more in line with a logic of consolidating their strongholds than reducing violence against the population. On the other hand, the conditions for promoting community dialogue remain very difficult, given that the population continues to suffer daily atrocities at the hands of the bandits, and that trust between citizens has been completely eroded and needs to be rebuilt first.
The controversies surrounding the sending out of a military mission to the country to combat gang violence have shown the extent to which the country is crying out for a paradigm shift in the approach of the security issues. Then the recurrent recourse to an international armed force often serves the sole interests of the economic oligarchy and the political elite, and in many ways constitutes a bonus for their opposition to state reform, to public policies of social justice and to the end of the rentier economy that reproduce violence, poverty, and food insecurity.
Bibliography
Ground Truth Solutions (2022), Trust must be earned: Perceptions of aid in Haiti. A reality check on post-quake accountability to affected people, April 2022, htpps://reliefweb.int/report/Haiti/trust-must-be-earned-perception-aid-haiti-reality-check-post-quake-accountability
Ministère des Affaires Sociales et du Travail (2020), Politique Nationale de Protection et de Promotion Sociales.
Nations Unies (2022), Analyse Commune de Pays, Port-au-Prince, juillet.
OCHA (2023), Haïti : Plan de réponse humanitaire
Oxford Policy Management (2017), Étude sur la protection sociale réactive aux crises en Amérique du Sud et dans les Caraïbes, Étude de cas sur Haïti, Oxford.
Primature Haïti (2018), Politique Nationale de Souveraineté et Sécurité alimentaire et de Nutrition, Document de Politique.
World Bank, Georgiana Pop (2016), Haiti-Let’s Talk Competition. A Brief Review of Market Conditions.
[1] See OCHA (2023), Haïti: Plan de réponse humanitaire.
[2] See Nations Unies (2022), Analyse Commune de Pays, Port-au-Prince, juillet.
[3] For a more complete analysis of these deficiences, see, among others, Oxford Policy Management (2017), Étude sur la protection sociale réactive aux crises en Amérique du Sud et dans les Caraïbes, Étude de cas sur Haïti, Oxford.
[4] See Ground Truth Solutions, Trust must be earned: Perceptions of aid in Haiti. A reality check on post-quake accountability to affected people, April 2022.
[5] Primature Haiti (2018), Politique Nationale de Souveraineté et Sécurité alimentaire et de Nutrition, Document de Politique.
[6] World Bank, Georgiana Pop (2016), Haiti – Let’s Talk Competition. A Brief Review of Market Conditions. Nations Unies Haiti (2022), Analyse Commune de pays, op cit.
[7] Nations Unies Haiti (2022), Analyse Commune de pays, op cit.
[8] Petro Caribe was an energy cooperation agreement between Venezuela and the Caribbean countries.
[9] Ministère des Affaires Sociales et du Travail (2020), Politique Nationale de Protection et de Promotion Sociales.