HAITI TURNS TO SLOW FOOD TO SPEED UP AGRICULTURAL RECOVERY
HAITI TURNS TO SLOW FOOD TO SPEED UP AGRICULTURAL RECOVERY
By Jewel Fraser
THE DAILY DOSE
DEC 14 2018
Across Haiti, people still talk about former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s 2010 apology for American trade policies that contributed to the decimation of their country’s agriculture. By pressuring Haiti to lower tariffs in the 1990s, the U.S. flooded the country with its food products, including low-quality rice, that the local agriculture industry couldn’t compete with. But Guito Gilot isn’t looking at the past anymore.
The 50-year-old is head of business at Cap Haitien Cocoa Producers, the country’s first cocoa cooperative that focuses on fair trade exports. Better known as Feccano, the cooperative believes it may have found a fix for the country to reclaim its agricultural self-sufficiency, with an ally with origins in faraway Italy: the slow food movement that originated in Rome in 1986 in protest against the opening of a McDonalds store near the city’s famed Spanish Steps. At the start of 2018, Feccano was an outlier as a Haitian organization that was part of the slow food movement – it joined in 2006. But now, a growing number of Haitian agriculture sector groups are embracing the grassroots movement with organizational headquarters in Bra in northwest Italy, which identifies food cultures that are on the verge of disappearing and then works with local communities to revive them.
This year, two Haiti-based organizations – Haitian Clairin Rum Producers and the Association of the Peasants of Fondwa – signed up with Terra Madre, a network started by the slow food movement to bring together artisanal food producers worldwide so they can support one another. The Florida-based Haitian Education Project (HEP), a non-profit devoted to building Haiti’s self-sufficiency through education and agriculture, also reached out to the slow food movement’s head office in Italy, in February this year and signed up soon after.
July saw the birth of the first four local slow food chapters in Haiti – in Port-au-Prince, Fort-Liberté, Pétion-ville and Cap-Haïtien. A fifth one came up in Limonade in August. Five delegates from Haiti attended the annual Terra Madre conclave in Torino in September. These organizations are counting on lessons from the global movement to rebuild confidence and introduce strategies that can help Haitian farmers revive local produce – with pride.
https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/haiti-turns-to-slow-food-to-speed-up-agricultural-recovery/91055