Is the United States Attacking Haiti?

Abstract

An attack often conjures up images of a bloodstained battlefield or nowadays, hacking and cyber espionage. This Note pierces through the unadventurous notion of an armed attack and ponders whether the ‘barrage’ of U.S.-subsidized rice into Haiti have eviscerated Haiti’s capacity to meet its own domestic rice production demands and if it violates the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures. This Note conducts a deep dive into the meaning of a subsidy in order to parse out the granular details. This Note scrutinizes the U.S.’s ‘farm safety net’ moreover and alludes to multiple pictographs illustrating the United States’ byzantine agricultural programs. This Note examines the socio-political and economic effects of U.S.-subsidized rice exports into Haiti and queries whether U.S. measures have coerced Haiti into an unsustainable fiscal position. It explores why Haiti slashed its tariffs down from fifty per cent to three per cent in the 1990s because of demands by the IMF, international community and the United States. Albeit, the United States has propped up its farmers with subsidies since the Great Depression. This Note remarks that Haiti’s politics are guided by its pocketbook and, in this case, the U.S. has likely whittled away at Haiti’s ability to replenish its pocketbook.

Keywords: Agricultural Subsidies, U.S.-subsidized Rice, Farm Safety Net, Tariffs, Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures