Sorry, but the problem has become worse and I have to blog this again:
In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2
a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one
business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of
mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.“It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,”
said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in
recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”
Apropos of nothing in particular. This blog has just been blocked by the Chinese government. It’s now only possible to view this blog through a proxy server from inside in the Middle Kingdom, which is a shame because I love your blog and this is an inconvenience.
This might change at any moment. Things bounce on and off the forbidden list all the time. It may also be an issue with your hosting company, rather than MR itself. The current political/media climate here is getting more… intense… as the Olympics controversy escalates, it’s no surprise that this manifests itself as tighter media controls.
Tragic about Haiti, though.
Makes you stop your bellyaching about your petty problems, eh?
Once in a while though fairly rarely, Kiva.org has a Haiti loan available for lenders (e.g.).
Perhaps if US “environmental policy” wasn’t driving the cost of food up for everyone, this wouldn’t be a problem.
Population: 8,924,553
land: 27,560 sq km
arable land: 28.11%
permanent crops: 11.53% other: 60.36%
Irrigated land: 920 sq km
0-14 years: 41.8%
15-64 years: 54.7%
65 years and over: 3.5%
Religions: Roman Catholic 80%, Protestant 16% 3/4 practicing vodoo
VIVA PITCAIRNS
As I understand it, people in Haiti have been eating dirt cookies for decades.
Perhaps if countries weren’t corrupt kleptocracies, they wouldn’t be so effected by U.S. Environmental Policies. When did it become the job of the U.S. to provide food for the world?
The misguided bio-fuel program is nobodies business but the U.S.
It is the “blame the devil” strategy. When you don’t know how to solve a problem, you try to find a scapegoat to blame everything bad on.
The mud pies would defiantly be classified as an inferior good, but I think giffen goods are only theoretical. With the case of Haiti, there might actually be a positive income effect because the people are so impoverished.
I mean, starving people eating butter? And the manufactured cookies are bought from vendors, with cash, who transport the dirt from far away?
It would help a lot if the U.S. would drop some or all of the policies that drive up the cost of food. It would help even more if every other government on earth did so as well.
As for Haiti, I have a plan that might help.
Start by occupying the country. The population is only 9 million, so 200,000 troops should be more than adequate, though of course we don’t presently have them to spare.
Next, study up on how the British governed India. Apply the same model, with some modernizations. What we now call ‘human rights violations’ must be minimized.
The colonial service should be recruited internationally, especially from France and other Francophone countries. Americans aren’t very good at this, and don’t much like learning foreign languages.
The brightest of the natives should be sent to universities in the U.S., France, and other advanced countries. Make sure to choose institutions with a few professors willing and able to explain how and why Marxism was a disaster in practice, so as not to produce too many Ho Chi Minhs.
In two or three generations, Haiti should have enough natives trained in honest and efficient administration to dispense with the colonial service. It can be emancipated, with some hope that it will fare as well as India.
Of course this will be expensive, though perhaps not as expensive as the Iraq adventure. The natives will probably resist. I would, since I wouldn’t actually expect an American occupation to be carried out with such benevolent motives.
This is a fantasy, since political support for such a project would be negligible. I wouldn’t really support it myself, being the libertarian curmudgeon that I am.
Assuming the U.S. was willing to expend enormous resources to save the Haitians from themselves, I think this is the best plan.
“But most of Haiti’s problems seem self-inflicted and impossible for outsider’s to solve.”
While true that we can’t solve Haiti’s social problems, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take short-term action to help prevent people from starving to death.
The correlation between US agricultural policies and tariffs on one hand and higher food prices (in the US and the developing world) and lower food supply (by our favoring the import of non-staple products like coffee and cut flowers) on the other seem obvious to me. So one thing we could do is to follow our own gospel and open our agricultural markets.
As Peter St. Onge notes above, there’s a reason for eating dirt under these circumstances.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophagy
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-2669
There’s a history of eating clay — kaolin — in Georgia, among African American women, but this seems unrelated. However, the negative results are likely as bad.
Did I see this kind article before?
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