by Eric Martin
In the aftermath of the recent earthquake that devastated the already beleaguered people of Haiti, the impoverished condition of that nation - which greatly exacerbated the lethality of the quake - has received sudden heightened scrutiny. Unsurprisingly, various factions have simply plugged Haiti's current condition into their preferred framework to reach their desired explanation.
In some cases, the results were bizarre. Pat Robertson chalked up Haiti's hardships to a prior pact with the devil (without clarifying how one Haitian, or even a small group of Haitians, could bind an entire nation, for centuries). Mark Kirkorian suggests that Haiti was too quick to throw off the shackles of slavery and colonialism:
My guess is that Haiti’s so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough…But, unlike Jamaicans and Bajans and Guadeloupeans, et al., after experiencing the worst of tropical colonial slavery, the Haitians didn’t stick around long enough to benefit from it. (Haiti became independent in 1804.). And by benefit I mean develop a local culture significantly shaped by the more-advanced civilization of the colonizers.
Kirkorian's allusion to "cultural" factors is more fully expounded on by both Jonah Goldberg and David Brooks (although Brooks leavens his thesis with some blame for those groups that have provided aid to Haiti in the past and present). Each columnist seeks to bolster his theory of cultural determinism by pointing out that Haiti and the Dominican Republic reside on two sides of the same island and share a similar colonial history, therefore, the difference in their respective historical trajectories must be attributed to some cultural factor. Goldberg:
Haiti's poverty stems from its lack of intangible capital. It shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic, and yet the Dominicans have six times the GDP (and are far better stewards of their environment).
Brooks:
Third, it is time to put the thorny issue of culture at the center of efforts to tackle global poverty. Why is Haiti so poor? Well, it has a history of oppression, slavery and colonialism. But so does Barbados, and Barbados is doing pretty well. Haiti has endured ruthless dictators, corruption and foreign invasions. But so has the Dominican Republic, and the D.R. is in much better shape. Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the same island and the same basic environment, yet the border between the two societies offers one of the starkest contrasts on earth — with trees and progress on one side, and deforestation and poverty and early death on the other.
As Lawrence E. Harrison explained in his book “The Central Liberal Truth,” Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10.
However, geographical proximity does not always mean parity in terms of agricultural prospects and the ability of a given ecosystem to sustain its population, and, beyond that, to enable its population to thrive.
Jared Diamond's masterpiece, Guns, Germs and Steel, does much to undermine so-called "cultural" explanations for why some societies thrive and others fail by pointing out that, in actuality, geographical happenstance (and the availability of certain plants suitable for mass agriculture and animals capable of domestication) have been the central drivers of disparity in development.
In essence (and apologies to Professor Diamond for the oversimplification), the reason that England was establishing an empire while Papua New Guineans were still hunting and gathering had very little to do with culture, but rather how one region's environment allowed for excess food supplies that supported a non-laboring class, while the others' didn't. The cultural differences, to a large extent, grew out of these conditions, rather than the other way around (with certain variations within like geographic regions/ecosystems, and across dissimilar strata, due to human ingenuity and other cultural factors).
Diamond discusses the disparate fortunes of Haiti and the Dominican Republic in a recent piece. The causes primarily stem from a bifurcation of the Island's habitat, which led to different quantities of arable land - with the geographically inferior Haitian habitat exacerbated by colonial influence (contra Kirkorian et al).
Why did the political, economic and ecological histories of these two countries — the Dominican Republic and Haiti — sharing the same island unfold so differently?
Part of the answer involves environmental differences. The island of Hispaniola’s rains come mainly from the east. Hence the Dominican (eastern) part of the island receives more rain and thus supports higher rates of plant growth.
Hispaniola’s highest mountains (over 10,000 feet high) are on the Dominican side, and the rivers from those high mountains mainly flow eastwards into the Dominican side.
The Dominican side has broad valleys, plains and plateaus and much thicker soils. In particular, the Cibao Valley in the north is one of the richest agricultural areas in the world.
In contrast, the Haitian side is drier because of that barrier of high mountains blocking rains from the east.
Compared to the Dominican Republic, the area of flat land good for intensive agriculture in Haiti is much smaller, as a higher percentage of Haiti’s area is mountainous. There is more limestone terrain, and the soils are thinner and less fertile and have a lower capacity for recovery.
Note the paradox: The Haitian side of the island was less well endowed environmentally but developed a rich agricultural economy before the Dominican side. The explanation of this paradox is that Haiti’s burst of agricultural wealth came at the expense of its environmental capital of forests and soils. [...]
While those environmental differences did contribute to the different economic trajectories of the two countries, a larger part of the explanation involved social and political differences — of which there were many that eventually penalized the Haitian economy relative to the Dominican economy.
In that sense, the differing developments of the two countries were over-determined. Numerous separate factors coincided in tipping the result in the same direction.
One of those social and political differences involved the accident that Haiti was a colony of rich France and became the most valuable colony in France’s overseas empire. The Dominican Republic was a colony of Spain, which by the late 1500s was neglecting Hispaniola and was in economic and political decline itself.
Hence, France was able to invest in developing intensive slave-based plantation agriculture in Haiti, which the Spanish could not or chose not to develop in their side of the island. France imported far more slaves into its colony than did Spain.
As a result, Haiti had a population seven times higher than its neighbor during colonial times — and it still has a somewhat larger population today, about ten million versus 8.8 million.
But Haiti’s area is only slightly more than half of that of the Dominican Republic. As a result, Haiti, with a larger population and smaller area, has double the Republic’s population density.
The combination of that higher population density and lower rainfall was the main factor behind the more rapid deforestation and loss of soil fertility on the Haitian side.
In addition, all of those French ships that brought slaves to Haiti returned to Europe with cargos of Haitian timber, so that Haiti’s lowlands and mid- mountain slopes had been largely stripped of timber by the mid-19th century.
It's not that social and political factors are irrelevant - Diamond himself lists a few contributing factors. But to put the lion's share of the onus for Haiti's current predicament relative to the Dominican Republic and other regional states on cultural quirks like voodoo or a lax work ethic (that for Goldberg, magically stiffens when you "cross theborder" into U.S. territory), or to lament the short duration of colonization (which itself was a major factor in Haiti's crushing deforestation), misses the true story by a wide mark, while perpetuating ill-informed race-tinged theories.
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