Christ’s Mandate For Missions
Disaster in Haiti as world’s food prices jump (CMM Editor’s Notes:
Our CMM Missionary there, Astrel Vicent, orphaned as a young boy,
and now pastor of the church that took him in, asks your urgent
prayers. Read more about him at
http://cmmissions.net/haiti_about.htm
Vincent hosts an annual pastors conference and it starts tomorrow,
Wednesday April 23 and runs through Saturday the 27th. 300 pastors from
across Haiti are expected. In years past Vincent has been able to feed
the 300 pastors one or two meals a day. This year with the food crisis
in Haiti and skyrocketing prices, he is unable to buy enough food. These
are God’s shepherds over many of His people in Haiti. Pray for Haiti.
Pray for Pastor Vincent to have enough to feed these humble servants.
Pray for the church leaders in Haiti to stay strong to lead and share the
love of Jesus.
You can go to http://cmmissions.net/donate.htm
and make an online secure donation through Paypal and designate Haiti on
the memo line. Or mail in your check to CMM PO 7705 Charlotte, NC 28241,
or call 704-517-2557 to pay by credit card or debit card over the phone.
Your prayers and help are greatly appreciated.
Please read the article below to grasp the severity of hunger and not
being able to afford to buy food for your family.)
Reed Lindsay, Chronicle
Foreign Service Monday, April 21, 2008
(04-21) 04:00 PDT Port-au-Prince, Haiti –
For years, Hernite Joseph scraped by selling imported chicken parts in the
muddy markets of this capital’s seaside slums.
The $3 or so she earned each day used to be enough to take care of her
unemployed husband and three children. Now, she is struggling to avoid
starvation.
"Everything has changed," said the 30-year-old Joseph, stabbing
at a half-frozen chunk of poultry with a screwdriver. "My kids are
like toothpicks. Before, if you had $1.25, you could buy vegetables, some
rice, charcoal and a little cooking oil. Right now, a little can of rice
alone costs 65 cents, and it’s not good rice. Oil is 25 cents. Charcoal is
25 cents. With $1.25, you can’t even make a plate of rice for one
child."
Food prices are rising around the world, sparking protests and riots in
Egypt, Cameroon, the Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan,
Yemen, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Italy. The World Bank
says food prices for such basic staples as rice, wheat and corn have
risen about 83 percent worldwide over the past three years. The crisis
has been caused by an increasing population, desertification, speculation
and the use of land for biofuels. Deadly food riots
But perhaps the most devastating impact has been in Haiti, where more than
half the population of 9 million lives on less than a $1 a day, and the
price of rice has doubled since December. At least seven people were
killed recently in food riots.
Haiti is particularly affected because it imports nearly all of its food,
including more than 80 percent of its rice. Once-productive farmland has
been abandoned as farmers struggle to grow crops in soil devastated by
erosion, deforestation, flooding and tropical storms.
In March, many poor Haitians complained of hunger so severe that it felt
like their stomachs were being eaten away by bleach or battery acid. In a
matter of days, "Clorox hunger" was being talked about in slums
and villages across the country.
Growing tension finally exploded on April 2 in the southwestern city of
Okay, the third largest in Haiti, where demonstrators clashed with U.N.
peacekeepers and tore down the walls of a U.N. military base. Thousands
of slum dwellers took to the streets, while local leaders demanded that
the government roll back free-market policies and create community stores
with subsidized prices. They also called on the government to fix a date
for the removal of the U.N. peacekeeping mission.
Since arriving in Haiti in 2004, U.N. troops have been credited with
rooting out armed groups from the slums of Port-au-Prince and helping
impose a degree of political stability. But the peacekeepers have provoked
deep resentment among many Haitians, who complain that the mission’s $500
million annual budget is wasted on troops and tanks.
In Port-au-Prince, protesters erected flaming barricades and threw rocks
at the national palace, burned gas stations and looted businesses. Across
the countryside, farmers erected road blockades.
"Our children are hungry, and we can’t feed them," said Vilner
Chery, a bare-chested farmer standing defiantly in front of his
community’s road blockade in Cavaillon, a 3-foot-high barricade made of
boulders, tree trunks and car parts. "We know we have a president in
this country. So we’re forced to get out on the street and cry for help
to the people who have the capacity to do something for us. That’s why we
put up the barricades to block the cars. The president must do something
about this."
On April 12, President Rene Preval promised to reduce the price of rice by
nearly 16 percent, while the Haitian Senate voted to remove Prime Minister
Jacques Edouard Alexis over the riots. Moreover, the United Nations has
promised to distribute 8,000 tons of food.
These moves appear to have pacified most Haitians – for now. But some
protesters say they will go back to the streets if food prices don’t go
down rapidly.
"The president needs to hurry," said Jean Francois Bernard, a
university student who participated in the protests. "The
mobilizations will continue until we see results. Until now, we haven’t
seen anything."
Preval said a 110-pound sack of rice would drop from $51 to $43. He
persuaded three major rice importers to take a $3 cut in profits, and
secured $3 million in international aid to cover the remaining $5 per
sack.
But the agreement is valid for only 30 days, and it is unclear how much
the price of rice will go down in the marketplace, if at all. On the
street, a 110-pound sack of rice currently sells for more than $70. Price
cuts won’t work
"Reducing the price per sack by $8 won’t change anything," said
Gerald Baptiste, who sells rice by the can in the poor neighborhood of La
Saline. "The price needs to go down to $2 at most."
Decades ago, rice was a luxury item, grown in the lush Artibonite Valley
and eaten on special occasions and Sundays. But after the ouster of
dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986, a U.S.-backed military regime
slashed tariffs, allowing rice and other cheap imports from the United
States and the Dominican Republic to flood Haitian marketplaces. Imported
rice soon became the most important food staple in Haiti.
But plans pushed by Washington to transform the rural economy into an
industrial force, capitalizing on the country’s cheap labor to turn the
country into the "Taiwan of the Caribbean," never bore fruit.
Twenty years later, Haiti has little industry besides a handful of
assembly plants where the minimum wage is less than $2 a day. The nation’s
agricultural production is mainly subsistence. Imported rice an issue
"In 1987, when rice began being imported at a cheap price, many
people applauded," said Preval in a recent televised speech.
"But cheap imported rice destroyed (locally grown) rice. Today,
imported rice has become expensive, and our national production is in
ruins. That’s why subsidizing imported food is not the answer."
But Preval did just that, faced with the threat of renewed protests if he
did not take immediate action to reduce prices. At the same time, he
promised to restart agricultural production by cutting the price of
fertilizer in half, thanks in part to Venezuela’s donation of 10,000 tons
of a low-cost nitrogen fertilizer.
Preval’s call for boosting national production may have struck at the
root of the problem but did not appear to calm seething tension among the
poor.
"Preval can’t talk to us about agrarian reform anymore," said
unemployed protester Louidi Saintilome, as he stood last week in front of
a flaming tire and a cloud of billowing black smoke. "The situation
has degenerated too much.
