Across much of the world, there has been modest to significant success in reducing high birth rates and high poverty levels. In Haiti, not so. High birth rates (five children per family) and extreme poverty remain stubbornly high. Why?
Two anthropologists try to answer this difficult question. Timothy T. Schwartz makes a micro-analysis in his book, Fewer Men, More Babies, 2009. Michel-Folph Trouillot makes a macro-analysis in his book, Haiti, State Against Nation, 1990. It takes both books to provide a complete answer.
While most people and even many scholars blame Haitian flaws in values, culture and illiteracy, etc., Schwartz concludes the cause for high birth rates is primarily economic in the sense that many children are needed to provide the labor to survive. One Haitian mother put it very simply: "Six can help you more. Some will work in the garden. Some to fetch water. Some will do laundry."
In Haiti, State Against the Nation, Trouillot argues that an overly militarized political state oppresses/exploits/dominates the rural peasant farmers and keeps them in grinding poverty. Ideally, the state should serve the people building roads, schools, etc. But much more often in Haiti, it is the state against the people. And much too often the urban elite are in cahoots with a foreign U.S. elite to exploit the rural masses. The French elite slavemasters were kicked out during the Revolution (1791-1804). Unfortunately this French elite was quickly replaced by a small Haitian elite.
Now back to Timothy Schwartz and his analysis.
"For more than a half a century, the county Jean Rabel has been the target of intense foreign intervention, most of which has met with indifference. But entrenched poverty and high fertility are not consequences of a nostalgic clinging to a rustic way of life, nor some shortcoming in the collective Haitian psyche or culture, as suggested by former USAID director Harris. Jean Rabel farmers conceptualize farming as the lowliest of occupations; virtually all rural Rabelians would prefer to migrate out of Jean Label and preferably out of Haiti; and many women interviewed in the surveys conducted for this book stated quite frankly that they would prefer not to have many children but, as will be seen, they must have children because they believe that children [and their labor] are necessary to survive."
"Thus, in the struggle to maintain their living standards, those Haitians who cannot escape by emigrating are trapped in a system of spiraling population growth, declining soil conditions, and stagnant technology. It is a system beyond their control. There is no active [positive] State presence in rural Haiti; and local community organizational structures are often functionally nonexistent beyond the level of the household."
Schwartz is incensed that many of his fellow anthropologists have started to favor "explanations that blame impoverishment and high birth rates on the impoverished peoples themselves, on their values, cultures and traditions," not on 500 years of oppression. L.E. Harrison, a former branch director of USAID in Haiti, typified this attitude when he wrote, "To repeat, the principal obstacles to progress in Haiti are cultural: a set of traditional attitudes and values. . . . The solutions must focus on obstacles in the Haitian mind." Again, not cultural, but oppression that has damaged culture.
"Jean Rabel women achieve what are among the highest birthrates in the world and they do so despite high incidence of disease, low-fat diets, intense work regimes, scarce resources, low male-to-female sex ratios, and high geographic mobility of both men and women, all factors that militate against pregnancy and childbirth."
On migration:
"Many Jean Rabeliens desperately tried---and many succeeded---to escape to the city and to neighboring countries, to the United States, and to Europe. For example, the migration of the village elite. . . is alarming [brain drain]."
On the value of children:
"The bottom line is that despite a few concerns about school costs, farmers in Jean Label want children. They see children as valuable economic assets and more children are better than fewer children." "Children are the wealth of the poor" a Haitian proverb.
On status of women:
"Haitian women enjoy a level of economic autonomy that often rivals or exceeds that of their spouses."
In my next blog, I will review Haiti, State Against Nation.
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