by Beth Lownik
What we now recognize as the “hunger crisis” seemed to creep up on us during the year that I lived and worked at a clinic in rural Haiti. The end of 2007 was marked by persistent, but not unusual, complaints by patients, neighbors, and friends (not to mention our own cook) about the rising prices of staple foods.
There was particular concern about the cost of “Miami rice,” the Haitian name for the imported, subsidized U.S. rice that has dominated the Haitian market since the late 1980s. Until then, Haiti did not import rice; in fact, Haitians tell stories of the roads through the central Artibonite Valley being covered with drying rice as far as the eye could see. They also tell of the destruction of this rice economy starting in 1986 when loans from the International Monetary Fund required the removal of tariffs on imported rice. Within a few years, the fertile lands of the Artibonite were no longer used to grow rice because the farmers could no longer make a profit against the highly subsidized imported rice.
Currently, very little local rice, or “diri peyi,” is grown. This made the increasing cost of rice in late 2007 an issue of concern for the vast majority of rural Haitians, who already cling to subsistence on the meager crops they grow on small plots and sell for an average of $1 to $2 per day. As we entered 2008, this concern mounted into a crisis.
The vast majority of patients I saw at the Visitation Clinic suffered from anemia due to iron deficiency, a particular problem for pregnant women. The poorest children provided the most heartbreaking and glaring examples of the effects of malnutrition when they came in with marasmus, a general malnutrition of too few calories overall, and kwashiorkor, a specific protein deficiency that is very difficult to treat. At least several times a year, we even saw a suspected case of scurvy, the classic Vitamin C deficiency famous for striking sailors of the past, which should be unheard of in a country with plentiful mangos and oranges.
There is no question that the rise in food prices only worsened the already precarious nutritional status of the people who sought care at the clinic, and there is no easy way to describe how it feels to be a witness to these large-scale forces at work in their lives. In a poignant and painful example of the effects of the global hunger crisis, a women’s group I had the privilege of working closely with took it upon themselves to wash, clean, and sometimes cook for the less fortunate families in their village. This small group of dedicated, resourceful women, formerly able to care for themselves and others, had been reduced to begging for food for their own families.
Beth Lownik was administrator for the Visitation Clinic while working in Haiti between May 2007 and May 2008. The Visitation Clinic is a project of the Visitation Hospital Foundation.
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