Food security Haiti : critical contributions

The world food economy attends to a goal of economic production not human reproduction. In doing so it heightens peasant food insecurity and social instability by undermining peasant market advantages and their right to production as it aims for global comparative advantage. This occurs through reduced tariff and market protections allowing importation of cheap food products. Peasants respond by finding specialized niche food markets not already subsumed by imports. These value added projects, however, are not simply about food. The projects are about recreating the Haitian peasant way of being as the poto mitan or center pole of the Haitian food system. This includes reproducing the peasant moral economy of community care, identity and autonomy as food producers, distributors and consumers