Figure 8.1. Contour canals dug on a hillside in southwest Haiti. Photo by Scott Freeman, 2012.
Sovereignty and Soil
Collective and Wage Labor in Rural Haiti
Haiti’s contemporary relationship to international development is tenuous at best. Between critiques of NGO-based aid (Schuller 2012) and pointed criticisms of the response to the earthquake (Katz 2013; Elliott et al. 2015), the aid industry has received a considerable thrashing from both scholars and journalists. Based largely on examinations of aid as they are implemented in and around Port-au-Prince, critiques have focused not only on where the money went but also on how urban Haiti has changed as a result. But the origins of development in Haiti lie in the countryside; hillsides and rural farmers have been the targets of aid programs since the middle of the twentieth century. Aid experts believed that the countryside was not only poor but also in some way lost in the past.
International aid experts came to save Haiti by saving its soil. Beginning with anthropologist Alfred Métraux in 1946, soil erosion in Haiti was etched into the country’s profile as another area to be developed. Until that time, imagining Haiti as undeveloped was relatively unheard of. The black republic had long been portrayed as backward, its residents the “poor black cousins” of world powers such as the United States (Renda 2001). Yet seeing Haitians as undeveloped was something new, a product of post–World War II thinking that discursively divided the globe into developed and undeveloped regions (Escobar 1995). Haiti, like many other countries across the world, was described as stranded in time. According to development planners, technical expertise and education would bring an undeveloped Haiti up to the current practices of industrialized countries.
From the first aid intervention in Haiti in 1949, a significant part of that education and technical expertise was directed at Haiti’s soils. As in aid interventions elsewhere across the globe, poverty was “ecologized”; that is, it was visible not only in the material conditions of the people but also in the environment of a targeted area (Mosse 2005). Haiti was seen as both economically and environmentally poor, afflicted by impoverished soils, demographic pressure, and deficient farming practices. In part, this perspective lent itself to understanding Haiti’s environmental issues as self-produced. Growing populations and poor farming practices were seen as the issues to control in order to protect the hillsides. Because of the strong assumed link between farming practices and environmental degradation, the control and development of Haiti’s soil was simultaneously an effort to control and develop Haitian farmers.
As foreign soil experts and their environmental conservation programs descended on the country, they soon saw the possibility of using Haitian labor groups as a ready-made form of community participation. Seeking local adoption of the imported methods of soil conservation, experts looked for a way to tie economic incentives to the imported practices. In this case, the strategy was digging canals along the contours of hillsides. The hope was that by using wage labor to implement this strategy, farmers would be incentivized to quickly spread the technique to their individual plots. Yet for over sixty years, farmers have largely refused to adopt this practice in the absence of aid-based wage labor. Rotating agricultural groups in the Damòn valley of Haiti see their group-based work as fundamentally separate from such NGO-funded activities.1 Aid organization documents have depicted these views as the expression of an intensely self-interested rural populace. But farmers’ groups should be understood as engaging in and preserving a set of traditions that are deeply rooted in a vision of the collective.
This chapter advances the discussion of sovereignty by analyzing the ways collective agricultural labor practices are part of post-independence practices of unity and are expressions of collectivism in the face of the individualized wage labor that foreign capital and aid institutions impose. First, I detail how environmental aid projects have attempted to use Haiti’s collective labor groups as a site for incentivizing individualized wage labor. I then discuss how Haitian collective work groups operate in a very different way, by continuing to work for group rather than individual benefits. Finally, I demonstrate that such groups see aid-based wage labor as fundamentally opposed to Haitian rotating labor arrangements. I argue that we should understand Haiti’s group labor and nonadoption of soil conservation as part of ongoing practices of labor solidarity.
Environmental Degradation and Land Use Practices
Environmental degradation in Haiti occurs as a by-product of economic exploitation of natural resources. This process began early in the colonial period, when French plantation owners cleared forests to establish and subsequently fuel sugarcane plantations. In 1690, there were no sugar plantations in Saint-Domingue. By 1705, there were 120, and by 1789 (the eve of the Haitian revolution), there were well over 1,000 sugarcane plantations in the colony (Fick 2000). Blatant extraction of forest resources by foreign owners appeared again in the twentieth century, exacerbated by the U.S. occupation of 1915–1934. The occupying Americans cleared forests to build an extensive network of roads that facilitated access to more remote areas of the countryside, which were then also cleared (Mouhot 2013). Added to this flagrant resource extraction is the fact that the majority of the contemporary Haitian populace depends on biomass (both wood and charcoal) for cooking. While the impact of charcoal production is often highlighted as a main cause of deforestation, the impact of this industry on forest cover is still debated (Shannon et al. 2003).2
The intensive pressure farming puts on hillside plots also significantly increases the rate of soil erosion. As hillsides are intensely cultivated, exposed, and tilled, soil becomes vulnerable to degradation during heavy rains. It would be a mistake to simply blame farmers for such practices. The broader context of economic accumulation and extraction should be taken into account in any understanding of the processes that propel soil degradation. Farmers in Haiti are not subsistence farmers. In order to pay for necessary commodities, they sell much of their agricultural production. The movement of goods from the countryside to urban centers in inequitable trade relationships continually extracts resources from the countryside. The systematic marginalization of the rural poor in Haiti (Trouillot 1990) has meant that farmers turn to their small hillside plots as their primary source of capital and accordingly demand much of the land. As economic necessity dominates the agriculturalists, farmers are obliged to make decisions based on how they cope with stressors (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987). Overworked hillside plots result in degraded soil that is increasingly vulnerable to erosion.
The role of farmers as land managers is a small part of the larger issue. Larger political and economic processes play an important role in stressing hillside plots and contributing to anthropogenic soil erosion (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987). As a result of these processes, soil, arguably the most valuable natural resource of the Haitian countryside, descends downhill and escapes into the Caribbean.
The UNESCO development mission of 1946 was the first to declare Haiti’s soil degradation a crisis. That mission and many that followed did not address the broader relations between farmers and the economic system in which they operate. Rather, environmental aid interventions have focused far more myopically on the relationship between farmers and the land. This perspective has led to the promotion of short-term and often ineffective soil conservation measures.
Around the globe, soil conservation interventions of the twentieth century were defined in terms of the technical knowledge of state- and agency-led interventions (White and Jickling 1995). The 1930s dustbowl crisis in the United States raised fears about the potential dangers of unfettered soil degradation around the world (Pretty and Shah 1997). In response, colonial governments in Africa and South Asia looked to soil conservation strategies that developed in the post-dustbowl United States. But rather than thinking systematically about the larger economic policies and practices that were the underlying cause of the environmental disaster in the United States, those who promoted these interventions often misdiagnosed the problem and focused on farmers. In another example, white settlers in Kenya blamed indigenous Africans for the erosion of soil despite evidence that externally introduced cereal monoculture was the reason for soil exhaustion and declines in soil fertility (Anderson 1984). Such ideas spread quickly, and farmers were often forced to adopt soil conservation measures that ignored the root causes of degradation. In response, farmers often only partially implement the coercively imposed strategies. The result has been ineffective projects and inattention to the causes of soil erosion. The history of soil conservation is all too often a history of skeptical smallholding farmers being advised, paid, and forced to adopt new soil conservation measures (Pretty and Shah 1997).
Contour canals have been a key component of soil conservation interventions since the mid-twentieth century. These consist of series of ditches lined with trees that are dug along the contours of a hillside. Widely used internationally, the canals are accompanied by a mound (or bund) on their downhill wall. Trees planted in that bund are designed to reinforce the canal as it catches and slows descending rain and water. Such canals have been praised internationally and have been implemented as part of broader conservation interventions (Tiffen, Mortimore, and Gichuki 1994). Contour canals were constructed in Haiti as part of foreign agricultural or environmental aid initiatives. They have been implemented over the past sixty years as a quick and easy fix to the long-term and complex problem of sliding soils. The intervention requires little planning and can be implemented within a short time, provided the workers to do the heavy labor of digging are available.
Contour canals were introduced in Haiti through development interventions in the early 1950s. But even at that early point of implementation, they received negative reviews. As early as 1952, anthropologists and social scientists assessing the efficacy of contour canals recognized that farmers were not adopting them on their own. Farmers dug the canals when they were paid by a development agency, but when the project ended they would stop doing the maintenance the large hillside ditches require. Thus, the canals provided little benefit. Explanations for non-adoption of these strategies were largely economic: There wasn’t an immediate payoff from the canals (Erasmus 1952; White and Jickling 1995). Theories about the benefits of soil conservation and the potential for higher crop yields did not appear until years later. Critics of the existing policies argued that if individual farmers were to construct these canals, they would need immediate economic incentives (Murray 1979). This would supposedly buy time for farmers to see the long-term benefits of such practices and adopt them as their own, independent of external funding. But time and again, even when farmers have received wages as incentives, they have not adopted canals in their own farming practices (White and Jickling 1995). After more than sixty years of contour canal projects, farmers and their labor groups still do not replicate contour canals of their own accord. Though various types of aid continue to support the construction of canals, they are built only when farmers and laborers are paid to do so by project funding.3
By the late 1970s, aid organizations that initiated the construction of contour canals began using Haitian group labor in the countryside in an effort to implement more participatory aid interventions. USAID projects up to that point had been critiqued as top-down schemes devised by technical planners who were often divorced from realities on the ground. By the 1970s, USAID in Haiti was widely criticized for propagating politically motivated “top-down development” because the institution’s large programs had often benefited politically connected and well-off urban residents rather than small rural farmers (Girault 1978). As part of its response to this criticism, USAID researchers identified Haiti’s collective labor groups as a way to harness “participative” group labor to the goals of development aid (Murray 1979). Aid planners revered Haiti’s existing cooperative labor groups as ideal models for community participation in project-based development. Haiti was not the only place where such strategies were implemented in international aid projects; project managers in other parts of the world also looked toward participatory development models as a solution to the problem of unsuccessful projects (Cooke and Kothari 2001). By the 1980s, group labor in the countryside was both an instrument of and a target of the agro-environmental strategy in Haiti.
As aid institutions proposed group-based wage labor as the most feasible incentive for building soil conservation structures, debates raged about whether it was ethical to introduce wage labor practices to residents of Haiti’s hillsides. On one side of the argument, some scholars and aid practitioners voiced fears that the practice would contaminate local types of labor exchange and reciprocation. They argued that the existing cooperative labor systems worked in fundamentally different ways than wage labor and that cooperative forms of labor would be co-opted by a type of poorly conceived development planning (Smith 2001). Other scholars and aid planners saw this argument as spurious, arguing that these groups were already practicing wage labor by renting themselves out to other landowners (Murray 1978). And indeed they did (and continue to do so). During my field work in 2012, I observed that Haitian cooperative labor groups regularly rented themselves out to other farmers, particularly at harvest time or when weeding was necessary. To understand these practices as simply wage labor, however, is problematic. In practice, labor in the countryside is not reducible to a simple exchange of wages. Such analyses impose a vision of western capitalism and individualism on practices that have an entirely different set of values.
Histories of Collective Labor
Group labor is well recognized in the anthropological literature as a ubiquitous aspect of rural Haitian agriculture (Smith 2001; Trouillot 1990; Métraux 1951; Herskovits 1952). Rotational labor groups practice cooperative labor, drawing on forms of labor organization from West and Central Africa. In Haiti, these groups are called (most famously) the konbit or eskwad or ekip. While the names may differ by region, the nature of their activities is fundamentally the same. For each day of work, which may include weeding, harvesting, or planting, the group works a different member’s land. The group may work together once or twice a week, rotating to a different member’s plot for each day of work. This rotating labor is referred to broadly as youn ede lòt (one helps another). No payment is exchanged; the rotation of the labor group ensures that all benefit equally. In the absence of tractors and other farming machinery, help from groups is an essential component of Haitian agriculture. Throughout Haiti, plots of land are rarely worked by solitary individuals (Murray 1978). The spirit of such collective labor is embodied in Haitian proverbs such as Men anpil, chay pa lou (With many hands, the burden is not heavy) and Yon sèl dwèt pa manje kalalou (One finger alone cannot eat stewed okra) (Smith 2001).
While cooperative labor is fundamentally based on shared and rotational work, cash is exchanged when groups are hired by nonmember landowners who need large groups for planting, harvesting, or weeding.4 Because the small labor groups of ekip and eskwad are more likely to rent labor to those outside the group, anthropological research that informed the design of aid projects in the 1980s pointed to this as evidence that wage labor was already part of village life. Thus, using wage labor in aid projects, it was argued, would not upset existing rural labor practices. One anthropologist estimated that an ekip or eskwad “may spend about half its time working for wages” (Murray 1978, 6, emphasis in original). This report cautioned development planners not to look for “romantic ideals” of countryside labor untainted by cash exchanges. Though Murray cautioned that remuneration through hourly wages were rarely successful components of aid projects, he (1979) advocated the use of some type of monetized incentive to introduce farmers to new practices.
Today, group agricultural labor is often exchanged for predetermined amounts of cash. Those amounts are often based on the number of individuals that compose the group, though occasionally the price is calculated by quantity of land to be worked. As money changes hands, the labor potential of the group is sold for the going rate in the countryside.5 But as I learned from farmers, any analytical construct that reduces these rates to purely individual wages misreads the practice of group labor.
One farmer explained to me precisely how this works on an early summer morning in the lower Damòn valley in the south of Haiti in 2012. That morning, I accompanied a landowner named Bekèl as he supervised an eskwad that was harvesting peanuts on his land. We took a donkey and two sheep to pasture on our way to meet the eskwad. Damòn is a very hilly region, so we followed the streams of the valley instead of scaling the large hills. When we arrived at the base of the hillside where Bekèl had planted peanuts, the eskwad was already there. The group was composed of two men, three women, and a female cook. Bekèl explained that the money he would pay the group does not go to each individual but would be held in common as a collective payment that would be conserved until December: “The eskwad joins their money together and in December buys an animal to kill.” That animal is butchered and the meat is divided for the celebration of Haitian Independence Day (January 1), a day highlighted by a symbolically significant meal of pumpkin soup and meat. Following the purchase of the animal, any remaining funds left over are divided among the group members. Again and again, ekip and eskwad members in the Damòn region told me that the money they receive is not used until December. Hence, payments by landowners such as Bekèl yielded no immediate economic returns. The payout for such work might be months away.
Bekèl stated quite clearly that members of an eskwad are present “not because you are hungry … but rather because you want to buy an animal to have a part of the meat in December.” This underscores the fact that hillside labor is often not wage based but instead is part of a work tradition based on a collective celebration. As one farmer put it, he and his fellow group members work in this way not for immediate remuneration but for “a goodwill that will help you in the future” (bon volontè kap ede w devan). This tradition, I was told, was upheld because those enslaved in colonial Saint-Domingue were not permitted to eat pumpkin soup. Jennie Smith (2001) has documented that meat was also denied to those who were enslaved and was reserved for slave owners on that day. Thus, the soup and the meat are symbolic of the privileges of freedom denied under slavery.
The determination of Haitian collective work groups to overlook immediate needs in order to meet a future collective goal is remarkable considering the pressures of costly school fees, the high cost of food and other household necessities, and unpredictable events such as crop loss due to draughts and hurricanes. By undertaking ongoing group work, collective labor groups ensure that meat, a precious and symbolically important commodity, is added to soup for each member on the anniversary of independence. These ongoing practices are powerful assertions of the unity, freedom, and humanity of contemporary rural Haitians.
“We do not do that type of work”
The structure and practices of Haiti’s rural groups play an essential role in determining what type of labor they take on. Despite the continual enticements of wage labor, farmers do not construct contour canals as part of their cooperative work group efforts. They repeatedly told me that contour canals were a good thing and that they could in fact help address soil degradation.6 But despite that, no farmer would pay another farmer for such work. As one male farmer told me, it was simply “not like that” (se pa sa). I was often told that “we do not do that type of work.”
Through extensive interviews in Damòn about soil conservation and labor, it became apparent that Haitian farmers saw a qualitative difference between the work of project-based labor and group work done in the fields. The rate aid agencies paid for digging canals was far greater than any price an individual in the countryside could find for individual or task labor. In 2012, while development project-based labor paid a standard 200 goud per day,7 the going local rate for an individual who hired him or herself out to a fellow farmer was about 100 goud per day, according to Lebèl, the president of a farmers’ association in Damòn. For peanut harvesting, the price was far less, 25 or 50 goud, as Bekèl, Lebèl, and others I interviewed confirmed. In comparison to local rates, the 200 goud paid for digging contour canals is a sizable amount of money. Such large monetary differences contribute to the understanding in the countryside that project-based labor is conceptually distinct from agricultural labor in the countryside.
My interviews with rural Haitians about soil conservation and labor revealed that the quantitative difference in compensation contributes to a conception that there is a qualitative difference between NGO labor and rotational labor. One day I asked Nelson and his father, both members of a farmers’ association, to help me understand why individuals refused to adopt the practice of constructing contour canals. Both said that they had seen many soil conservation projects come and go. Nelson’s father spoke about how even though people understood soil conservation to be important, they still wanted something that would benefit them: “When soil conservation is mentioned, people know that [external] money is coming.” He added that “people won’t form groups to do this work.” I asked Franswa’s daughter, another rural farmer, if it would be possible for a landowner to pay for soil conservation. She responded: “Se pa yon met pou peye. Se pa sa” (It is not for a landowner to pay. It is not like that).
Whereas group labor is most often structured around collective participation and delayed benefit, project labor is structured around individualism and immediacy. While project-based labor groups appear to work as a collective “team,” they receive only individual benefits immediately following their work. While it is true that much project-based labor is done by locally based organizations such as community or neighborhood associations, women’s groups, and the like, these groups are not compensated as a group, as is typical in the most common labor arrangements in Haiti.
Implicit in project labor is the assumption that the unit of labor is the individual. This assumption is based on the ideas of industrialized labor and the insertion of foreign capital. With foreign capital comes the idea of an industrialized workday that regulates both time and space. While there have been various fluctuations in and contestations of the minimum wage in Haiti (Schuller 2008), in 2012, aid agencies seemed to rely on the national minimum wage rate of 200 goud per day as they calculated a project wage. Formal labor arrangements in Haiti, especially those based on trade agreements, have long taken advantage of an impoverished Haiti to pay low wages in the assembly and textile sectors (Farmer 2004). The type of funding that comes into the countryside with aid projects is thus organized into daily “wages” that are regularized by international labor accords. Such agreements, however, do not recognize the organization and practices of the countryside, practices that may not always be simply divisible into individuals and hours.
While monetized compensation for labor does exist in the countryside, it is done primarily through the work of individuals, not groups. But even for an individual, it would be a distortion to understand rural labor exchanges simply as wage labor: “Agrarian wage labor should be studied as one transaction within a system of agrarian labor transactions, and not simply as an exchange of labor for cash” (Pierre 2009, 151). Work performed by individuals for a specific task might also be exchanged for other types of labor, and sellers of labor might also be buyers of labor, challenging the dyadic patron-client model of rural work (Pierre 2009).
In rural Haiti, the often urgent need for cash is such that an offer of simple wage labor by project funding is nearly a coercive incentive to implement contour canals. In the receipt of wages, farmers, a knowledgeable and valuable part of agricultural production, are reduced to simple workers devoid of adequate technical knowledge and experience. They become merely “beneficiaries,” or recipients of aid. Development-funded group labor appears to conform to the norms of the countryside but in fact fails to understand far more complex relationships.
Conclusion
An anthropologist who contracts with USAID and the World Bank described the countryside by stating that farmers are intensely self-interested and that their self-interest is tempered only by special ties and obligations. He argued that there is little evidence of any community solidarity in Haiti (Smucker 1983). Another social analysis done by USAID regarding its agroforestry intervention claims that “for good historical reasons, Haitian rural society has always been highly individualized” (Lowenthal 1990, 11). However, Jennie Smith (2001) argues that the work of the eskwad and ekip are not only acts of teamwork in the field, they are a profound assertion of dignity, independence, and interdependence in the face of constant struggle. My research carried out in Damòn demonstrates that group labor in the fields of Haiti is not simply a means to an individual end but is an ongoing practice of collectivism built on core values of independence and freedom.8
As aid projects contemplate the Haitian countryside, the desire to propagate short-sighted interventions and maintain a perspective of Western capitalism eclipses the powerful modes of solidarity practiced in the countryside. Ethnographic research on aid and the Haitian countryside can help present practices in appropriate historical and cultural context. Historians Laurent Dubois (this volume and Dubois 2012) and Jean Casimir (2001) trace labor and land practices in post-revolution Haiti, shedding light on how specific rural practices and systems have survived since independence. After the revolution, Haiti’s rural populace vehemently opposed structures that echoed the restoration or continuation of the exploitative model of the plantation. Since then, attempts by both the Haitian government and the United States to reestablish plantations have largely failed. This post-revolution arrangement of land and labor, the counter-plantation system, was an explicit rejection of the ways plantations worked and drew on forms of African agricultural organization and spirituality and on examples learned from maroon communities of runaway slaves (Dubois 2012). Such institutions embraced collective labor arrangements that are still practiced in the countryside.
Despite concerns that development work would contaminate the cooperative work groups of Haiti, the ekip and eskwad remain connected to collective ideals and their practices and work arrangements go far beyond a simple monetary reward. Outsiders seeking to “modernize” the Haitian countryside are often frustrated by what they see as cultural or administrative impediments to progress. But these frustrations often arise from misunderstanding. The work of konbit, eskwad, and ekip are not only acts of teamwork, they are also part of a value set that differs significantly from those that inform individualized wage labor.
Since the dawn of the development encounter in Haiti, soils have been among the most visible and contentious targets of aid funding. By looking at the history of soil conservation interventions, we can better understand not only the state of contemporary environmental development but also the broader issues of aid in Haiti. As international experts intervene to rearrange the practices of farmers, counter-plantation institutions are strong examples of ways that practices in the Haitian countryside remain Haitian. In considering who owns soils and labor practices in Haiti, we must reconsider the intimate relationship between rotational labor and independence.
Notes
1. All names of individuals and places have been changed.
2. In fact, the degree of deforestation in Haiti is a highly contested issue. Recent studies (Churches et al. 2014) have argued that Haiti has a tree cover of approximately 32 percent. This contrasts distinctly with the often cited statistics of 2–4 percent forest cover (Bannister and Nair 2003; Dolisca et al. 2007).
3. In Freeman (2014), I examine how financialized measurement systems and a deep need for project success are key aspects of the repeated construction of contour canals.
4. Not all collective work groups sell their labor. Konbit I observed in 2012 did not rent labor to nonmembers.
5. In Damòn in 2012, the rate paid per person for peanut harvests was between 25 and 50 goud per day of work, approximately US$.58 to $1.15 at the time.
6. Despite the marginal benefits of contour canals, rural residents often verbally expressed initial approval or interest in the canals as an intervention.
7. Approximately US$4.67 in 2012.
8. As Smith (2001) has pointed out, it is important not to overstate collective labor arrangements as either the romanticized communalism of the “noble savage” or the trope of the economically rational actor because both of these interpretations oversimplify these complex relationships. Discussions of such actions must be based on historically and ethnographically particular research.
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