The Papay Peasant Movement (MPP), one of Haiti’s largest peasant organizations, celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023. With nearly 60,000 members, including peasant youth, women, and men, the MPP focuses on agroecology, popular education, environmental management, and gender issues.
Operating in 13 communes and 35 communal sections, the MPP utilizes Paulo Freire’s method of popular education to engage with rural communities. In an interview with Capire, Juslene Tyresias from the MPP discussed the peasant struggle in Haiti and the current battle against US imperialism. This interview took place during the Rising Majority Congress in Saint Louis, United States, in June 2024, which brought together 700 members from various grassroots organizations, parties, unions, and human rights movements.
Juslene also highlighted the systematic dismantling of Haiti’s food sovereignty due to neoliberal trade policies.
Since the 1980s, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and institutions like the International Monetary Fund have imposed economic reforms that undermined domestic food production and increased reliance on US food imports. For example, in 1995, tariffs on rice imports were reduced from 35% to 3%, which had devastating effects on producer prices, domestic production, and the livelihoods of small farmers. Consequently, Haiti’s rice imports soared from approximately 7,337 tons in 1985 to nearly 260,000 tons in 2005.
Juslene also addressed the health impacts of these policies in her interview: “Since the 1980s, Haiti, which was once a sovereign, self-sufficient country in terms of food, has faced a massive influx of imported products. Specifically, rice from the United States and Asian countries is overtaking our local production. According to a study published in February 2024 by the University of Michigan, the imported rice we heavily consume in Haiti contains two cancer-causing elements: cadmium and arsenic,” she says.
Earlier this year, Reuters cited the same study, noting that the average arsenic and cadmium concentrations were nearly twice as high in imported rice compared to Haitian-grown rice, with some imported samples exceeding international limits. Nearly all imported rice samples surpassed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s recommended limits for children’s consumption.