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The theory in the article is that the political instability have encouraged the coffee farmers to concentrate on short-term gain rather than that long-term view
by cmiles74 10y ago
The theory in the article is that the political instability have encouraged the coffee farmers to concentrate on short-term gain rather than that long-term view that is required to grow a coffee plant crop. They begin outlining this idea on page two, which is arguably far too deep into the article.
Because that transition has been never-ending, an entire generation has now passed since 1986 where uncertainty about the political future is the norm. And the political bleeds into everything, including the day-to-day choices made by all Haitians, rural farmers included.
And then a little further on they finally tie it to coffee
If you're unsure what the political winds will bring next year, or who might be in power and how it will affect you, why would you invest in a long-term cash crop that takes years to pay off? To make sure you can provide for your family, you'd be wiser to focus on the food-crop harvest that's just a few months away, which is exactly what Haitian farmers do.
Later on in the article, they spend time on what the aid organizations are actually doing and how this is counter-productive if their goal is to truly help Haitian farmers become self sufficient.
- M_Grey 10y agoI don't have any problem with the link between political instability, desperate poverty, and subsistence farming... it's not exactly a new or controversial link after all. It's really just the specific claim I quoted, which as far as I can see is then immediately abandoned.
- ctdonath 10y agoHow is it abandoned? The whole rest of the article describes how it's more profitable to request charitable aid to facilitate coffee farming than it is to actually do long-term coffee farming. The farmer first depicted doesn't want to cut down his badly-maintained coffee tree precisely because those few fruits it produces lets him legitimately say "I grow coffee, but need money/equipment donations to improve it", garnering cash or sellable equipment that he can proceed to buy food with; if he actually applied those donations to seriously improve his farming, there's no way he can get that tree to produce enough to greater return than just "chasing [and abusing] charity". You see the point abandoned, I see the point fairly summarizing the entire article.