Content area
Full text
Margaret Trost was on her second visit to Haiti when the relationship between public policies and personal catastrophes became crystal clear to her.
Trost, 45, earned her master's in journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and worked in production at WHA-TV. She first went to Haiti in early 2000 to try to find some meaning in her life after the sudden death of her husband from an asthma attack at their Cottage Grove home in September 1997.
While there, she discovered an opportunity to help a priest in Port-au-Prince start a lunch program for the very hungry children who inhabit this poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. A few months later, she was back trying to learn more.
She went to the farmers' market on a Saturday in July with a woman who was gathering food for the Sunday meal they would serve to some 500 children the next day. While there, Trost paused for a few moments, sitting on a rice sack.
Rice is one of the staple foods in Haiti. It also was one of the main crops in Haiti. So Trost assumed that the rice they were buying would be from Haiti. She was surprised to see all the rice sacks around her were stamped with "USA."
What she learned was that in the 1980s, the international agencies that provide loans to impoverished countries like Haiti required them to reduce tariff protections for their own rice, opening up the country to competition from other nations. U.S. rice quickly undersold Haitian rice and the farmers there went out of business, migrating to the cities in the almost hopeless quest of finding other work.
Trost...