Gender in the World Food Economy: Inequitable Transformation of Haiti’s Food Economy

Jennifer Vansteenkiste

doi:10.3389/fcomm.2022.755994

Abstract

Over the past five decades, agricultural trade liberalization and integration into the global food system have undermined gender equality, women’s empowerment, and food security in Haiti. International actors who design agricultural policies are aware of gendered contributions to Haitian food security, yet ignore this knowledge to privilege an ideological belief that trade liberalization and structural adjustment programs will advance gender equality. I argue that agriculture and food policies must treat gender roles and responsibilities as constitutive to the solution by recognizing their critical contribution to the structure of Haitian agrarian society and accordingly food security. I advance this claim by analyzing scholarly literature, institutional documents, and interviews with interlocutors (n= 292) from rural, peri-urban, and urban settings across Haiti to document how: 1) dominant narratives support an ideological belief that trade liberalization will advance gender equality; 2) integration of Haiti’s local food economy into the world food economy demands the reorientation of gendered labour; 3) women must participate in a system that while purporting to improve food security, ultimately diminishes their nutrition and social, economic and political wellbeing. This research documents that policies designed to globalize Haiti’s food economy on the premise of improving food security actually force women to abandon agricultural production and intensify their labour in less lucrative distribution and consumption roles of imported goods. This analysis documents that the transition ultimately reifies gender inequalities, heighten food insecurity, and contributes to feminist food scholarship.

Highlights

While the world food economy is widely credited for providing affordable food, it is increasingly criticized for delivering price spikes and food insecurity to countries of the Global South (Clapp, 2012); Haiti is no exception
This paper contributes to feminist food scholarship and addresses these scholarly gaps by documenting how: 1) dominant narratives support an ideological belief that trade liberalization will advance gender equality; 2) integration of Haiti’s local and gendered food economy into the world food economy demands the reorientation of the poto mitan, and; 3) Haitian women must participate in a system that purports to improve their food security yet diminishes their income, nutrition, health, social, economic and political wellbeing
As garden production became less competitive in local markets, Haitian women began to leave the lakou and migrate to urban centers for work and to find better schools to prepare their children for a non-agricultural future inscribed with higher status

Summary

Introduction

While the world food economy is widely credited for providing affordable food, it is increasingly criticized for delivering price spikes and food insecurity to countries of the Global South (Clapp, 2012); Haiti is no exception. National production supplies just 43 percent of Haiti’s food needs, 51 percent is met by food imports and 6 percent by food aid, leaving the population vulnerable to global price spikes; by comparison, in 1981 food imports represented only 18 percent of the Haitian diet (MARNDR, 2010; Julie et al, 2017). Despite this decline in consumption of local production, 60 percent of the Haitian population still participate in farming (Cohen, 2013). Because the world food economy remains production and profitdriven, there seems to be little concerted effort from the international community to readjust these damaging policies to improve the situation

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