Istwa Nou

The Import-Export Bank of the United States put seven million dollars into SHADA. The money cleared land, paid farmers to work it, and hired administrators to run crop development, production and export. More than ninety thousand Haitians and Americans were employed on the programme. It went wrong from the beginning, and the reason was that the agricultural ambition had been drawn up without much attention to the ground it was to be carried out on. Cultivation takes years that a wartime shortage does not allow. A drought ran through 1943 and 1944. The cryptostegia vine failed to take root in areas the plan depended on. A fire went through one of the SHADA sites. What seven million dollars bought was a demonstration that Philippine agriculture does not transfer to Caribbean soil on demand, and a wide stretch of Haitian countryside stripped of what had been growing on it, which stayed stripped after the programme closed.

The Société Haïtienne-Américaine de Développement Agricole was set up to grow rubber for a wartime market, and its method was to take farmland out of food. Crews cleared standing crops and cut down trees that bore fruit so that rubber could be planted in their place. Peasant families were moved off the plots they worked. The returns came in slowly and small. What the project delivered instead was displacement on a mass scale and the loss of the fruit-bearing stock that households had eaten from for generations. Fruit trees take years to bear. A family that loses one loses a decade of food, not a season of it. The rubber that replaced them failed to take hold, so the cleared ground gave nothing back to anybody. The ecological damage and the human damage were the same damage counted twice, and both were charged to people who had not asked for the scheme and could not refuse it.

Jeanne Sylvain signed on for one year of what she took to be easy work, and she did not yet know what was going wrong in the fields. The duties were clerical. She read the daily and weekly papers closely, cut out everything that mentioned SHADA, and translated any article or note that carried weight. Doing that for months taught her what the newspaper was for. Part of her work was to pass over the inefficiencies and produce a picture of a productive enterprise, for Haitian readers and for the American partners paying the bills. Once she translated a long humorous piece and tried to place it. Her supervisor, the United States agronomist Thomas A. Fennell, struck it out and told her it fell outside the scope of the paper. A Haitian woman was being edited by an American man on the question of what could be printed about American work on Haitian land.