Is anyone listening, can you see it?

[RodISHI]

Maybe this earthquake is a wakeup call to what is happening to the people of Haiti. How many people really care one way or another. I'm sure most of y'all don't bake dirt cookies in order to keep from starving each day.

Take a good look America at Haiti because this could very well be what your future looks like. Just as Care stated, "You reap what you sow". America's investors have assisted in lending their money to such disastors as have befell Haiti and many other poor countries throughout the world.

In Haiti the bank/corporates have stripped the wealth from many of the people, many banker types control the food supply and the food processing plants.

A few devastating natural disastors such as has stricken Haiti, drought, tornados, hurricanes and earthquakes and such, you will not recognize this country in twenty years or so.

A Day in the Life of Cite Soleil

excerpt- "Then, in 1986, prodded by the IMF and the World Bank, Haiti dropped import tariffs from 30 percent to less than 3 percent. Today they sit at about 2.5 percent. Almost all Haitians I interviewed blamed this disastrous decision as the root cause of Haiti's current catastrophe.

So why did Haiti abruptly change its policy? First, the two organizations bought Haiti's acceptance by offering vast loans (Haiti is still struggling to pay them back today). Second, the deal was part of a grandiose proposal meant to form the country into manufacturing-based economy. The IMF and the World Bank made this same mistake in many other poor countries, and today the two organizations admit the reckless policies contributed to today's global food crisis.

The drastic move from protectionism to an open market was welcomed at first. Cheap US rice flooded the market, driving down locally produced crops. As Fifine said, "food was so cheap right after the 1986 decision — rice was everywhere." But the explosion of American rice was a short-lived gain and a harbinger of future disaster.

Small Haitian farms were the hardest hit. Prices plunged with the deluge of cheap imported food, making it impossible for small Haitian farmers to compete with factory farms in Florida. The local agriculture industry collapsed. Many farmers, like Fifine, left their land and moved to Port Au Prince.

Today, Haiti's land is egregiously underutilized. It has the land to grow 200,000 metric tons of rice a year, but current production is at a dismal 90,000. Once self-sustaining, the country now produces less than half of what it eats.

The drying up of farming was accompanied by an enormous shift in eating habits. Using a strange kind of Pavlovian economic conditioning — bizarrely analogous to how American ranchers changed the diet of US cattle from grass to corn — Haiti was led to change its diet to US-produced rice. What 20 years ago was a weekly meal has become a daily necessity. Ask any Haitian today and they'll tell you a meal in Haiti isn't a meal without rice."

Flak Magazine | A Day in the Life of Cite Soleil, 07.16.08

Jonathan M. Katz in Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Associated Press
January 30, 2008

It was lunchtime in one of Haiti's worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud.

With food prices rising, Haiti's poorest can't afford even a daily plate of rice, and some must take desperate measures to fill their bellies.

Charlene, 16 with a month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country's central plateau.

The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. But in places such as Cité Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings, and two unemployed parents, cookies made of dirt, salt, and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.........

Poverty News Blog: Poor Haitians Resort to Eating Dirt

* Press Release
Organic Dairy Farmers Fight for Justice and Their Livelihoods
The Cornucopia Institute, May 14, 2009
Straight to the Source

Contact: Mark Kastel, 608-625-2042

Giant Factory Farms Exploiting Federal Regulatory Loopholes

CINCINNATI, OHIO: Organic farmers from around the country, and cooperatives and advocacy groups that represent them, converged on southern Ohio over the past two weeks to plead with federal regulators to close loopholes being exploited by a handful of giant factory farms. They argued that these mega-dairies were creating turmoil in the marketing of organic milk and forcing some family farmers out of business.

The multiweek USDA administrative law hearing, populated by many more lawyers than farmers, representing the interests of powerful dairy marketers on both sides of the argument, is taking testimony in order to decide the future of the "producer-handler exemption."

When the nation's farm regulators, over 70 years ago, devised a system to fairly share the extra profits from bottled fluid milk, which is more profitable than cheese and other dairy manufacturing, they allowed for an opt-out for farmers who produced their own milk and bottled it on the farm. These direct-marketers were generally small family-owned operations delivering milk to their local communities.

Flash forward to this century, and a number of giant producer-handlers, alleged to be "gaming the system," are milking thousands of cows on industrial-scale dairies-certainly a far cry from the system that was established to benefit family farmers selling to local markets

The concerns of the organic community's approximate 1800 family farmers have focused on Aurora Dairy Corporation, a $100 million vertically integrated producer that operates five dairies in Texas and Colorado, milking between 10,000 and 20,000 cows.

"Corporations such as Aurora Organic Dairy, which are currently claiming the exemption for producer-handlers, have caused catastrophic marketplace disruption in the organic dairy industry, in part as a result of this outdated regulation," said Mark A. Kastel, senior Farm Policy Analyst for the Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute. The exemption saves Aurora millions of dollars that would otherwise be equitably shared with dairy farmers around the country.

Cornucopia and others in the organic industry have claimed that Aurora, which is the country's leading manufacturer of private-label organic milk, supplying such giant retailers as Wal-Mart, Costco, Target and Safeway, have used the exemption to undercut legitimate industry participants putting many farms at risk.

Lawyers for Aurora and other dairy interests spent over an hour arguing with the administrative law judge in the hearing in an attempt to exclude Cornucopia's testimony. They especially objected to Kastel bringing up the fact that Aurora is widely viewed as a "bad actor" in the organic industry and thus their credibility in this matter should be questioned.

The USDA, pursuant to a formal legal complaint filed against Aurora, found that the giant dairy concern had violated 14 tenets of the organic regulations including illegally operating a feedlot, rather than grazing their cattle as required, and bringing in conventional cattle that did not qualify to produce organic milk. After recommendations by USDA staff to decertify the enterprise, Bush administration officials let the corporation off, requiring only some changes to their operations and a one-year probation. Aurora is now the subject of 19 class-action, consumer fraud lawsuits being adjudicated in federal district court in St. Louis (the USDA found that Aurora had marketed milk labeled as organic but did not qualify for the designation).

Rick Segalla, a certified organic dairy farmer milking 115 cows in Canann, Connecticut, and representing the Northeast Organic Dairy Producers Alliance, testified in support of a production cap of 450,000 lbs of milk per month to qualify as a producer-handler. "This honors the original intent and purpose of the exemption, makes allowance for existing small businesses, who have made capital investments, and takes into account the size of organic dairy herds in the twenty-first century," Segalla said. He also testified at the hearing on behalf of the Federation of Organic Dairy Farmers.

Another farmer who made a trip to Cincinnati was Kathie Arnold, of Truxton, New York. Along with her husband and brother-in-law she described their investments to convert their 30-year-old business, managing 250 head of cattle, to organic production. "One of the basic principles of the Federal Milk Marketing Order system is to provide equity between producers. That principle is being compromised with the current producer handler exemption . when some of today's producer handlers are milking many thousands of cows. The economic advantage they have by not paying pooling costs creates an inequitable playing field."

Unlike small, local or regional producer-handlers, Aurora ships milk from a single processing plant, in central Colorado, nationwide. It is accused of undercutting prices for family farmers in every federal marketing order in the country.




Lawyers for Aurora and other dairy interests spent over an hour arguing with the administrative law judge in the hearing in an attempt to exclude Cornucopia's testimony. They especially objected to Kastel bringing up the fact that Aurora is widely viewed as a "bad actor" in the organic industry and thus their credibility in this matter should be questioned.

The USDA, pursuant to a formal legal complaint filed against Aurora, found that the giant dairy concern had violated 14 tenets of the organic regulations including illegally operating a feedlot, rather than grazing their cattle as required, and bringing in conventional cattle that did not qualify to produce organic milk. After recommendations by USDA staff to decertify the enterprise, Bush administration officials let the corporation off, requiring only some changes to their operations and a one-year probation. Aurora is now the subject of 19 class-action, consumer fraud lawsuits being adjudicated in federal district court in St. Louis (the USDA found that Aurora had marketed milk labeled as organic but did not qualify for the designation).

Rick Segalla, a certified organic dairy farmer milking 115 cows in Canann, Connecticut, and representing the Northeast Organic Dairy Producers Alliance, testified in support of a production cap of 450,000 lbs of milk per month to qualify as a producer-handler. "This honors the original intent and purpose of the exemption, makes allowance for existing small businesses, who have made capital investments, and takes into account the size of organic dairy herds in the twenty-first century," Segalla said. He also testified at the hearing on behalf of the Federation of Organic Dairy Farmers.

Another farmer who made a trip to Cincinnati was Kathie Arnold, of Truxton, New York. Along with her husband and brother-in-law she described their investments to convert their 30-year-old business, managing 250 head of cattle, to organic production. "One of the basic principles of the Federal Milk Marketing Order system is to provide equity between producers. That principle is being compromised with the current producer handler exemption . when some of today's producer handlers are milking many thousands of cows. The economic advantage they have by not paying pooling costs creates an inequitable playing field."

Unlike small, local or regional producer-handlers, Aurora ships milk from a single processing plant, in central Colorado, nationwide. It is accused of undercutting prices for family farmers in every federal marketing order in the country.

"They ship their milk from their one plant to Portland, Oregon, Portland, Wisconsin, and Portland, Maine-all regions of the country where family farmers milk cows locally, established a relationship with organic consumers, and have been building the business that Aurora is now exploiting," Kastel testified.

Organic dairy producer Tony Schilter traveled all the way from Washington state to testify and answer questions during cross examination from the lawyers present. Speaking extemporaneously, Mr. Schilter justified closing the loophole currently being exploited by the giant dairies, by illustrating how two geographic regions in the country had already limited the size of producer-handlers operating and that it was time for this to happen on a national basis.

"The exploitation of dairy farmers around the country, by large corporations taking advantage of loopholes in the current regulations, needs to end," explained Cornucopia's Kastel. "Just like tax shelters where American corporations have moved headquarters or subsidiaries to Bermuda, or played games like transferring the ownership of their intellectual property to dummy corporations, we need our regulators to recognize when our laws need to change to protect the American public."

State officials in Wisconsin, Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire also testified at the hearing in support of entrepreneurial dairy farmers who continue to legitimately utilize the producer-handler exemption, but the states joined organic producers in asking for the scale of these exempt direct marketers to be limited.

The hearing continues and is expected to stretch over a total of two to three weeks. Stakeholders will next file briefs, and USDA milk marketing administrators will then make a recommendation on potential reforms to the Secretary of Agriculture for implementation.

The Cornucopia Institute, a Wisconsin-based nonprofit farm policy research group, is dedicated to the fight for economic justice for the family-scale farming community. Their Organic Integrity Project acts as a corporate and governmental watchdog assuring that no compromises to the credibility of organic farming methods and the food it produces are made in the pursuit of profit.

Giant So-Called 'Organic' Factory Farms Operated by Aurora Exploiting Federal Regulatory Loopholes

Haitian Hell
A Government Gone Awry

Haitian Hell - A Government Gone Awry

excerpt----
The country's infrastructure is in sad shape. Although roads now link the north coast city of Cap Haitian and the south coast city of Jacmel, roads within Port-au-Prince are a shambles, overburdened by increasing numbers of autos. Power outages are common, partly because tankers carrying diesel fuel for Haiti's generators won't unload until they're paid in advance with U.S. Currency. The sewage system, built for a city of 100,000, is also falling apart. Only 20 percent of the capital's residents have access to safe drinking water, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development. The lake behind the Italian-built Peligre Dam is badly silted, and only two of its four penstocks are usable; funds provided for a suction dredge in the lake were never used for that purpose-they disappeared.




Excerpt------One of Port-au-Prince's newer businesses is selling water by the bucket. Entrepreneurs drive tank trucks into the mountains, fill up and return to the city to sell the water at exorbitant prices. Yet, at the same time, Haiti:

* Buys four small Italian jet fighters, whose price comes to about $3 million apiece, including maintenance and training.
* Pays Michele Duvalier, President-for-Life Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier's wife, $50,000 a month.
* Redecorates the Duvalier's four bedroom suite in the big, white presidential palace closely guarded by police.
* Builds a mausoleum intended for Baby Doc's father, Francis (Papa Doc) Duvalier, who ruled from 1957 to his death in 1971. Fortunately, says a diplomat, "good taste prevailed", and the mausoleum, in a park not far from the Place of Heroes of Independence, where homeless Haitians sleep under sheltering statues, has been turned into a public museum with an entry fee of $3.