Financializing Haiti; or, Today in non sequiturs

I recently read a fascinating piece in Forbes about an NGO in Haiti. The author of the piece is Willy Foote, the founder of "an agricultural lender" called Root Capital.  The point of the piece is to celebrate the work of the expiring Clinton-Bush Fund by explaining some of the fine things that Root has done with Fund resources, and to explain the challenges that make the business environment in Haiti unlike any other environment in the world.

So on the way to doing this work Mr Foote writes the following:

We have worked in 30 African, Latin American and Caribbean countries since 2000 and we’re bringing all that learning and innovation to address the challenges of building agricultural businesses that generate long-term social, economic and environmental sustainability in rural Haiti.  It has been hard, truth to tell. The business challenges concentrated in that one small, impoverished nation are formidable—from weak government systems, to severe environmental degradation (less than 1.5 percent of land is forested in Haiti) to limited education and poor health status.
Consequently, most groups in Haiti, regardless of their business experience, need some form of financial management training intervention in order to grow and thrive.

This is important work, to be sure, and Mr. Foote points us to some important considerations. But that  'consequently' worries me. In order to accept financial management training as the solution to the problems that he mentions, one has to make at least one big assumption, and leave a lot of questions unasked. (OK, so this is less a non sequitur than an argument with suppressed premises. But it feels like a non sequitur.)



The assumption is that all of the challenges mentioned are akin to natural conditions - that they are just a part of the environment like mountains, and that one must simply adjust to them instead of changing them. One might think instead that these are not natural but political conditions, and that a truly sustainable society - and a more congenial business environment - might depend on changing the politics.

What does politics have to do with it? This is where the unasked questions come into play. Why is Haiti's government weak? Might its continued weakness have something to do with the way international donors bypass the government and funnel money directly into their pet enterprises? And might the blueprint for this tendency, and for a perpetually weak Haitian state, have been established by decades of neo-colonial meddling from the North? And reinforced by the neoliberal imperative to shrink the public sector and open the doors for international business?

Similarly: Why has the natural environment been degraded? Might it have something to do with the US agricultural and trade policies that allowed us to dump cheap agricultural goods in Haiti and undercut what was once a thriving agricultural sector - policies for which President Clinton has since apologized (video here, the great Paul Farmer commenting on it here)? Or with the state being too weak to build and sustain an electrical grid, forcing people to burn wood for fuel?

The financialization (pdf) and depoliticization of Haiti's problems follows from and affirms a larger assumption, which is that the world of finance capital just is the world, and all problems are problems of financial management. There are such problems, and in a financialized world it is important for people who aspire to improve their lives to learn how to navigate the waters of finance. But some problems go deeper; they are problems of financialization rather than for it; some problems derive from the social conditions, the political decisions, that have allowed finance to achieve its ascendancy over human affairs.

from http://archive.truthout.org/miami-rice-the-business-disaster-haiti67019