Haiti’s Malthusian poverty is the default state of mankind, Steve Sailer notes, but getting fed and looked after by 10,000 foreign charitable organizations is not.
Why is Haiti so poor?, commentators ask, but for a country with an African culture — and Haiti does have an African culture; they killed off the white population early — Haiti isn’t particularly poor:
22 sub-Saharan African countries have lower per capita GDPs than Haiti’s $1,300, with Zimbabwe last at $200.
Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel; Collapse) looks at the natural experiment that split Hispaniola into Haiti and the Dominican Republic:
One of these [social and political differences] involves the accident that Haiti was a colony of rich France and became the most valuable colony in its overseas empire. The Dominican Republic was a colony of Spain, which by the late 1500s was neglecting Hispaniola and was itself in economic and political to decline.
Hence France could and did invest in developing intensive slave-based plantation agriculture in Haiti, which the Spanish could not or chose not to develop in their side of the island.
France also imported far more slaves into its colony than did Spain. As a result, Haiti had a population seven times higher than its neighbour during colonial times — and it still has a somewhat larger population today. But Haiti’s area is only slightly more than half of that of the Dominican Republic so that Haiti, with a larger population and smaller area, has double its neighbour’s population density.
The combination of that higher population density and lower rainfall was the main factor behind the more rapid deforestation and loss of soil fertility on the Haitian side. In addition, all of those French ships that brought slaves to Haiti returned to Europe with cargos of Haitian timber, so that Haiti’s lowlands and mid-mountain slopes had been largely stripped of timber by the mid-19th century.
Diamond actually has more to say on that point, but probably nothing The Guardian wants to print. Sailer explains:
In Collapse, Diamond praised the D.R.’s old megalomaniacal dictator Rafael Trujillo (1891–1961) for stealing much of the forestland and exploiting it cautiously in a rational manner. Dominican kleptocracy helped avoid the tragedy of the commons that contributed to the ecological ruin of Haiti, where the common folk chop down all trees for cooking fuel.
Diamond cautiously points out another advantage:
A second social and political factor is that the Dominican Republic — with its Spanish-speaking population of predominantly European ancestry — was both more receptive and more attractive to European immigrants and investors than was Haiti with its Creole-speaking population composed overwhelmingly of black former slaves. Hence European immigration and investment were negligible and restricted by the constitution in Haiti after 1804 but eventually became important in the Dominican Republic. Those Dominican immigrants included many middle-class businesspeople and skilled professionals who contri buted to the country’s development. The people of the Dominican Republic even chose to resume their status as a Spanish colony from 1812 to 1821 and its president chose to make his country a protectorate of Spain from 1861 to 1865.
Apparently Trujillo was the only national leader to recruit Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Who knew?
Only outside charity and emigration, Sailer says, keep Haiti from starvation — which leads him to suggest a modest proposal:
One obvious step that could help Haiti in the long run has, unfortunately, dropped almost into the realm of the unmentionable these days: increased funding of population control efforts. (Full disclosure: I’m a Catholic).
Third World birth control used to be a fashionable progressive cause. When I was a kid, Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, made about 20 guest appearances on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. The Rockefellers and George H.W. Bush were strong advocates of the need for Third Worlders to reduce their fertility.
But today, it’s hard to find much on Google about Haiti and contraceptives. According to a 2001 World Health Organization report: “Among sexually active women, 13% used a modern method of contraception and 4% relied on traditional methods”.
And the other 83 percent?
It appears that Haitian women now wisely want to reduce the number of children they have — Haiti’s total fertility rate is said to be down to 3.8 babies per lifetime, the same as Saudi Arabia’s. But Haitians need to bring their fertility down to European below-replacement rates for a couple of generations to allow the land to recover — and the people, hopefully, improve their “human capital”.
Let’s make long lasting Depo Provera contraceptive injections free to Haitian women.
Anyone got any better ideas?