Haiti, officially the Republic of Haiti, is a country on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean Sea, east of Cuba and Jamaica, and south of The Bahamas. It occupies the western three-eighths of the island which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Haiti is 27,750 km2 (10,714 sq mi), the third largest country in the Caribbean, and has an estimated population of 11.4 million, making it the most populous Caribbean country. The capital is Port-au-Prince.
Jean-Claude Duvalier, nicknamed "Baby Doc", was a Haitian politician who was the President of Haiti from 1971 until he was overthrown by a popular uprising in February 1986. He succeeded his father François "Papa Doc" Duvalier as the ruler of Haiti after his death in 1971. After assuming power, he introduced cosmetic changes to his father's regime and delegated much authority to his advisors. Thousands of Haitians were killed or tortured, and hundreds of thousands fled the country during his presidency. He maintained a notoriously lavish lifestyle while poverty among his people remained the most widespread of any country in the Western Hemisphere.
The boll weevil is a species of beetle in the family Curculionidae. The boll weevil feeds on cotton buds and flowers. Thought to be native to Central Mexico, it migrated into the United States from Mexico in the late 19th century and had infested all U.S. cotton-growing areas by the 1920s, devastating the industry and the people working in the American South. During the late 20th century, it became a serious pest in South America as well. Since 1978, the Boll Weevil Eradication Program in the U.S. allowed full-scale cultivation to resume in many regions.
Saint-Domingue was a French colony in the western portion of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, in the area of modern-day Haiti, from 1697 to 1804. The name derives from the Spanish main city on the island, Santo Domingo, which came to refer specifically to the Spanish-held Captaincy General of Santo Domingo, now the Dominican Republic. The borders between the two were fluid and changed over time until they were finally solidified in the Dominican War of Independence in 1844.
Haitian Creole, or simply Creole, is a French-based creole language spoken by 10–12 million people worldwide, and is one of the two official languages of Haiti, where it is the native language of the vast majority of the population. Northern, Central, and Southern dialects are the three main dialects of Haitian Creole. The Northern dialect is predominantly spoken in Cap-Haïtien, Central is spoken in Port-au-Prince, and Southern in the Cayes area.
In the context of the history of slavery in the Americas, free people of color were primarily people of mixed African, European, and Native American descent who were not enslaved. However, the term also applied to people born free who were primarily of black African descent with little mixture. They were a distinct group of free people of color in the French colonies, including Louisiana and in settlements on Caribbean islands, such as Saint-Domingue (Haiti), St. Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. In these territories and major cities, particularly New Orleans, and those cities held by the Spanish, a substantial third class of primarily mixed-race, free people developed. These colonial societies classified mixed-race people in a variety of ways, generally related to visible features and to the proportion of African ancestry. Racial classifications were numerous in Latin America.
The Soviet Union introduced forced collectivization of its agricultural sector between 1928 and 1940 during the ascension of Joseph Stalin. It began during and was part of the first five-year plan. The policy aimed to integrate individual landholdings and labour into nominally collectively-controlled and openly or directly state-controlled farms: Kolkhozes and Sovkhozes accordingly. The Soviet leadership confidently expected that the replacement of individual peasant farms by collective ones would immediately increase the food supply for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for the processing industry, and agricultural exports via state-imposed quotas on individuals working on collective farms. Planners regarded collectivization as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution that had developed from 1927. This problem became more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program, meaning that more food would be needed to keep up with urban demand.
Jean Léopold Dominique was a Haitian journalist and activist for human rights and democracy in Haiti. His station, Radio Haiti-Inter, was the first to broadcast news, investigative reporting, and political analysis in Haitian Creole, the language spoken by most Haitian people. On 3 April 2000 he was assassinated as he arrived for work at Radio Haiti-Inter. An extensive though turbulent investigation failed to officially identify and bring to justice the primary perpetrators, who remain at large.
The outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the United Kingdom in 2001 caused a crisis in British agriculture and tourism. This epizootic saw 2,000 cases of the disease in farms across most of the British countryside. Over 6 million cows and sheep were killed in an eventually successful attempt to halt the disease. Cumbria was the worst affected area of the country, with 893 cases.
Mission Zamora is an integrated land reform and land redistribution program in Venezuela, created in law by the Ley de Tierras, part of a package of 49 decrees made by Hugo Chávez in November 2001. The plan is named in honor of Ezequiel Zamora, a 19th-century Venezuelan peasant leader.
African swine fever virus (ASFV) is a large, double-stranded DNA virus in the Asfarviridae family. It is the causative agent of African swine fever (ASF). The virus causes a hemorrhagic fever with high mortality rates in domestic pigs; some isolates can cause death of animals as quickly as a week after infection. It persistently infects its natural hosts, warthogs, bushpigs, and soft ticks of the genus Ornithodoros, which likely act as a vector, with no disease signs. It does not cause disease in humans. ASFV is endemic to sub-Saharan Africa and exists in the wild through a cycle of infection between ticks and wild pigs, bushpigs, and warthogs. The disease was first described after European settlers brought pigs into areas endemic with ASFV, and as such, is an example of an emerging infectious disease.
Antoine Louis Léocardie Élie Lescot was the President of Haiti from May 15, 1941 to January 11, 1946. He was a member of the country's mixed-race elite. He used the political climate of World War II to sustain his power and ties to the United States, Haiti's powerful northern neighbor. His administration presided over a period of economic downturn and harsh political repression of dissidents.
Haiti has a sizeable diaspora, present primarily in the United States, Panama, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Canada, France, the Bahamas, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil and Chile. They also live in other countries like Costa Rica, Mexico, Bolivia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Venezuela, Argentina, Barbados, Guyana, Belgium, Switzerland, Turks and Caicos, among others.
The Program to Eradicate African Swine Fever and to Develop Pig Raising was a development project which took place in Haiti in the 1980s. It was launched in 1981 by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; the Instituto Interamericano de Ciencias Agrícolas (IICA), a branch of the Organization of American States; the International Development Bank; the governments of Mexico, Canada, the United States; and the government of Haiti to "eliminate the debilitating effects of African swine fever (ASF) in Haiti and to begin development of a productive swine industry".
Social class in Haiti uses a class structure that groups people according to wealth, income, education, type of occupation, and membership in a specific subculture or social network. Since the colonial period as part of the colony of Saint-Domingue (1625–1804), race has played an important factor in determining social class.
Agriculture continued to be the mainstay of the economy of Haiti in the late 1980s; it employed approximately 66 percent of the labor force and accounted for about 35 percent of GDP and for 24 percent of exports in 1987. The role of agriculture in the economy has declined severely since the 1950s, when the sector employed 80 percent of the labor force, represented 50 percent of GDP, and contributed 90 percent of exports. Many factors have contributed to this decline. Some of the major ones included the continuing fragmentation of landholdings, low levels of agricultural technology, migration out of rural areas, insecure land tenure, a lack of capital investment, high commodity taxes, the low productivity of undernourished animals, plant diseases, and inadequate infrastructure. Neither the government nor the private sector invested much in rural ventures; in FY 1989 only 5 percent of the national budget went to the Ministry of Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Rural Development. As Haiti entered the 1990s, however, the main challenge to agriculture was not economic, but ecological. Extreme deforestation, soil erosion, droughts, flooding, and the ravages of other natural disasters had all led to a critical environmental situation.
Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) or hoof-and-mouth disease (HMD) is an infectious and sometimes fatal viral disease that affects cloven-hoofed animals, including domestic and wild bovids. The virus causes a high fever lasting two to six days, followed by blisters inside the mouth and near the hoof that may rupture and cause lameness.
In reaction to the 2009 flu pandemic, governments around the world have responded with sometimes extreme reactions against pigs, which has included the official extermination of all domestic pigs in Egypt and the culling of three wild boars at the Baghdad Zoo in Iraq. Many of these slaughters occurred in Muslim countries, and religious restrictions on the consumption of pork have been cited as influencing the decision to take such action. Many other countries have banned international trade in pigs and pork products.
The Duvalier dynasty was an autocratic hereditary dictatorship in Haiti that lasted almost 29 years, from 1957 until 1986, spanning the rule of the father-and-son duo François and Jean-Claude Duvalier.
Rice production was an integral part of the Haitian economy, as it has been farmed in Haiti for over two hundred years. The origin of this rice has been traced back to West African agriculture. Rice is a staple food for most Haitians but it has become a commodity in the sense that Haiti is no longer self-sufficient in producing rice for the country. Haiti maintained dependency on their own agriculture of rice until the 1980s. In the mid-1980s Haiti was no longer producing substantial amounts of rice and by the 1990s Haiti held a greater reliance on imports rather than domestic rice production. The decline in rice production caused by policies under the Caribbean Basin Initiative had devastating consequences for Haiti's rural population. Many Haitian farmers, traders, and millers faced unemployment and relocation. Because farming was their livelihood, many could not find adequate work with their skill set. The Adoption of trade liberalization policies and environmental degradation are said to be the two factors that have caused Haiti's decline in rice production. These policies have lowered the rice import tariff so that it is now less than any other Caribbean nation. The tariff is at three percent, causing a dumping ground of rice in Haiti. Many accuse the United States of purposefully depositing all of their rice into Haiti. In 1985 the local rice production was at 163,296 metric tons while the US imports were only at 7,337 metric tons counting for a total of 170,663 metric tons. By 2000, local production had decreased to 130,000 metric tons while US imports ascended to 219,590 metric tons; in addition, since 1995 over $13 billion in subsidies have gone to rice exports. The result made Haiti inundated with subsidized rice imports while undercutting domestic production.
