Speech by Jean-Bertrand Aristide given at University of North Carolina, October 20, 1997

I wish to begin by thanking the University of North Carolina for the
invitation to be here with you. This lectureship is dedicated to the
discussion of the persistence of poverty, either material poverty or poverty
of spirit. Allow me to ask first of all what it means to be poor. You are
students, going to school, if it is not to become rich, but certainly not to
become poor. Nobody goes to school to become poor. Today 1.3 billion people
in our world live on less than one dollar a day. This is material poverty.
Not one hundred years ago, not ten years ago, today, right now.

At the other end of the economic scale, we find that worship of the market
and its invisible hand is fast becoming a world religion in which the tunnel
vision of economic growth has become the measure and the limit of our human
project. Globalization, the integration of world markets, promises to lift
everyone, rich and poor. Does this mean that poverty will no longer persist?

Since 1980 most third world countries have opened their economies to the
world market. They have lowered tariffs, embraced free trade, and allowed
goods and services from the industrialized world to flow in. Breathtaking
technological advances are bringing the world closer together, and a global
culture of sports, entertainment, and consumer goods is being created. Yet
where in 1960 the richest 20% of the world's population had 70% percent of
the wealth of the world and the poorest 2.3%, today the richest have 85% and
the poorest just 1.1 %. 358 individual billionaires have more wealth today
than the combined yearly income of 45% of the world?s people. Poverty, it
would seem, is not only persisting in the age of globalization it is
becoming more entrenched.

This persistence is somehow rooted in structural factors. Haiti, Latin
America's oldest republic was not always poor. In 1789 it was France's most
valuable colony and accounted for 1/3 of all French commerce. More ships
docked in our ports than in the great trading center of Marseilles. And in
that same year, 1789, Haiti produced more wealth than all 13 of the North
American colonies put together.

In 1791 Haiti's 400,000 black slaves, the producers of this great wealth,
revolted against their servitude in what became the world's only successful
slave revolution. The French waged a total war, which lasted ten years, and
destroyed Haiti's infrastructure and agricultural productivity.

Lasting peace with France was only achieved in 1823 when Haiti agreed to pay
$150 million francs to reimburse the French for the loss of their land and
slaves, making Haiti Latin America's first debtor nation. To pay the first
30 million-francs, Haitian President Boyer closed all of Haiti schools. This
was an early case of structural adjustment, that is, the application of
government austerity measures to enable the payment of foreign debt.
Indebtedness also persists. In 1995, severely indebted low-income countries
paid one billion more dollars to the International Monetary Fund than they
received from it. For the 46 countries of Sub Saharan Africa foreign debt
service is currently four times their combined governmental health and
education budgets.

Haiti's heavy debt to France not only discouraged investments in
infrastructure and education; it also encouraged the logging of Haiti's
tropical forests for export to Europe, precipitating the almost total
deforestation that exists in Haiti today. Without the trees to hold the
soil, one percent of Haiti's topsoil washes to sea each year, driving
Haiti's peasant farmers further into poverty as the land produces less and
less each year.

But if the structures of poverty persist, the poor also persist. They
persist in surviving; they persist in struggling for a better life. They
persist in creating a way where there is no way.

Let me share this story with you. On weekends we invite kids from the
neighbor hood to spend time with us at home. One day last year, Florence, a
beautiful little girl of four years old, who has no mother and no father,
was visiting. As the kids were preparing to go to swim I asked Florence
where she was going. She pointed to the pool, and said "in that big bucket."
She had never seen a pool before. I asked her if the pool was big or small.
She said, "it is beautiful." Later as we were serving the kids cola I was
teasing her, telling her not to taste it because it was rum, she said, "no
it is cola." I asked her which did she prefer cola or rum? She responded
firmly " I prefer juice.".

Florence is a child. She responds in a natural way. But we adults can take
from this story something else. When presented with two options, we can
always create a third way.

During the past few years, while I was in exile from Haiti, and now since
finishing my term as President, I have traveled and spoken to groups around
the world: to students throughout the United States, at conferences in
Europe and Latin America, to young people in Japan, and recently in Finland.
Each time I address a new group I am struck - the same questions - the same
hunger to create this third way, to find alternatives, to respond to poverty
in a moral way. In Japan last year I said to a group of University students
"When someone is hungry I am hungry, when someone is suffering, I am
suffering." And there I saw the unmistakable flash of recognition of truth
in their eyes.

If poverty persists, the thirst to challenge poverty also persists, and from
this persistence movements for social change are constantly renewed.

In Haiti in 1986 - A 30-year dictatorship was brought down.

In 1990 - We had our first fair and free democratic elections.

In 1991- the military seized power through a brutal coup d?etat and held the
nation hostage for three years.

In 1994, thanks to the continuous non-violent resistance of the Haitian
people and the support of the International Community, the coup d?etat was
reversed. I returned to Haiti to complete my term as President.

In 1995, in accordance with the wishes of the great majority of the Haitian
people we disbanded the military, which had up until then consumed 40% of
our national budget. This was an historic step in our struggle to eradicate
poverty.

Today I believe Haiti's path to democracy is irreversible, but it remains
fragile due to the economic situation. During the coup d'etat the already
battered economy shrunk drastically. The average Haitian survives on about
$220 US dollars a year, while one percent of the population still controls
45% of the national wealth. 50% of children under the age of five in Haiti
are malnourished.

In nations around the world, even those experiencing rapid economic growth,
there are millions of children living on the streets, refugees of a system
that puts the market before the person. Every three seconds, one of these
children dies of hunger. If we listen closely, these children have a message
for the next century. Eleven years ago we opened a center for street
children in Port-au-Prince. This year, we opened a radio station with our
400 kids. Radyo Timoun (little people's radio) broadcasts their music, their
news, and their commentaries 14 hours a day. The station is a testament to
the power of human spirit. I was recently listening to a commentary on
democracy prepared by three eleven-year old girls. They defined democracy as
food, school, and health care for everyone. Simplistic or visionary? For
them democracy in Haiti doesn't mean a thing unless the people can eat.

The poor have a message for us as well. Consider this: five months ago a
newborn baby was found in a pile of garbage by one of our teachers. Ants had
eaten part of the child's hand. The teacher, Rose, is a poor woman. She took
the baby, named him Ti Moise (little Moses). He has become the smallest
among our 400 kids. This woman teaches us that beyond market values there
are human values.

Around the world, very often mothers, in a special way, protect human
values. It is no exaggeration to say that the survival of the people rests
on the strength of women. If we look at worldwide income generated through
the informal sector, that is income not counted in GDP, it is sixteen
trillion dollars a year, and of this eleven trillion is generated by women.

Studies around the world have shown that when household budgets are in the
hands of women, they are more likely to be spent for primary needs (food,
education, and health care). I would hazard to predict that when the budgets
of nations are in the hands of women we will see the same result.

Women, children, the poor must be subjects, not the objects of history. They
must sit at the decision-making tables; they must fill the halls of power.
Their participation will bring a wealth of human spirit that we need to lead
us into the next century.

In civil society, through grassroots organizations, non-governmental
organizations, peasant movements, and environmental groups, we find
structures for this participation being built throughout the world.

In Haiti at the Aristide Foundation for Democracy we are creating structures
for economic participation. In 1996 we created a 12,000-person cooperative
that offers low interest loans to its members. Later, the cooperative opened
a community store where the members can buy rice, beans and other
necessities for about two-thirds of the market price. The power of this
cooperative is not its economic capital; it is the capital of confidence
that the members are building. They are investing in one another, something
the global economy is unwilling to do.

In a world seeking alternatives, on the eve of the next century, small
experiments like these, like the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, may offer the
seeds of hope.

The need is urgent. We know that global spending priorities are grotesquely
skewed. It is estimated that only 10% of development aid goes towards
meeting primary human needs (education, health care, clean water, and
sanitation). This amount represents less than what the industrialized world
spends on athletic shoes each year. It would take six billion dollars a
year, from now to the year 2000 in addition to what is already spent, to put
every child in the world in school. This seems an impossible amount, yet it
represents less than 1% of world military spending.

In Cite Soleil, Port-au-Prince's largest slum over 200,000 people live in
one square mile, in perhaps the worst living conditions in the Western
Hemisphere. When you go there you have the impression that the people never
sleep, there is activity day and night. This is because there is not enough
physical space for everyone to lie down at the same time. They sleep by
turns.

How do these people survive? Why is suicide practically unheard of in Haiti?
To understand we must move beyond statistics. To see the richness of the
Haitian people we must examine cultural factors: wealth of humor, warmth of
character, ease of laughter, Dignity, Solidarity. We have traditions in
Haiti that allow us to: share food when we can; raise the child of a friend
or relative who cannot; work together in a Konbit to bring in a crop, or
build a neighbor?s house, in exchange for a meal shared at the end of the
day; make one more place on a tap-tap that is already impossibly full;
survive in a vast informal economy that remains beyond the statisticians,
yet provides the main source of sustenance for 70% of the urban workforce.
And then we still smile, and we still laugh. In Haiti we are rich in these.

A vast wealth of experience, knowledge, and skill resides with the poor.
 From all this creativity, this panorama of human endurance of the poor in
Haiti, and the poor in Mexico, and in Brazil, and Southeast Asia and Africa,
and more and more of the poor in North America and Europe, we can learn.
There is a wealth of spirit here and will persist

The United Nations Human Development Report for 1997 tells us that poverty
is no longer inevitable. The world has the material and natural resources,
the know-how and people to make a poverty-free world a reality in less than
a generation. This is the challenge of the next century.

If this challenge seems impossible, reflect on this: During the coup, while
I was in exile, a member of our parliament who was fiercely opposed to our
return, declared on television that I would never return. The people should
stop talking about Aristide, he said, for when did you ever see an egg laid
by a chicken go back into the chicken? After my return, the people painted
murals on walls throughout the country: a huge chicken, a huge egg, and a
finger pushing the egg back into the chicken.

The impossible became possible.

Credit: http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti-archive/msg04613.html