A Piggy Bank -- Literally

Creole pigs are small, scruffy animals that live off of table scraps and are able to forage around garbage heaps and fields and feed themselves. They're hardy animals who require very little human care, and yet are also edible and relatively nutritious. Poor families would keep a few around, and sell them if they needed cash. The pigs were literally "money-in-the-bank" for people who lived on the edge of starvation. That's why most of the poor in Haiti and the Dominican Republic raised them--until 1983, that is.

In 1983, swine flu broke out among pigs in the Dominican Republic. Fearful that it would spread to the United States and kill herds here, the large pig farming corporations in the U.S. convinced the U.S. government to put pressure on the dictators of both the Dominican Republic and Haiti to eradicate and replace their swine herds. The idea was that the U.S. government would sell the bigger, regular pigs common here to the governments of the DR and Haiti, who would in turn give or sell them at a discounted price to their own farmers.

But when the Creole pigs were taken from the poor and destroyed, the poor did not always receive the replacements. And even when they did, the fat North American varieties did poorly in the Caribbean climate.

"When we had our Creole pigs," Jezumenn, a woman from the Haitian village of Desarmes explained in Grassroots International's newsletter Action for Global Justice (December 2004), "they didn't require fancy care. They didn't require doctors! Then they came with the foreign pigs and we couldn't raise them. You had to treat these pigs better than you'd treat a woman giving birth! It was awful when they killed our Creole pigs. Something terrible!"

For 20 years this situation deteriorated, until Grassroots International stepped in. Based in Boston, Grassroots International is leading a campaign to bring the Creole pig back to Haiti--and replace all the trees that have been cut down in the past 20 years as the poor, without pigs, turned to chopping down forests to sell the firewood. Haiti has lost a greater percentage of its forest and woodland in the last 20 years than any other country in the world.

"When you have nothing in your hands, you are hopeless," one Haitian peasant farmer recently was quoted as saying in Action for Global Justice. "But when you have something that you can build on--like a pig--that gives you hope."

Go to www.grassrootsonline.org for more information. Providing a Creole pig for a family in Haiti costs about $55 USD.

Catholic Connections

The presence of so much hunger and poverty in our communities, nation, and around the world is a grave moral scandal. The primary goals of agricultural policies should be providing food for all people and reducing poverty among farmers and farmworkers in this country and abroad. A key measure of every agricultural program and legislative initiative is whether it helps the most vulnerable farmers, farmworkers, and their families and whether it contributes to a global food system that provides basic nutrition for all. --The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, For I was Hungry and You Gave Me Food: Catholic Reflections on Food, Farmers, and Farmworkers, 2003. (www.usccb.org/bishops/agricultural.htm)

Reflection Questions

How and why does the Haitian Creole Pig Repopulation Program of Grassroots International fit the "key measure of every agricultural program" as described above in the quote from the US bishops?

Join us in our Forum to discuss these questions!