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US rice exports to Haiti, which account for the bulk of supplies of the country’s key food staple, contain unhealthy levels of arsenic and cadmium, heavy metals that can increase risks of cancer and heart disease, according to a recent study by the University of Michigan.

Haiti is among America’s top buyers of rice, alongside Mexico and Japan, and cheap imports are more affordable than local options in the Caribbean nation, the poorest state in the western hemisphere.

According to the study, average arsenic and cadmium concentrations were nearly twice as high in imported rice compared to the Haitian-grown product, with some imported samples exceeding international limits.

Nearly all imported rice samples exceeded the US Food and Drug Administration’s recommendation for children’s consumption. [...]

The study, which attributed the dominance of imported rice to lower import tariffs and long-term contracts signed during [US-supported] political turmoil in the late 1980s and 1990s, said Haiti imports nearly 90 per cent of its rice, almost exclusively from the US.[...]

When researchers ran the study in 2020, they found that Haitians on average consumed 85kg of rice per year, compared to 12kg in the US

Trade data vizualisation showing main countries US exports rice to

How the United States Crippled Haiti’s Rice Industry - Haiti Action Committee

Haiti’s hunger crisis is no accident – it is the direct result of US economic policies imposed on rural Haiti beginning in the 1980s. The story of how the US undermined Haiti’s domestic rice industry exemplifies how a nation of farmers can no longer feed itself.[...]

Rice cultivation in the United States is deeply rooted in slavery. Black Rice author Judith Carney writes, “Few Americans identify slavery with the cultivation of rice, yet rice was a major plantation crop during the first three centuries of settlement in the Americas… By the middle of the eighteenth century, rice plantations in South Carolina and the black slaves who worked them had created one of the most profitable economies in the world.” European settlers knew nothing about the complexities of growing, harvesting and threshing rice. But enslaved Africans did.

A basic staple of the Haitian diet, rice has been cultivated in Haiti since its 1804 independence. Until the 1980s, Haitian farmers produced most of the rice consumed in Haiti. Under the US-backed dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier and the brutal military regimes that followed, domestic rice cultivation began to plummet. In the space of a few decades, Haiti became the world’s fourth largest market for American rice. By 2004, the value of US rice exports to Haiti amounted to $80 million.[...]

Food aid played a key role in undermining Haiti’s domestic rice production. President Aristide observed, “What good does it do the peasant when the pastor feeds his children? For one night, he is grateful to the pastor, because that night he does not have to hear the whimpers of his children, starving. But the same free foreign rice the pastor feeds the peasant’s children is being sold on the market for less than the farmer’s own produce. The very food that the pastor feeds the peasant’s children is keeping the peasant in poverty, unable himself to feed his children.”

Ronald Reagan’s 1984 Caribbean Basin Initiative prompted a major increase in US food aid to Haiti. In 1984, Haiti received $11 million in food aid; from 1985-1988, Haiti received $54 million in food aid. The Caribbean Basin Initiative called for integrating Haiti into the global market by redirecting 30% of Haiti’s domestic food production towards export crops, a plan that USAID experts systematically carried out. The United States fully recognized that this would lead to widespread hunger in rural Haiti, as peasant land was converted to grow food for foreigners. Food aid was supposed to compensate rural Haitians for this attack on their livelihood. Food aid benefits the big American companies who grow and transport it, but wrecks local economies. As cheap American food undersold Haitian farmers’ produce, domestic agriculture became even less sustainable. In effect, food aid created a dependence on foreign imports.

How was the United States able to impose its will on rural Haiti? At the time, Jean-Claude Duvalier, the son of Haiti’s infamous dictator, Francois Duvalier, ruled Haiti. Like his father, the younger Duvalier held onto power by controlling Haiti’s repressive security forces. He received millions in US aid intended to maintain US influence in the Caribbean as a bulwark against Cuba. The Reagan administration conditioned US aid on Duvalier’s support for the plan to restructure Haiti’s economy. Thus began the most massive foreign intervention in Haiti since the 1915-1934 American occupation.[...]

In February 1986, a popular uprising forced Baby-Doc Duvalier out of power. After he fled Haiti, raiding the treasury as he left, a military junta headed by General Henri Namphy took power. Predictably, the United States aligned with the junta and intensified measures to restructure Haiti’s economy. In 1987, Namphy received IMF loans valued at $24.6 million in exchange for agreeing to slash rice tariffs from 150% to 50%, the lowest in the Caribbean. He opened all of Haiti’s ports to commercial activity and agreed to stop what little support the government had offered Haitian farmers. Meanwhile, Haiti’s military elite saw an opportunity to make a profit smuggling American rice.

In the United States, the passage of the 1985 Farm Bill significantly boosted subsidies to American rice growers. By 1987, 40% of American rice growers’ profits came from the government. Heavily subsidized American rice could sell at prices far below the market value of Haitian rice. Haitian farmers never stood a chance against this unfair competition.

In Haiti, imported American rice is called “Miami rice” because it is shipped from Miami in sacks stamped “Miami, FLA.” By December 1987, Haiti’s rice production had shrunk to 75% of Haitian needs. Outraged Haitian peasants barricaded highways and ports for three months to protest the cheap American rice that had begun to flood Haitian markets. They attacked truckloads of Miami rice with machetes, picks and clubs, dumping rice onto the earth.[...]

By 1990, the year Fr. Jean Bertrand Aristide was elected President in Haiti’s first democratic election, US rice imports outpaced domestic production. Aristide was the candidate of Haiti’s popular movement Lavalas. He won with 67% of the vote. His February 1991 inauguration marked a victory for Haiti’s poor majority after decades of Duvalier family dictatorships and military rule, signaling participation of the poor in a new social order. The new administration began to implement programs in adult literacy, health care, and land redistribution; lobbied for a minimum wage hike; and proposed new roads and infrastructure. Aristide enforced taxes on the wealthy, and dissolved the rural section chief infrastructure that empowered the paramilitary force known as Tonton Macoute. He closed Fort Dimanche, the dreaded Duvalier-era torture center. The Aristide government met with a large coalition of farmers’ associations and unions and proposed buying all Haitian-grown rice in order to stabilize the price, limiting rice imports during periods between harvests.[...]

Just seven months after his inauguration, President Aristide and the democratic government were overthrown in a bloody military coup led by General Raoul Cedras. Trained in the United States and funded by the CIA, Cedras commanded the Haitian Army. His regime unleashed the collective violence of Haiti’s repressive forces against its own people. From 1991-1994, nearly five thousand Lavalas activists and supporters of the constitutional government were massacred; many others were savagely tortured and imprisoned. [...]

In September 1992, barely a year after the coup, American Rice, Inc negotiated a nine-year contract with the illegal Haitian government, importing American rice under its newly formed Rice Corporation of Haiti.

American Rice, Inc is a subsidiary of Erly Industries, a powerful international agribusiness. The company holds an almost monopolistic position in Haiti’s rice market. In the 1980’s American Rice, Inc imported rice under its brand Comet Rice, which constituted much of the Miami rice that ravaged Haitian rice production at the time.

In the 1990s, American Rice, Inc supplemented its profits in “legal” rice imports by smuggling rice to avoid paying import taxes. Lawrence Theriot, the Washington lobbyist for American Rice, Inc was a former director of Reagan’s Caribbean Basin Initiative. He had powerful friends in Washington, DC like Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-NC). In March 2000, the Haitian government fined American Rice, Inc $1.4 million for evading Haiti’s customs duties. Jesse Helms retaliated by withholding $30 million in US aid, and denying high-ranking Haitian officials visas to enter the United States. The American Securities & Exchange Commission later found Theriot and two other American Rice, Inc executives guilty of corrupt foreign practices for smuggling rice into Haiti.[...]

Bill Clinton’s 1992 election took place during Haiti’s repressive Cedras regime, when President Aristide lived in exile in the United States. After Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, Clinton famously apologized for forcing Haiti to lower its rice tariffs during his administration. He acknowledged that he helped big Arkansas agro-businesses reap profits at the expense of Haiti’s rice farmers. But Clinton left a lot out of the story.

Clinton posed as mediator between the coup leaders and President Aristide to negotiate the return of Haiti’s democratically elected government. He took advantage of this role to use the threat of continued repression as a bargaining chip.[...] Aristide resisted the US neoliberal plan. He insisted that discussions demanded by the financial institutions for the proposed sales of state-owned enterprises include benefits for the poor – opportunities for co-ownership, funding for health and education, reparations to the victims of the coup. Aristide would later refuse to move forward with privatization, disband the Haitian military over strong US objections, raise the minimum wage and bring paramilitary leaders charged with extra-judicial killings to justice.

"I want to make a movie so painfully obvious in its satire that everyone who understands it lives in perpetual psychological torment inflicted on them by all the people who don't"

“The fight against terrorists and resistance groups was, in January 1944, specially successful. It was led by the troops subordinate to the MBF, by the units of the commander of the Sipo and the SD. Units under the command of the commander-in-chief of the Western Front also participated in these fights. In January 1944, 582 actions against 244 terrorist camps were carried out by the army, the FG and the SD. According to known evidence, so far, 173 terrorists have been killed during these operations. According to a statement by the Sipo-SD commander, 4,460 arrests were made in January 1944 [...]. In addition, 841 people were arrested by the French police. [...] Following the convictions handed down by war courts, 109 people were shot. In any case, we act bluntly against terrorists. Where necessary, collective sanctions are applied as immediate retaliation. These included are many immediate executions as well as large-scale arrests, followed by the transfer of persons arrested for compulsory work in the Reich. Houses and farms, from which shots were fired, have been systematically burned immediately for several weeks now.”

A Jewish prayer shawl worn by Levi Simon, a British man fighting for the Israeli army in Gaza who filmed himself rummaging through women’s underwear in an abandoned Palestinian home, belonged to a celebrated Holocaust survivor who warned of the dangers of hatred and racism. Social media footage posted in November shows Simon wearing the shawl, known as a tallit, in a building in Gaza. “This tallit I am wearing belonged to a Holocaust survivor by the name of Zigi. I am right now inside of Gaza writing ‘Am Yisrael Chai’ to make sure nothing like this will ever happen again,” Simon says in the clip, drawing a Star of David and writing the Hebrew phrase meaning “the people of Israel live” on the wall. According to the accompanying text, the tallit was donated by the family of Zigi Shipper, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and other Nazi camps from Lodz, Poland, who moved to the UK after the Second World War and died last January aged 93. But a close friend and fellow survivor told Middle East Eye he believed Shipper would have been "astounded and upset" to learn of the way in which his tallit had been used in Gaza. “He would have been as heartbroken as I am because neither of us imagined anything like that would be witnessed by us,” Manfred Goldberg, who met Shipper in 1944 when both were working as slave labourers at a camp in modern-day Poland, told MEE. Asked whether he would have been concerned by the conduct of Israeli forces, Goldberg added: “How can you ask such a question? Who is not upset? Zigi was a very outspoken person. He made a lot more noise than I did. He would have been beside himself.” [...] “Zigi and I had an unbreakable bond because of our experience in the camps. I know him better than I know more or less any person on earth,” said Goldberg. In his later life, Shipper was renowned for his decades of work promoting awareness of the Holocaust in countless talks to schoolchildren and through media interviews. In 2017, he was among 112 Holocaust survivors whose testimonies were recorded as part of a United Kingdom Holocaust Memorial project. “I want young people to know, especially young people, what happened because of racism and most importantly, hatred,” Shipper has been quoted as saying by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

and, more on what simon has been posting . . .

In one clip, Simon waves an Israeli flag in a school where, he says, “they teach terrorism”, adding: “We’re here, we’re here to stay, we’re not going to take your terror, and they’re going to start teaching Hebrew in this school soon." In another clip, he says he is going through “terrorist houses” looking for guns and explosives and then opens a drawer and starts pulling out and displaying women’s underwear, which he describes as "exotic lingerie".

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But no! This is an actual, proper, sustained criticality, pressurized water moderated, fission reactor with a 12 MW(thermal) output; all mounted on the chassis of a T-10 heavy tank.

But more than that, the complete system was an entire minified portable power plant. The first vehicle contained the reactor core, some biological shielding, and part of the pressurized water loop. The second vehicle contained the heat exchanger between the water loop from the reactor and the steam turbine side. The third vehicle contained the 1.5 MW(electric) steam turbogenerator and the fourth housed the main control panel and some auxiliary equipment. The first and second vehicles could be covered in earthworks for extra radiation shielding. It isn't specified but I assume the steam side would have to have been an open loop drawing from a local body of water as there doesn't seem to be any provisions made for capturing and condensing the dead steam.

Having a fully functional and modest capacity nuclear power plant able to be freely moved around and deployed rapidly wherever there was a source of feed water and then packed up and sent on it's way just as fast is some seriously wicked engineering.