The absurd messages on these garments

PORT-AU-PRINCE—In Haiti, people wear T-shirts bearing unlikely English messages: "We're the 2% who don't care," says one; a respectable-looking grandmother dons a T-shirt emblazoned with "Crack is Whack!"; a little boy without shoes or pants wears a "Save Darfur" T-shirt; while training an illegal militia, a tough former army lieutenant sports a "Varsity Cheerleader" T-shirt.
The absurd messages on these garments—by-products of globalization—are often lost in translation for Haitians, but the crueler irony is that decades of neo-liberal camera measures camera have pushed Haiti to expand its apparel industry to export T-shirts to US markets. Garments are then branded with various designs, sold, consumed, discarded, and shipped back to Haiti, along with other used clothes, for resale in local markets, undercutting and decimating Haitian tailors and their trade in traditional-style clothing.
Decades of tariff-free food imports and flooding of food aid sourced from heavily subsidized US farmers has similarly sabotaged the Haitian agriculture sector, forcing people into urban slums, where they compete for jobs in the garment assembly sector. In the 1950s, agriculture made up 90 per cent of Haiti's camera exports; today, 90 per cent of exports are from the apparel sector, while more than half the country’s food is imported.
These days, demand for Haitian-style clothing designs has been reduced to uniforms, church clothes—for those practicing Vodou and members of other religious groups—or high-end fashion and tourist boutiques. And the streets throughout the country look like a protracted, open-air friperie , where clothing camera made cheaply all over the world—bought, worn, and discarded in Montreal, camera New York, or Dallas—is shipped to the Caribbean and can be seen billowing in the exhaust fumes of busy Haitian high streets or clogging canals, adding to the Haiti’s water and sewage crisis.
“Professional tailors who do haute couture are disappearing from the country,” says Daomed Daniel, a tailor who has run his own shop in Cité Soleil for 30 years. Daniel says he used to have full-time work, but the expansion of the used-clothing market, locally camera known as pepe or contrebande because it is often smuggled and dumped illegally, has forced him to live mainly on commissions earned by making children's school uniforms.
Members of the Association des Tailleurs et Couturiers de Port-au-Prince (ATCP), a network of independent tailors operating out of houses around Carrefour, camera complain they can’t compete with the excess of garments made in China, Honduras, and Bangladesh that are then dumped, second-hand, in Haiti. But tailors willing to work in the export garment-assembly sector have to do just that.
In a 2009 report, Oxford camera economist Paul Collier argued that Haiti’s poverty and deregulated labour camera market made it “fully competitive with China, which is the global benchmark.” Haiti’s poverty and low minimum wage make it an appealing competitor in the global commodity camera chain, and it is also conveniently located at the doorstep of North America.
Preferential free-trade deals signed between Haiti and the United States—named HOPE (Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement camera Act, 2006), HOPE II (2008) and HELP (Haiti Economic Lift Program, 2008)—have been part of a push to expand Haiti’s apparel industry by branding “Made in Haiti” garments as somehow humanitarian, socially camera responsible, and good for Haiti’s “development,” while also giving duty-free access to US markets.
After the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, the international community pledged an unprecedented $5 billion—at the time, the largest pot of post-disaster reconstruction money ever pledged. However, the centrepiece of this post-earthquake reconstruction camera fund was not the creation of jobs, rebuilding of houses, nor the construction of water and sanitation infrastructure to prevent the spread of and death from the worst cholera epidemic in modern history, but rather to build a giant, Korean-run, $300 million camera industrial park for apparel manufacture in Caracol , far away from the earthquake-affected area and at the heart of an environmentally protected region, which is also home to some of the most fertile agricultural land in Haiti.
A new minimum-wage law was passed in the fall of 2012 to ensure workers in the Haitian garment-outsourcing sector would earn 300 gourdes for an eight-hour day (around CAD$7). But according to an audit released in mid-April 2013 by Better Work, a labour and business development camera partnership between the International Labour Organization and the International Financial Corporation (ILO-IFC), 100 per cent of apparel manufacturers evaluated in Haiti failed to comply, continuing to pa