Haiti once exported rice

 Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap : the high cost of discount culture, 2009 

p.167

    Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, offers a telling illustration.  In 1995, Haiti reduced tariffs on rice imports from 35 to just 3 percent in response to pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United States.  Rice imports grew by 150 percent, and Haitian rice farmers could not complete.  Some tried cultivating other crops but eventually abandoned their land and moved to the city in a desperate search for work.  Henri Bazin, head of the Haitian Economists Association and a former IMF employee, told one reporter, "Cheap imports and the government's failure to support peasant farmers are driving them off the land and into the cities to burgeoning slums."

    Haiti once exported rice.

pp.169-170

    ... Bluntly put: There was no shortage of rice in India and no shortage of food in the world during the "food crises" of 2008.  Yet millions of Indians--as well as Africans and Asians--suddenly found themselves stranded on the edge of starvation.

    What had changed was not rice but the rice trade.

    ...

    The spike in food prices in 2008 was a result, at least in part, of the unsustainably low prices that preceded them.

    (Shell, Ellen Ruppel, HF5429.215.U6S54 2009, 381'.1490973--dc22, copyright © 2009) (Cheap : the high cost of discount culture / Ellen Ruppel Shell, 1. discount houses (retail trade)--united states, 2. consumer behavior--united states, )

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Amy Butler Greenfield., A perfect red : empire, espionage, and the quest for the color of desire, 2005

p.182

Attitudes like this were prevalent among the French elite on Saint-Domingue, and they were part of what led the island's black inhabitants to revolt in 1791 in one of the bloodiest slave uprising in history.  After thirteen (13) years of struggle, they won their independence from Franc and christened their new nation “Haiti” ── an outcome that struck terror into the hearts of slave owners everywhere. 

  (A perfect red : empire, espionage, and the quest for the color of desire / Amy Butler Greenfield.──1st ed., 1. cochineal──history., 2. dyes and dyeing──textile fibers──europe──history., 3. dyes and dyeing──mexico──history., 4. cochineal insect., TP925.C63G74  2004, 667'.26──dc22, 2005, )

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War Is a Racket is a speech and a 1935 short book, by Smedley D. Butler, a retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient. Based on his career military experience, Butler discusses how business interests commercially benefit, such as war profiteering from warfare. He had been appointed commanding officer of the Gendarmerie during the United States occupation of Haiti, which lasted from 1915 to 1934.

After Butler retired from the US Marine Corps in October 1931, he made a nationwide tour in the early 1930s giving his speech "War is a Racket". The speech was so well received that he wrote a longer version as a short book published in 1935. His work was condensed in Reader's Digest as a book supplement, which helped popularize his message. In an introduction to the Reader's Digest version, Lowell Thomas praised Butler's "moral as well as physical courage".[2] Thomas had written Smedley Butler's oral autobiography.

According to the HathiTrust online library, the book published in 1935 is in the public domain. A scanned copy of the original 1935 printing is available for download, in part or in whole, on the HathiTrust website, along with a detailed description of the copyrights.[3]

source:
       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
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http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1596915986/

Chang also points out the strong agricultural subsidies in Europe (milk), the U.S. (corn), and Japan (rice). The good news is that these subsidies keep farming viable in those areas and the nations involved more independent; the bad news is that U.S. corn is exported to Mexico - making economic survival impossible for their farmers and driving them to illegal immigration into the U.S. 

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