March 22, 2010
Jonathn Katz reports for the AP that Clinton apologized in a statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 10:
“It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake…I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else.”
Chief humanitarian coordinator for the UN, John Holmes, echoed this statement, telling the AP:
“A combination of food aid, but also cheap imports have … resulted in a lack of investment in Haitian farming, and that has to be reversed.”
The article notes that while these criticisms have been coming from aid groups for years, “world leaders focused on fixing Haiti are admitting for the first time that loosening trade barriers has only exacerbated hunger in Haiti and elsewhere.”
To read the entire article, click here. To see past coverage of this issue and the effects of imported rice on Haiti, see this or this.
