Big Game of Chicken

[Note: I wrote this in August, on the plane ride home from my first trip to Haiti, and never posted it. Now I'm starting this blogging thing again, starting with this post from many months ago.]

The other day I was out in a rice field, like usual, trying to learn a little more about the irrigation system. SRI requires more precise water management than traditional rice farming methods, so if farmers are to be successful with it, they will need clean, well-functioning canals. The small canals that run between the farmers’ fields are made of dirt, and they frequently get clogged up with weeds and plant debris that needs to be cleaned.

There is a word in Creole for a bunch of people getting together to do communal work, like cleaning shared canals: kombite. The existence of a word means that there is a precedent for sharing work. I asked them if they ever cleaned their canals together, and they told me they used to have kombites all the time – every week some said, or a few times a season. And now? No, they said, not so much any more.

Why not? I asked. Oh, they said, because some NGO came in last year and paid us to clean our canals. They haven’t come back this year, but now people will only work on the canals if someone pays them to do it.

A canal full of weeds

The farmers tell me that cleaning the canals is the responsibility of the local government agricultural agency, while the agency claims to be responsible only for the large concrete canals that feed each system of smaller dirt canals. But even the agricultural agency is plagued by wait-for-the-NGO-to-do-it syndrome. This year, as part of the SRI project, Oxfam gave the agency some money for cleaning the larger canals. But when the machinery broke down halfway through the project, the agency said they had spent all of the money. It was up to Oxfam to come up with more money to fix the machines and finish the cleaning.

So a big backhoe sits, broken, next to a half-cleaned drainage canal, and the smaller canals are filling up with weeds, while everyone waits for someone else to come in with the money to fix it.

This is partly a story about farmers with insufficient access to public infrastructure and an underfunded government agency. But it is also to some extent a story of donations undermining preexisting local solutions. If farmers cleaned their own canals just two years ago, the benefit of cleaner canals must be worth the work it takes. But why do something for free if you think someone might come and pay you to do it?