Monsanto's donation to Haiti

About a month ago, Monsanto offered a whole bunch of hybrid corn seed as a donation to the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture. Many Haitian farmer groups protested, because they felt the seed was inappropriate for their conditions, and an insidious attempt by Monsanto to place itself into the Haitian market. This is an open letter to Monsanto that gives background and the progressive take on the issue. This is a blog post from a Haitian living outside of Haiti that doesn't understand why Haitian farmers would burn a gift. Here's a comment I posted on that blog explaining a bit of technical background on hybrid corn seeds. And here are two posts on Haitian agriculture in general, one on the earthquake's creating a food crisis, and one on the grassroots response to the food crisis.

And here's an article about how Haiti needs big moving equipment to get rid of debris. I appreciate the look at Haiti's now and future debris problem, the criticism of the lack of funding to address it, and the concrete administrative and technical proposals the authors put forth. But I don't understand why the authors would criticize efforts to get rid of debris by hand-loading it into trucks. Indeed, if funding for debris removal were available, it seems to me that in a poor country with lots of underemployed people, the best bet would be to get lots of people loading debris into trucks, which then dispose of it as engineers see fit. Why would anyone recommend replacing Haitian labor with scarce, expensive machinery? Of course the authors' points are valid that the cash-for-work programs should provide safety equipment to workers, and not just move debris from one side of a road to another, but those shortcomings are merely evidence of a poorly-managed project, and could just as easily occur if they were using heavy machinery. This article seems to be imbued with a bias in favor of machinery and technology and against a profusion of smallscale, labor-intensive solutions to problems. But we already saw in the immediate aftermath of the quake that the most effective efforts at removing rubble and saving trapped victims were undertaken by Haitians themselves, working with little technology. The high-tech, expensive international search and rescue teams only pulled a few dozen bodies from the rubble.