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‘Madame, you must understand,’ said the man in the bar, in angry,
Creole-accented French. ‘They killed all our pigs. All of them.’ Others
joined in, indignant, eager to tell a rare foreign visitor about the
calamity that had befallen their pigs. They all had theories about why it
was done.

We were in Port-au-Prince, capital of Haiti, one of the poorest countries in
the world. The people in the bar live with malnutrition and disease, and one
Haitian in ten is HIV-positive. Yet what seemed to outrage them most was
pigs – or, more specifically, the four-year war against the native Haitian
pig that was instigated by the US government in the early 1980s. The aim of
this campaign was to prevent an outbreak of African swine fever on
Hispaniola, the island Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic, spreading
to the pigs of North America. More than a million animals were slaughtered,
and by 1983 Haiti’s much valued native pig was extinct.

The blancs, as Haitians refer to white foreigners, shipped in replacement
pigs by the thousand. But these newcomers failed to meet the needs of local
peasants. ‘The American pigs are too fat,’ explained an off-duty policeman.
‘They eat too much. They are no good for us.’

Banking on pigs

The international aid community cites the attempt to replace Haiti’s small,
black pig with a fat, white modern breed as a classic case of failed
technology transfer. But over the past few years a small team of French
researchers has been trying to remedy the problem. By judiciously
crossbreeding oriental and Western pigs, they have ‘reinvented’ the Haitian
pig and succeeded in reintroducing their creation in the face of political
instability in Haiti and suspicious agricultural officials in the US.

Before they were wiped out, Haiti’s pigs functioned as the peasant’s bank.
They stored the tiny surplus of nutrition generated by subsistence
agriculture, and yielded dividends in the form of piglets which could be
sold for cash, or eaten. The Haitian pig was descended from medieval
European breeds. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Caribbean pirates carried
them to feast on between attacks on colonial shipping. Like the Haitians
themselves – the descendants of slaves who declared independence in 1804
after rebelling against Napoleon – the Haitian pigs were tough. They
survived mainly on a diet of otherwise unusable plant material. Moreover,
the pig was as central to the peasants’ religion as to their economy. In
voodoo tradition, the sacrifice of a black pig seals contracts.

African swine fever is a contagious viral disease endemic to southern Europe
and Africa but absent from the Americas, and Haitians have their theories as
to how it came to their country. One is that the American CIA sent infected
pigs to Cuba as part of its campaign to destabilise Fidel Castro’s
government. The infection is then said to have reached Haiti as a result of
the illicit trade between the islands. A rival theory, favoured by left-wing
Haitians, insists that the dictator Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier
deliberately unleashed African swine fever after coffee prices fell in the
late 1970s. The government wanted peasants to plant coffee to earn foreign
exchange, of which it expected to take a cut. But as coffee became less
profitable, peasants devoted more energy to subsistence farming and their
pigs. Some say that the threat of African swine fever was nothing more than
a rumour generated by Duvalier to justify killing the pigs.

But the disease was real enough. The virus arrived in Hispaniola in 1978 and
spread rapidly, according to the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on
Agriculture (IICA), an agency of the Organization of American States.
Authorities in the Dominican Republic confirm this, saying that scraps from
a meal served on a flight from Europe were fed to local pigs by airport
cleaning staff. Vets on Hispaniola had never seen African swine fever, and
at first they vaccinated sick pigs for hog cholera. When the vaccinated pigs
continued to die, they called for help from the US Department of
Agriculture. Using immunological tests, the USDA quickly diagnosed African
swine fever.

Pig farmers in the US, Mexico and Canada panicked. Experts predicted
financial disaster if the disease became endemic in Haiti and then spread to
North America. ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵs at the University of Minnesota estimated that it
would cost $152 million to eradicate any sizable outbreak in the US.
And if the disease took hold, long-term control costs could run to Dollars
560 million per decade.

Swine fever is incurable and the only way to prevent an outbreak from
spreading is to kill exposed pigs. But agricultural experts seldom consider
it necessary to slaughter every pig. Outbreaks in Europe are controlled
simply by isolating and killing exposed herds. The policy in Hispaniola was
very different. Under pressure from the Americans, the Dominican government
agreed in 1978 to kill every domestic pig in the country. In return, the US
gave the Dominicans American pigs, of the Yorkshire and Duroc breeds.

Almost three-quarters of Dominican pig farms are similar to those in
industrialised countries. Large herds live in stalls, where they eat
specially formulated feed. These are ideal conditions for the modern breeds
that were introduced. The rest of the country’s pig farmers, the peasants,
couldn’t afford to feed the American pigs, so the USDA gave them chickens.
By the mid-1980s, African swine fever in the Dominican Republic was under
control. The local pig industry even improved. Other pig diseases were
wiped out with the slaughter of the herd, and now Dominicans can export pork
to the US and Puerto Rico as well as supplying themselves.

Mass slaughter

The situation was very different in Haiti. Virtually all the pigs there were
owned by poor peasants. And while Dominicans had a relatively democratic
government and an organised agriculture ministry, Haitians had one of the
most repressive dictators in the world. When Baby Doc Duvalier and his
officials heard that US government agents were paying for dead pigs –
$15 for a piglet, $25 for a young pig, $40 for an
adult – they instructed the army to organise a search and destroy mission.
The payment was meant to go to the bereaved peasant but under Duvalier’s
regime no dollars changed hands without government officials taking a
percentage.

By 1983, every native pig had been killed. Haitians still speak with
revulsion about that time. Families who lost their pigs informed on others
who were still hiding theirs. There are tales of women who stuck hollow
straws up the nostrils of their pigs, and buried them. To the Americans,
though, the slaughter was a golden opportunity. Livestock specialists at the
USDA became excited at the prospect of replacing the slow-breeding, small,
primitive pigs of Haiti with fast-breeding, big, modern products of American
know-how. They proposed to import Duroc, Hampshire and Yorkshire varieties
and cross them to produce pigs with hybrid vigour.

At the time it looked like a recipe for disaster to some aid workers and
Haitian officials. The capital investment required to raise modern pigs is
substantial. The animals produce more meat from a given quantity of feed
than the traditional breeds, but because of their size they have to be fed
large quantities of high-quality food. Moreover, modern pigs have been bred
to yield meat under controlled conditions, not to survive on poor tropical
farms. They require large amounts of good drinking water, frequent washing,
washable flooring and the services of a vet. Even North American farmers
regard them as touchy creatures, prone to nervous disorders.

Rich Haitians, who dominated the government, liked the idea of modern pigs.
They had the means to build large-scale, cash-intensive piggeries and
thought they could use the imported pigs to build up a pork export industry,
a scheme which never materialised. The Americans started shipping pigs to
Haiti in 1984.

To the surprise of many, some of these pigs survived and even thrived in the
hands of ordinary Haitians. According to Jean-Marie Redon of the French
embassy in Port-au-Prince, 400 000 big white porkers were imported into
Haiti or bred there by American agencies. About half, he says, survived,
establishing a trotter-hold on the Haitian economy. You can see the
occasional grimmel, as the Haitians call them, in Port-au-Prince, protecting
its white skin from the sun with layers of filth, and rooting with apparent
contentment in festering piles of rubbish. ‘It just gives you more respect
for the adaptability of the pig,’ says Jan Hurwitch of the IICA.

But overall, the imported animals failed to meet the Americans’ original
goal of restoring pigs to the peasants. You don’t have to travel far in
Haiti to see why. In the market town of Mirebalais, about 50 kilometres
northwest of Port-au-Prince, I followed a foraging band of white piglets
down an alley near the town centre. They led me to the back of a run-down
house, where I met the piglets’ owners, who proudly showed me their sow.
These people earned money from jobs in town, but supplemented it by selling
piglets. The pharmacy in Mirebalais was poorly stocked, but it had a few
broad-spectrum antibiotics of the sort the white pigs would occasionally
need, and which any citizen of Mirebalais with enough education to speak
French to a foreigner could probably afford.

Driving down the rutted road back to the capital, I spotted a big, white,
healthy-looking sow tethered to a tree outside a small house. I stopped to
chat to her owner. He, too, was happy to talk pigs. ‘Yes, madame, I make a
nice little profit on her. I sell the piglets. But you must understand,’ he
said, ‘I am a teacher. I can afford to feed her, and to buy medicines. The
peasants, the parents of my pupils, cannot afford to feed their children
what it takes to feed such a pig.’

At first the Americans subsidised high-quality feed for the owners of the
new pigs, but after 1986 they stopped. As demand rose for wheat bran, the
staple feed the big pigs needed, its price rose fourfold. By 1987 farmers
found they could not afford to feed their new charges. They could not break
even by selling piglets or meat, as local prices had been forced down by the
glut of imported breeding pigs and cheap imported pork scraps from the US
and Canada. Moreover, the new white pigs, as well as being sensitive to the
sun, were unsuitable for Haiti’s voodoo rituals. Unable to cope with
traditional feed such as vegetable scraps and fruit, or the pattern of feast
and famine on peasant farms, the number of grimmels in Haiti had by 1989
started to fall.

Genetic stew

Enter the French. As early as 1983, French aid workers had decided that
Haiti needed its old-fashioned pig back. According to Redon, the
disappearance of pigs from peasant households had knock-on effects.
‘Peasants used to keep a few mango trees to feed their pigs,’ he says. But
with the pigs gone, the peasants had little use for mangoes. So they chopped
down the trees for charcoal to sell for cash, thereby worsening the already
serious deforestation of the Haitian countryside. To make matters even
worse, the peasants replaced their pigs with tree-nibbling goats, says
Redon. Black goats even came to replace black pigs in voodoo ceremonies.

The French solution was to bring in breeds similar to Haitian pigs. The most
promising candidates were two tough, prolific Chinese breeds, the Meishan
and the Jiaxing. These pigs reach puberty at the age of three months, while
the Western breeds take six or seven months, says Christian Legault of the
French National Institute for Agronomic Research. As a result, they can
produce more litters during their lives. In each litter, moreover, three to
four more piglets survive to term in the uterus, apparently because the sows
secrete more progesterone, and the postnatal survival rate is also higher.
In Meishan sows, 18 to 20 teats function during lactation compared to 14 in
Western breeds, and the milk is more nutritious.

The French proposed to cross these prolific pigs with a medieval breed from
Gascony. This would enrich the genetic variability of the resulting piglets
and give them some of the looks of the old Haitian pigs. The Gascon is
probably related to the Haitian pig’s piratical forebears; it looks ‘more
like a wild boar than a pig’, says Redon. Moreover, both Chinese and Gascon
pigs are black. In a bid to make the new pig resemble the Haitian pig more
closely, the researchers tossed a further breed into their genetic stew, an
indigenous pig from Guadeloupe. The Guadeloupe breed wasn’t as fertile as
the Chinese pigs, and is spotted rather than black, but it was adapted to
survive under Caribbean conditions.

In 1984, the French researchers asked the Haitian authorities for permission
to bring in breeding stock to produce pigs that were half Guadeloupe, a
quarter Chinese and a quarter Gascon. The Duvalier government was
unenthusiastic, and US officials advising it rejected the French proposal
outright. Not only were they convinced that their own modern breeds were
better, but they were afraid that pigs from Europe would reintroduce
European pig diseases of the sort they had just wiped out in Haiti.

So the French set out to produce disease-free pigs. In 1985, they flew 14
pregnant sows from Guadeloupe to the Porcine Pathology Station at Ploufragan
in Brittany. The piglets were delivered by Caesarian, and raised in sterile
conditions, as were disease-free ‘Sino-Gascon’ pigs of mixed Gascon and
Meishan or Jiaxing parentage.

Revolutionary pigs

The Haitian authorities and their US advisers still refused to allow the
pigs into Haiti until, in February 1986, the Duvalier regime was overthrown.
That June, France sent 117 Sino-Gascon and 65 Guadeloupe pigs to Haiti. The
researchers never did get formal permission to import their pigs, says
Roland Cariolet of the research station at Ploufragan. But some of the new
Haitian officials were becoming aware of the grimmel’s limitations, so they
let the pigs in anyway.

Before the pigs were allowed to travel to their new home, a breeding station
at Tomassin in the hills above Port-au-Prince, they were kept in quarantine
on an island and tested by American vets. Tomassin’s veterinary staff, led
by Jean-Jacques Delate, had to struggle with power cuts and political unrest
as they tried to keep the centre free of disease. The pigs could not be
vaccinated against common pig diseases, for fear that the live virus in the
vaccine might revert to a virulent strain.

In 1988, the French started distributing little, black piglets to ecstatic
Haitian peasants. The pigs retained their Meishan and Jiaxing ancestors’
capacity to breed under almost any conditions. In 1992 the daughters of the
original crossbred sows were averaging 5.3 piglets per litter on peasant
farms, over half their average rate under the best conditions in Tomassin,
in spite of being malnourished.

The new pigs appear well suited to peasant farms, says Legault. They live on
scraps, and their fat carries them through lean periods. Peasants have even
crossed them with grimmel boars to obtain offspring with more meat and
considerable hybrid vigour. Legault says the genetic impact of the
crossbreeds on Haiti’s pig population is ‘probably very large’, judging by
the number of black pigs with ears like the Gascons’ now to be seen in
Haiti.

Legault estimates that by the end of 1992, there were about 250 000
descendants of the Sino-Gascon pigs on peasant farms, out of the 650 000
pigs that the UN estimates live in Haiti. In the mid-1980s the IICA brought
in three times as much breeding stock and bred three times as many piglets
as the French. But because the French pigs have a higher survival and
reproduction rate and are more popular with peasants, the grimmels now
outnumber them by only 60 percent.

The French team in Port-au-Prince feels their pigs are well enough installed
for peasant farms to be repopulated with tough, highly fertile black pigs by
the end of the decade. Now the researchers are planning to introduce the pig
to the peasant farmers of the Dominican Republic, who never benefitted from
the American’s big white pigs. They will also be trying to cross the pig
with wild cimarron pigs, escapees from pirate barbecues which live in
Dominican forests.

The fear now is of unforeseen disasters. Trade between Europe and the
Dominican Republic means that an outbreak of African swine fever, or other
European pig disease, cannot be ruled out. This threat is compounded by
other factors. Plans to build a veterinary diagnostic laboratory in Haiti,
and to set up basic veterinary surveillance so that the next outbreak can
be contained early, have been stymied by the political unrest and US trade
embargo that followed the overthrow of the popular president Jean-Bertrand
Aristide in 1991.

Despite all this, Haitian peasants are unlikely to submit easily to another
foreign-led campaign to stamp out a pig plague. The American pig project
suffered, says Hurwitch, ‘because the experts leading it disregarded the
socioeconomic conditions in which they were working’. No one asked the
peasants what they wanted and what they could afford.

Haitians seem quite able to answer both questions. The schoolteacher in the
hills near Mirebalais had not heard of the black French pigs until I told
him. ‘You tell those French scientists from me,’ he told me, pounding the
air for emphasis. ‘You tell them we need their pigs in this district.’
Behind him, a big white sow snorted contentedly in the shade of her palm
tree.