Word: peasant
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...death of island pigs could kill the peasant's way of life
...those Haitian pigs have virtually disappeared, and with them may go the peasant's way of life. Three years ago, when African swine fever broke out among local hogs, the Haitian government, with U.S. assistance, undertook a $22 million one-year campaign that eradicated the country's surviving population of 400,000 black swine. Reason: U.S. agricultural experts feared that the disease would spread and wreck the $10 billion U.S. pig business. Death squads wiped out the pigs of 800,000 Haitian families, paying $30 to $40 compensation for each animal killed. Wildlife biologists are now tracking down...
...less the old black hogs. Once the island is declared free of disease, the Haitian government, aided by a $27 million Inter-American Development Bank loan, will restock the island pig population, establishing breeding and slaughtering facilities. The fear, however, is that this ambitious commercial plan will bypass the peasant...
...essential as the pigs were to the peasant economy, their fate was sealed once the African swine fever was discovered. An acute, febrile, highly contagious viral disease with a 99% mortality rate, it was initially recognized in Kenya in 1909. In 1971 it appeared for the first time in the Western Hemisphere, in Cuba, where 460,000 swine were killed to eliminate the disease. In 1978 it turned up in the Dominican Republic after a local pig supposedly ate contaminated ham from Spain. The vi rus quickly jumped the 200-mile common border into Haiti. Haitians recall seeing pigs fall...
...stepped from the bus to examine the hull of the bank's burnt-out structure, which peasant and student volunteers were reconstructing. An International Harvester tractor rusted beside several new Russian counterparts. An elder bystander complained to me that he preferred the U.S. machine, but that Ronald Reagan blocks their import. I could not help but wonder how laid-off International Harvester workers in Rock Island. Illinois or Fort Wayne, Indiana would react if they were aware of this wasted opportunity...