In the Danger Zone (25 page)

We eat a little breakfast of rice and small river fish in full view of the entire village who gather round to laugh at my shabby state. Maye and Sylvie chat about children, food and the future and I make a series of bad balloon animals for the village kids. I get fed again by Sylvie's sister, and this time I get into the swing of it, despite the fact that I haven't really done anything to deserve such a privilege. I have become attached to Maye and his family in the short time I've known them, and these few days in the countryside are another reminder that despite the fact that our lives are so wildly different, we are very much alike. In another world, I could see myself wasting away many an evening chatting to Maye over a pint in my local pub. I'm very sad when it's time to say goodbye. I will probably never meet Maye again, and I will miss him.

• • • • •

I head out of the Artibonite valley and stop off in a nearby town for lunch. The owner of a food shack points at a pot of sludgy green matter and tells me, 'It's got crab, meat and a local leaf.' Her little restaurant is packed, and she says that selling food is one of the few ways of making money in Haiti. 'It's helped me raise three children on my own and send them to school in Port-au-Prince. I bought my house without a husband, I worked and bought some land and the restaurant. But everybody uses Miami Rice now. Before you could get our local varieties, Shayla and Malangusa. They don't have those any more.'

On the way back to Port-au Prince I get a good view of the desperate state of the countryside. Before I arrived I had read that Haiti has suffered 98 per cent deforestation, but I didn't really appreciate it. Not only are there hardly any trees to be seen, but the soil is almost nonexistent, eroded by the lack of vegetation to bind it to the hills. Instead of earth, the fields are almost entirely made up of small rocks, with a light scattering of soil in between them. I've heard the term 'soil erosion' used around the world, but it's always been something of an abstract concept, and rarely so visible to the eye. This land is shockingly bad, and I can't see how anyone can scratch a living from it.

I pass a flood-channel that looks like a huge river of stones. When the rain falls around here it rips downhill, unhindered by trees or bushes and strips the fields of any remaining soil and rocks. In some places a few terraces have been attempted, but they look pretty halfhearted, and must take a disproportionate amount of work when the fields are likely to produce so little. The soil heads south towards the sea and the rocks are left as this extraordinary wave, a symbol of ecological folly.

A Glimmer of Hope

I keep thinking that each new place we go to must be a bit better – surely it can't be worse. Inevitably it is. Cap Haitien is like Port-au-Prince but with less infrastructure, although it does have a fair few remnants of beautiful French colonial architecture. It sits on another soupy swamp of water and excrement.

I visit a school on the outskirts of one of Cap Haitien's slums to see the WFP's school feeding programme. It's made up of three small buildings bisected by an open sewer, and is absolutely crammed – a school that in the UK would cater for maybe 80 children has 1,000 kids who attend in two shifts – 500 in the morning, and the other 500 in the afternoon.

In Haiti, as in so many other poor countries, desperate parents prefer kids to work selling and hustling to add to the family income. Many kids therefore don't get to go to school, so they lack the skills to get employment when they grow up, and so the cycle of poverty continues. The WFP has a successful programme of school feeding whereby kids all receive a free meal at school, which eases the burden on their families. It seems to work very well and because the WFP isn't distributing free food into the market, it doesn't disrupt local economies. And the kids get something of an education. I visit a class and the teacher invites me to sing them something in English. I try teaching them to sing 'Think I'll Go and Dig Worms', but they are completely baffled, so I get them to count to ten instead. It's a wild success.

The meal is a porridge of CSB (corn soy blend) and a stew of vegetables. It tastes OK – filling and nutritious if not actually tasty, but the kids are shy about eating it in front of me so I take my leave.

I am invited by one of the kid's mothers to take a look at her house nearby, and follow her to the adjacent slum. Her house is actually just a room, and it's tiny. Seven people live in a space the size of two double beds. All food preparation is done outside, next to another open sewer, and the few bedclothes that they own are covered in a thick patina of grease and dust. I've been inside for only ten minutes before Mario says that he can overhear people getting angry that we are here, and demanding money for us filming. So we leave.

Much of the early blame for Haiti's ecological damage lies with the European invaders, who used the trees for fuel but also cleared huge swathes of the country for sugar plantations. Nowadays the only trees left seem to be mangoes so I drop in at a mango warehouse near the main airport to find out a bit more. The mango industry used to have a huge trade with the USA, but the trade embargoes of 1991-4 pretty much destroyed the industry after the Americans looked to Central America to supply the market. But in contrast to my experiences so far, there is a glimmer of hope here, with mangoes now Haiti's second largest export product after coffee. The tragedy is that after 1991, people started to cut down their mango trees because no one would buy the fruit, so now, production is difficult. It's made even more so by the fact that most farmers have only a handful of trees, and they have to transport their delicate fruit over the island's potholed roads for hours at a time.

Jean Maurice has a network of these small farmers and has managed to create one of Haiti's few sizeable businesses. All the export depends on the small farmer. I'm an average farmer too because I own four or five trees. Most of my farmers are the same.'

He takes me out to his field where I climb a tree with one of his employees and, cack-handedly avoiding the wasps' nests, manage to pick half a dozen mangoes. The Madame Francis variety is grown only here in Haiti and around 2.5 million boxes are exported to the USA every year.

It's another baking hot day so we sit under one of the mango trees to try the fruit. Jean insists that I don't peel it, but just bite straight through the skin and into the fruit. It's amazing. As I rip off the skin with my teeth a powerful burst of mango scent floods my nostrils, four times as strong as a mango bought in London and with a deeper, more intense flavour. Jean explains that this is the flavour of a real, tree-ripened, ready-to-eat mango, whereas the ones I've always eaten have ripened off the tree in refrigerated transit, and the flavour just doesn't develop properly.

Nowadays the few remaining mango trees are at great risk. They are resistant to drought and fire, so they're a reliable crop even for farmers who have just a small plot of land. But with production on such a small scale the industry is vulnerable to desperate farmers cutting down their mango trees to make fuel. If someone chopped their tree down, 'they would probably earn the same amount of money selling charcoal [immediately] as it's bringing in to them every year in terms of selling the fresh mangoes. They could have one child that is sick after the mango season and they need to cut the tree so they can save that child. One crisis and that's your livelihood gone'.

The mango industry is still relatively small, but it does show that Haiti is capable of exporting to America, and this rare hint of optimism comes as something of a surprise and a relief.

Fantasy Beach

There's one other glimmer of hope for the Haitian economy. Just 20 minutes away from the slums of Haiti's second city, Cap Haitien, I drive through some heavily armed gates and enter another world.

On a remote beach in the north of the country is a vision of the Haitian Caribbean paradise I hoped existed before I arrived here: beautiful, clean white-sand beaches with deep turquoise sea, palm trees and tikki bars. I haven't seen anything this organized, clean and idyllic in the whole country. But sadly, none of it's real. Labadee is an artificial nirvana built by the Royal Caribbean cruise company, complete with an ersatz Caribbean flea market selling replica voodoo dolls. Even the palm trees have been imported. And ordinary Haitians are distinctly unwelcome on this very private beach.

I arrive early in the morning and I get to the beach just in time to see the
Voyager of the Seas
appear on the horizon and park its gargantuan, expensive butt in Labadee Bay. Twice a week, huge cruise ships drop in to Labadee and around 3,500 tourists, most of them American, are offloaded, along with their own food, first-aiders and jolly cocktail salesmen.

I watch with astonished awe as these 3,500 tourists are ferried to the beach, where they get to paddle around, jet-ski and watch a badly hammed-up cod-voodoo ceremony.

During their five hours on Haiti the passengers won't leave the beach (they aren't allowed to). They won't taste any local food either – their supplies are all brought over from the ship. Some of them don't even
know
they're in Haiti. I manage to speak to an old lady fresh off the boat. She explains, 'I'm just resting right now, we've been busy on the cruise ship.'

'It's been hard work on your cruise ship?'

'Yep.'

'Do you know anything about Haiti at all?'

'No.'

'Do you know what lies on the other side here?' I point beyond the beach.

'I don't know what's on the rest of the island.'

It's easy to sneer when you're confronted by a phalanx of shiny American tourists, but it's dawning on me that these brash visitors provide exactly what Haiti needs: employment.

David Southby is an Englishman who runs the beach for the cruise line, and he's realistic about Haiti's prospects as a tourist destination: 'We do confine the guests to the site because there really isn't that much on offer outside of the site at this stage. It would be very difficult to bring in any amount of tourists, which is probably what will bring Haiti up and into the future. It's a beautiful place, there are some amazingly beautiful beaches, there is a lot of potential. The infrastructure just isn't here to support us yet.'

He goes on to explain, 'We have 200 full-time staff, plus the additional staff for call days, the musicians and so on, so we've got up to 500 people on site. That's 500 people with a regular income, which is not something that you'll find anywhere else, definitely not to that scale.'

For the tourists, the highlight of the day is an all-American barbecue, but the buffet is an astounding collection of homogeneous comfort foods: chicken wings, frankfurters, unripe tomatoes, burgers and pork ribs. I'll guiltily admit that the ribs are actually quite nice, but the rest is an abomination.

Just across the bay is Labadee village, and a handful of the local workers on the beach come from there. I hitch a ride over, and it's what I'd imagined Haiti would be – a simple but not impoverished laid-back Caribbean village. It's obviously benefiting from tourist income through' jobs, but for the families of the workers, the cruise ship passengers might as well be on another planet (although I should add that no one would talk to me without being paid $5, so whether or not what they said was true, I have no idea.

A woman I talk to says that she's never in her life met one of the half million cruise ship guests who come every year. 'We just see them in the distance on their jet-skis. Sometimes they come in very close, but they don't land.'

We return to the beach but it's all over. In the hour we'd been gone the guests all disappeared back to the ship and a short while later the
Voyager of the Seas
was steaming off towards Miami. They had been here for three hours, never leaving the compound, and that was their entire experience of Haiti. In a funny kind of way, they never left America.

Royal Caribbean Cruises pays the Haitian government $6 per person to use Labadee and that's income the country desperately needs. If I was being pessimistic, I'd suggest that at 163 on the corruption scale, it would be surprising if any of that money went back into the community, but Haiti needs some optimism, so just forget I said that.

It's easy to sneer, and these large steel containers packed with nice wealthy Americans seem wildly out of place here in the poorest country in the western hemisphere, but they could be Haiti's great hope for prosperity. Americans don't seem enormously keen to encourage mutually beneficial ties with their neighbours, but they won't turn their noses up at a slice of affordable luxury. The trouble is that the USA seems to have a habit of causing at least as many problems as it solves.

I've never experienced such depths of human despair as I found in Haiti, especially in the slums. It is an image that still regularly haunts me, and I can't help despairing for Maye, Jacques and the people of Cite Soleil who endure so much. I hope the world, and especially the USA, doesn't screw Haiti over again.

Next, I'm heading for Mexico, so close to the USA that you can throw stones over the border. Perhaps they treat these neighbours a little better.

POPULATION:
106 million

PERCENTAGE LIVING ON LESS THAN
$2
A DAY:
20%

UNDP HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX:
53/177

CORRUPTION PERCEPTIONS INDEX POSITION:
70/163

GDP (NOMINAL) PER CAPITA:
$8,006 (54/179)

FOOD AID RECIPIENTS:
n/a

MALNUTRITION:
5% of the population

I have come to Mexico to investigate one of the country's biggest problems: the Tortilla Crisis. Don't laugh. You might think of Mexican food as a novelty Friday-night beer-sponge, but tortillas provide around 50 per cent of all calories that Mexicans eat, and the corn that they're made from is the main crop for 3 million impoverished rural farmers. In 1994 Mexico signed a free trade agreement with the USA that caused massive upheavals for corn farmers and sparked an extraordinary revolution led by the Zapatistas, a group of anti-globalization rebels fighting for the rights of indigenous people in the southwest of the country.

The Zapatistas are a well-funded, well-organized, armed group that only ever appears in public in balaclavas and ski masks, and have a habit of issuing rambling proclamations denouncing the USA and threatening the Mexican government. So far, so Marxist revolutionary. But the difference is that the Zapatistas are a group that admits its mistakes, that develops its policies and devolves power. It's led by an enigmatic, eloquent intellectual called Marcos whose true identity remains a secret, and who manipulates TV journalists like us with remarkable dexterity. I'm going to try to speak to the Zapatistas and find out if the Tortilla Crisis, together with the influence of the USA, have torn apart rural Mexico.

Eco Alberto

A few hours' drive out of Mexico City is Eco Alberto, the world's most extraordinary theme park, and I'm on my way there to experience the unique sensation of being an illegal immigrant crossing the border from Mexico into the USA. I can't work out whether it's a huge bad-taste cash-in, a simple exercise in left-wing activism or a training ground for would be fence-jumpers. Either way, I'm joining in.

I meet 'Poncho', the head of the operation who wears a thick woollen balaclava (although no poncho ), despite the fact that he's sweating profusely underneath it. He's taking a roll-call of extras from the village who are here to help me get an authentic illegal immigrant's experience.

Along with 25 giggling blokes and a couple of crippled-with-embarrassment
muchachas,
I jump onto one of four pick-up trucks and set off. Ten minutes later I'm dropped off in the middle of nowhere and join these extras stumbling around muddy fields in the pitch black whilst three 'border patrol' vehicles with flashing blue lights, sirens and floodlights chase us around. I can't see a thing, so I run about in a panic, falling over every five minutes, and occasionally hide in bushes.

I wonder what it's meant to achieve. At various points along the way, Poncho stops to offer his semi-poetic, semi-revolutionary, wholly confusing thoughts about truth, brotherhood and struggle: 'This night is in honour of all migrants who have left with the illusion, the dream of finding a better quality of life. Ninety per cent of our community have migrated, leaving behind our land, our culture and our customs.'

I can't really work out if this is a condemnation of desertion or a celebration of escape. Is it about a struggle for wealth and respect in the USA, or is he saying that Mexicans should stay on the land and make the best of it? In any case, there's frequent singing of the national anthem and group assertion that they have pride, respect and certainty in their hearts.

What is clear is that this community has had a terrible time: there are so few opportunities here and Poncho says that the collapse in the market price of corn, the most important local crop, has forced 90 per cent of Alberta's population to jump the border into the USA, leaving behind a social vacuum and a hobbled, decimated community. They've set up this illegal immigration theme park to publicize their plight and to bring a bit of cash and pride into their lives.

At one point I get arrested by the mock border police who fire blank ammunition at me and abuse me in cod-aggressive immigration insults: 'We gats too many of you Mexicans 'ere. We don' like you so go back 'ome.'

They have the acting ability of porn stars, but they clearly love their roles, their faces curled up in mock grimaces. Nonetheless they release me and I continue to run around cornfields and through irrigation pipes as the border police capture my co-migrants.

After another three exhausting hours of this madness Poncho puts a blindfold on me and leads me somewhere he claims is very special. He talks for another 20 minutes about pride, believing in ourselves and giving our souls for our family, friends and Mexico. I'm still confused as to what exactly we are all proud of; the message is confused by his constant reversion to tawdry, sexist knob jokes and extravagant claims about how much sex he has, but this is important stuff for Poncho.

Finally my blindfold is removed and the sight is, indeed, spectacular. We are in a dramatic valley, and thousands of lanterns have been lit all the way up the rock face on either side. The sight sends a shiver down my spine and fills me with non-specific awe. The show is over and I am given a welcome bowl of chicken giblet soup.

This whole mad scheme might seem funny to people on the outside looking in, but my translator, Luisa, has heard that the lanterns were intended to represent the estimated 500 people who die crossing the border each year. These people are suffering huge turmoil, but the question is, why? What has happened to make 90 per cent of a community disappear, considering the dangers involved and the fact that they have to abandon their loved ones to an uncertain future?

Well, the answer seems to lie in a treaty signed in 1994 between the USA, Canada and Mexico. Bear with me here because the following should explain why I'm running around fields in rural Mexico. Plus, think how knowledgeable you'll seem next time you drop into Nando's.

• • • • •

In 1994 Mexico signed up to a free trade agreement with the USA and Canada known as NAFTA, which dismantled many import and export duties. It's been controversial in all three countries and it has helped in some areas and caused difficulties in others. In Mexico it's been great for the trading middle classes, and it's also created a huge number of unskilled jobs at new assembly plants. But there's been catastrophic fall-out in rural areas. The agreement meant that Mexico removed import taxes on US corn – corn that's sold way below the cost of production thanks to the huge subsidies that the USA pays to farmers – and imported corn suddenly became much cheaper. However, millions of Mexicans, especially in rural areas, are poor corn farmers who survive on what they can grow, selling any surplus to keep themselves afloat, and the NAFTA price crash was devastating for many of them, causing widespread misery to people who were already desperately poor.

When your food security is already compromised and you're living on the edge of hunger, a small shift in your ability to sell your corn has disastrous consequences. And this, in roundabout ways, is what NAFTA did. The result has been extreme poverty, chronic malnutrition and a social vacuum created where communities simply became unviable. In poor, rural areas many people are now either living in miserable conditions, or have left for the USA in a desperate attempt to find work.

As part of the trade agreement, the Mexican government started a programme of land reform to reverse the system of collective ownership (my, how the USA hates collective ownership!) that was common in the countryside, and this has added to rural chaos and resentment. There's an added complication too: the price of tortillas (made from com flour) recently
rose
fourfold due to higher prices in the USA, presumably due to US farmland being turned over to ethanol production (which uses a different kind of corn). But for various reasons, this seems to have benefited the big transnational corn dough suppliers and not small-scale rural corn farmers.

In 1994, on the day that NAFTA was implemented, the Zapatistas exploded onto the scene, based in southern rural areas where food security is worst affected. Although they are armed with guns, they've rarely been used, but despite this they've been pretty successful. Trouble is, they like to control their image very tightly and recently they've been refusing all interviews. I've got just two weeks to make them change their minds.

Don Chon

It's 5.30 a.m. and I am sitting in a knackered saloon car outside the chapel of Santa Malverde, the saint of prostitutes and burglars, in the most dangerous part of Mexico City. My driver has locked me in and forbidden me to leave the car, and he fidgets nervously as we wait for the legendary restaurateur Don Chon to emerge from his apartment. Chon is renowned for his love of ancient pre-Hispanic foods from Aztec and Mayan times, and it's a great privilege that he's agreed to meet me. The trouble is that I'm feeling decidedly queasy and I haven't slept a wink all night. Gastronomic adventure usually gets me excited, but right now it's the last thing I need.

Chon finally waddles around the corner. He looks short and rotund and very grumpy. We drive to La Merced ('Mercy'), his favourite market, which he warns me is both vast and dangerous. People here don't like being filmed, but Chon has apparently convinced people to speak to me. There are stalls piled high with mounds of cactus buds, all manner of chillies and spices, bushes of leafy vegetables and flowers. Despite my wonderment, however, I feel very unwelcome as stallholders wave me away when I ask to speak to them, and I'm only allowed to chat to the specific people Chon's negotiated with. One guy sweats profusely whilst I talk to him, but he's passionate about the traditional foods he sells – poached duck tripe (very tasty – a little musky, but with a soft, liverish texture), tiny crayfish dyed red, fish wrapped in corn husks and baked. He says it's a shame that modern junk food has taken over the country.

I convince a spice stallholder to give me a masterclass on chillies, and foolishly ask to try the hottest that the guy sells. At first, there's a little heat, but not the face-expanding slow explosion I was expecting, so I try a little more. Bad idea. These are quite dry chillies, so the first taste goes nowhere, and it's only when my saliva starts to break down the heat-packing capsaicin that my head is rapidly set alight. None of this is helping my stomach.

I visit the fly egg man: I'm surprised that anyone has the patience to harvest them because they are minute, the size of fat grains of sand, and greyish-brown. I dip a finger into the pile and taste them: they are entirely devoid of flavour, and the only sensation is the tingle in my cortex at the thought of eating flies, and a crunch on my tongue, like I'm chewing grit. The whole flies are even weirder, like eating shards of straw. Again, they taste of absolutely nothing, and even though they are an historically important delicacy, I find it amazing that people will pay $80 per kilo for them. The stallholder admits that foods like this are in decline.

I try to chat with Don Chon but he's getting grumpier and grumpier as we walk around the market, and I don't understand why – most chefs are happiest in places like this. He takes me to a food stall and orders chicken soup plus a side order of gestating hen with a string of half-formed eggs inside it. Neither tastes of much but it looks fun and the texture of the eggs is wonderful – a cross between hard-boiled yolk and hard-boiled white. He also offers me some chicken blood tortilla. Ah, I finally realize what's going on: he's trying to shock me, and his lousy temper only gets worse when I don't recoil from these strange foods. Oh dear, he's chosen the wrong person to try to shock – this is comfort food compared to half-fermented rotten walrus – and my interested reactions have been making him more and more irritable.

We finally head off to his meat market to pick up
escamoles
(ant eggs), off-white and creamy on the tongue, and
jumiles
(large fleas), which have an extraordinary crunchiness and a flavour that's a cross between fennel and menthol. They'd almost be pleasant if they didn't leave my mouth full of irritating shards of flea legs. Don Chon takes me to his restaurant to start cooking.

He serves me fly eggs fried with chicken egg, cactus and coriander; ant eggs cooked with green tomatoes, garlic and chilli; and whole flies cooked with red tomatoes, garlic, chilli and chicken eggs.

Hmm. It's all quite interesting, but when prepared, the flies and fly-eggs taste like a sandy omelette and the ant larvae tastes like salsa omelette. I don't want to sound mean, and I'm all in favour of resurrecting ancient foods and breathing life into lost cultures, but I only really enjoyed his food for the novelty and surprise rather than the taste. I was hoping for a gastronomic epiphany so that I could come back to Britain with a renewed zeal to spread the word about eating insects. But even his deep-fried grasshoppers just taste of old cooking oil.

Chon drops a few hints that he'd rather I buggered off, thanks all the same. He needs to get on, preparing braised snake and (allegedly) some armadillo.

I get up early to visit a
tortilleria
and try to find out more about the tortilla wars. Funnily enough, no one is willing to take the blame for the recent fourfold price increase that sparked riots in Mexico City and brought 75,000 people onto the streets to protest. Mexicans eat 300 billion tortillas each year – that's 3,000 per person.

The tortilla trail starts with the corn growers (usually the massive transnational corporations, such as Cargill and ADM), then leads through a web of distributors and wholesalers, processors and dough-makers until it arrives as a ready-to-bake dough at high-street
tortillerias.
These are where most people buy them, freshly baked on machines that churn them out at around 120 a minute. And it's here that the good people of Mexico pay through the nose, and where the government recently imposed price restrictions to try to keep them affordable. Trouble is, none of the people running
tortillerias
could care less about price restrictions and instead they charge as much as they can.