Rational Cooperation: Situating Konbit Labor Practice in Context

INTRODUCTION1 Traveling west towards the small town of Torbeck from the southern city of Les Cayes, one sees the Caribbean Sea to the south and the wide, seemingly never-ending rice fields to the north. Beyond the smooth road paved during the first Aristide presidency, along the rural roads that wind through small communities and individual fields (the sort of roads development agencies are currently attempting to widen and improve), groups of individuals walk along the road and work in the rice fields. Known as konbit or eskwadf2 these agricultural work parties (farmers and friends or family members) accomplish labor-intensive farming tasks quickly and efficiently in an environment of plentiful labor and scarce capital. According to statistics assembled by the Ministry of Planning and Foreign Cooperation, Torbeck falls in the bottom twenty-five percent of communes (municipalities) in Haiti in terms of access to basic social services (MPCE 2004). Torbeck is a poor commune in a very poor state. Ninety-four percent of Torbeck's sixty thousand residents live in the countryside with the majority engaging in small-scale agriculture (Severe 2005). Though beans, bananas, and vetiver grass are important crops in Torbeck, the chief agricultural crop is rice. The wet lowland plain and suitable climate allows for virtual year-round production. The average peasant farmer in Torbeck cultivates using traditional tools such as the machete (manchet), sickle (sepet), and hoe (woe) and has very little access to fertilizer or pesticide. Poverty, lack of adequate agricultural technology, and the labor-intensive nature of rice production led to the importance of konbit and eskwad labor practice in the commune. Celebrated for their egalitarianism and cooperativism, konbit lie at the core of the methods of production of the Haitian peasantry. These forms of labor organization have existed in the Haitian countryside for centuries, in every political-economic context. As a result, their meaning, history, importance, and even definition have been discussed by anthropologists and sociologists for decades.3 Scholars' descriptions and interpretations exploring the regional and local variances of konbit practice depend heavily on the time and place in which events were observed and recorded and differences of views amongst the peasantry itself. Though scholars' opinions vary, there is no doubt as to the importance of these cooperative labor efforts to the productive life of the peasantry in Haiti. In this article I argue that konbit, as a form of social labor organization, is best understood in a socioeconomic context. I will first offer a description of two forms of konbit practice as they are manifested in the commune of Torbeck and described by people living there during 2006-07. From this description, located at a particular time in a particular place, I offer an alternative interpretation of konbit practice. Konbit, as self-organized, self-determined labor groups, are the inherently rational product of smallscale cultivators who, acting as rational entrepreneurs, participate in these work groups either for much-needed income or to exchange labor needed to complete intensive agricultural tasks in a context defined by an independent land-owning peasantry, high levels of poverty, poor rural infrastructure, and limited access to productive capital. In providing a localized and contemporary description of konbit practices I seek neither to take issue with definitions and descriptions given in past scholarly research nor to provide a static and ultimate understanding of konbit practice throughout Haiti. There are disagreements in the literature regarding the categorization of different forms of cooperative labor in rural Haiti and their descriptions (e.g. eskwad, konbit, kovee, sosyete), and I will not add to the confusion by providing an analysis of all these forms. Rather I intend to create a starting point by which we may undertake an analysis of the relationship between the practice of cooperative agricultural work parties and the context in which they are produced. …