Farming gets 9.7 percent of the budget and policing gets thirty

A report of the Organization of American States published in 1972 recorded how the Haitian state divided its money. Agriculture, natural resources and rural development together received 9.7 percent of the national budget. The Interior and National Defence received 30 percent. The Inter American Committee for the Alliance for Progress had decided as early as 1966 to take part in preparing the report, on the grounds that the economy was deteriorating. More than three million Haitians lived from farming at the time. A state spending three times as much on policing its own population as on the sector that fed it was carrying out the task it had, which was to hold a barrier in place between the families that owned the country and the peasants and urban workers who did not. The report says nothing about the military control the state maintained over the countryside.