Pig Eradication 1983

The 1983 pig eradication campaign was the externally driven destruction of Haiti's Creole pig population in the name of African swine fever disease control. The Creole pig was not merely livestock — it functioned as a store of value, emergency reserve, and household insurance mechanism inside the peasant economy, and its removal weakened rural autonomy. The destruction of the pigs was followed by replacement animals expensive to feed and poorly adapted to peasant conditions; Laurent Dubois and Paul Farmer both treat the campaign as one of the clearest late twentieth-century examples of outside decision-making imposed on rural Haiti with little regard for local economic life, feeding the broader pattern of dependency later intensified by structural adjustment.