page_33 < previous page page_33 next page > Page 33 In the same way as with erosion control, one might look to the government as the natural initiator of change in rural areas, but this has been the case only in theory. The reality is very different. Until recently, a mere token interest has been taken in agriculture on the part of the representatives of the Haitian state. We will return later to the role played by politics in creating and maintaining underdevelopment in Haiti. Presently it is enough to conclude that such crucial activities as extension service have in the main been insufficient both in quantity and in quality. In general, these activities have been spread far too thinly across the rural population to be of any real use, except for in very special, and sometimes somewhat unexpected, cases.28 MARKET IMPERFECTIONS It is debated to what extent the middlemen operating in the marketing of peasant crops are exploiting the peasants by means of oligopsonistic or oligopolistic collusion.29 Since Haiti has an economy in which market considerations are extremely important, exploitation could do considerable damage to the peasant producers. In the present section we will discuss whether this is actually the case. Since food crops and export crops are marketed via different channels, we will divide the discussion into two parts, beginning with the food crops. The marketing of food crops takes place via a well-developed system of market places, more than 500 with a minimum of fifty sellers and buyers on a normal market day in the mid-1970s.30 This network of markets extends across the entire country. The goods produced by the peasants move internally in one direction while products of urban origin which the peasants need but do not produce themselves flow in the other direction. Both types of products are handled by the same intermediaries, the wholesale-dealing Madam Sara and the retailing revendeuses. It has been contended that the internal marketing system is an inefficient one because the movement of goods from producers to consumers takes place at high costs and the intermediaries reap profits in excess of what they could earn in other activities. A consensus, however, appears to be emerging that the system is efficient (given some constraints) and that no oligopsonistic or oligopolistic exploitation takes place.31 In the first place, although strictly speaking no systematic knowledge is available, whatever evidence there is seems to indicate that the profit margins at all levels of the marketing system are not so high as to qualify as â€Åšmonopolistic.’ This is definitely true for the retail level where competition is stiff enough to depress profits to a level where it is no longer appropriate to speak of a profit in the economic sense but rather of an implicit wage for the labor expended in the process of trading. The Madam Sara appear to make somewhat higher gross profits. They also provide a < previous page page_33 next page >