NEW YORK - Former US President Bill Clinton, now a UN Special Envoy to Haiti, has pledged to foster the country's self-sufficiency after expressing regret for implementing policies during his administration that damaged its agricultural capacity and ability to feed itself.

"That's what we're doing now," he said on 31 March, pointing to efforts to spur coffee and mango production. It was a hopeful sign for those who have long advocated changes in the way the US government delivers food to developing countries.

Clinton told the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 10 March about his administration's role in exporting US-subsidized foodstuffs to Haiti, taking advantage of lower tariffs set as a condition on loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.

Among the items was US rice, which was cheaper than the home-grown variety and contributed to the collapse of the Haitian rice industry: 47 percent of Haiti's rice supply was domestically produced in 1988; in 2008 it had plummeted to 15 percent.

Agricultural capacity was also harmed by the flood of food aid sent to cope with humanitarian crises, some of which wound up in local markets. "It was a mistake ... I was a party to ... I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did - nobody else," Clinton told the committee chaired by Senator John F. Kerry.

Clinton described the policy as an effort to "free those places to ... skip agricultural development and go straight into the industrial era", but said it had "failed everywhere it's been tried ... you just can't take the food chain out of production ... it also undermines a lot of the culture, the fabric of life, the sense of self-determination," he told reporters at an international donors' conference at the UN on 31 March.

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