The Creole Pig: Haiti’s Great Loss
Dir.: Dudley Alexis, WLRN TV, 2024, USA, 60', in English, no subtitles

Taking the film The Creole Pig: Haiti’s Great Loss (2024) as a departure point to discuss food and ecological sovereignty, director Dudley Alexis, writer James Noël, and scholar Aïda Roumer engage in a critical discussion on Haiti’s history of international aid and foreign development programmes as instruments of external dependency, exploitation, and intervention. In a conversation, the three discuss how Haiti’s history continues to inspire resistance and solidarity among its community despite the efforts of colonial and imperial powers to destabilize the country. 

The Creole Pig: Haiti’s Great Loss recounts the story of an animal central to Haitian life for generations. Indigenous to Haiti, the Creole pig was a critical resource for peasant farmers, providing rural communities with a vital source of stability and resilience. However, in the 1980s, an outbreak of swine flu prompted the intervention of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in cooperation with the ‘Baby Doc’ Jean-Claude Duvalier government to exterminate its entire population. The documentary explores how this mass culling accelerated Haiti’s economic decline while examining the political and social fallout that followed. Featuring interviews with farmers, economists, educators, and analysts, the film delves into Haiti’s history to unpack the enduring impact of this tragic event, and the forms of resistance that it continues to promote.