USAID’s legacy of ecological imperialism
USAID’s legacy of ecological imperialism
by Angela Sherwood
USAID is the latest institution to fall in the Trump-Musk administration’s scorched-earth approach to U.S. state institutions. Within weeks, the agency was effectively shuttered—its Even its website usaid.gov went dark. Musk, revelling in the destruction, tweeted: “Spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
As legal battles over USAID’s future unfold, liberal commentators have framed the agency’s dismantling as a humanitarian disaster. They warn that eliminating USAID will “endanger millions of lives” while undermining U.S. “global leadership” and “humanitarian goodwill.” Cutting funding for its programs in health, education, disaster relief, and food security is portrayed as both “cruel” and “directly at odds with U.S. interests.” The narrative is clear: without USAID’s nearly $40 billion in annual aid, the world faces deeper crises of disease, famine, conflict, poverty and insecurity.
Few would deny the profound dangers—both in terms of democratic accountability and human cost—of granting the world’s wealthiest individual unchecked authority to dismantle a state institution. Yet while the consequences of this move will be undoubtedly severe—especially for the communities made structurally reliant on foreign aid—the liberal narrative surrounding USAID’s collapse is flawed. In casting the agency’s demise as a humanitarian catastrophe, it fails to interrogate USAID’s history as an extension of the U.S. imperial project.
Since its creation in 1961, USAID has been a highly politicised instrument of U.S. hegemony, advancing capitalist expansion and imperial interests. Its programmes have reinforced debt dependency, integrated postcolonial states into global markets on exploitative terms, and promoted privatisation, structural adjustment, and governance reforms that align with U.S. foreign policy—disciplining states of the Global South while maintaining the illusion of development as a partnership.
More than an aid agency, USAID has helped construct the power structures enabling land commodification, labour precarity, and resource extraction—all at the expense of the communities it claims to help.
In Haiti, the primary site of my research, the ecological destruction facilitated by USAID is undeniable, though its long-term consequences continue to unfold. While there are several contemporary examples, perhaps one of the most striking instances of USAID’s role in environmental harm was its involvement in the mass eradication of Haiti’s Creole pig population in the 1980s. Historically, Creole pig farming—the rearing of a pig breed indigenous to the island of Hispaniola—was the lifeblood of Haitian livelihoods, enabling families to afford basic services. It was also highly sustainable, requiring minimal grazing space, while allowing farmers to repurpose surplus crops and waste as feed. In many ways, the Creole pig was a linchpin of the economic autonomy and sustainability of Haiti’s rural communities.
In 1981, the U.S. government, alongside other international institutions and Haiti’s corrupt state elite, launched a sweeping campaign to eradicate the entire Creole pig population. The Program to Eradicate African Swine Fever and to Develop Pig Raising (PEPPADEP) aimed to slaughter approximately 384,000 Creole pigs, resulting in a short-term loss of US $12-15 million for local farmers. Officially, this “development” project was framed as a necessary biosecurity measure to prevent the spread of African swine fever (ASF), which U.S. officials feared could endanger American pork industries. However, beyond its stated objectives, PEPPADEP carried other underlying motivations: it aimed to restructure Haiti’s agricultural economy by replacing local, dark-skinned Creole pigs with imported white pigs from the U.S.
Critics of the programme argue that African swine fever had already been eradicated by the time PEPPADEP was implemented. Regardless, the eradication measures served their purpose. By eliminating the Creole pig population, Haiti was left entirely dependent on imported livestock—a direct benefit for American agribusiness interests.
Crucially, USAID played a central role in executing this project. Tasked with overseeing the pig repopulation and compensation scheme, the agency not only failed to mitigate the damage, but it actively facilitated an intervention whose disastrous consequences were entirely foreseeable. The new pig breeds imported from the U.S. proved highly ill-suited to Haiti’s environment, requiring specialised feed, intensive veterinary care, and costly maintenance—resources that were neither accessible nor sustainable for Haiti’s rural farmers.
Reports suggest that USAID was well aware of these risks but proceeded anyway. The agency also remained conspicuously silent on the violence and intimidation inflicted upon those who resisted the pig cull and the economic devastation it caused. Worse still, the promised compensation from USAID to Haitian farmers rarely materialised.
If USAID helped engineer ecological disaster in rural Haiti, it also shaped the cascading socio-ecological consequences in its urban centres. After the destruction of rural livelihoods, many Haitian farmers migrated to Port-au-Prince, deepening the city’s precarious conditions. In this sense, the mass killing of Creole pigs was not an isolated act of ecocide, but a key episode in a protracted history of ecological imperialism, with USAID functioning as a primary agent in its execution.
Over the past four decades, USAID has implemented countless projects and policies facilitating land dispossession and resource extraction in Haiti—not least in its support of export processing zones and the development of the garment industry. At the same time, USAID has been implicated in multiple aid scandals and corruption cases, in its role to advance U.S. commercial interests.
From Haiti’s experience, it should be clear that our current political moment demands a critical distinction between concern over the manner in which USAID is being dismantled and nostalgia for the institution itself. Rather than romanticising USAID as a benign force in global humanitarianism, it is crucial to recognise how its interventions have always followed a model of development that is ecologically destructive. From its role in restructuring agricultural economies to fuelling disaster capitalism, USAID has consistently deepened social vulnerabilities in service of U.S. interests, rather than alleviating them.
Instead of defending USAID, a more critical response would be to interrogate what kinds of alternatives—rooted in self-determination and social movements—can move beyond imperial formations of international aid. To be sure, the Trump-Musk dismantling of USAID does not represent a retreat from U.S. imperialism; rather, it represents a shift toward more overtly transactional state relations and coercive forms of domination. However, as USAID faces dissolution under a right-wing, techno-authoritarian regime, our focus should not be on mourning its demise, but rather on exploring how global solidarities can be reimagined in the wake of these institutional transformations.