The Haitian government’s decision to eliminate fuel subsidies in September 2022, causing fuel prices to roughly double overnight, ignited popular fury that had been building for years and found in the fuel price shock a catalyst for the most widespread protests since the PetroCaribe demonstrations of 2019. For millions of Haitians already struggling with food prices running at more than 25 percent annual inflation, the sudden doubling of fuel costs was simply the final straw.
The mechanics of how fuel subsidies worked in Haiti meant that their removal had immediate and cascading effects on daily life. Cheaper fuel had subsidized transport costs, which kept the prices of goods and services lower than they would otherwise have been. When fuel prices doubled, transport costs rose immediately, and those costs were passed along the supply chain to every product that needed to be moved — which in a country that imported the majority of its consumption, meant almost everything.
Small business owners who operated on thin margins found their cost structures fundamentally altered overnight. Tap-tap operators who calculated their fares based on fuel costs faced impossible arithmetic: raising fares risked losing customers; maintaining them meant operating at a loss. Market vendors who used fuel-powered generators to preserve food faced sharply higher operating costs. The entire informal economy that sustained most Haitian livelihoods was destabilized simultaneously.
The government argued that the subsidies were fiscally unsustainable and that the savings would be redirected to social programs, but the social protection infrastructure needed to cushion the impact of such a major price shock essentially did not exist. For families already making difficult choices about what to eat and how to keep the lights on, the promise of future social programs was no comfort against the immediate reality of prices they could not afford.