The floods in northwest Haiti have come just four months after a similar catastrophe claimed the lives of more than 2,500 people in the Caribbean country's southeast border region. Then, flash floods and mudslides decimated the remote communities of Fond Verrettes and Mapou, whereas now the focus is on the massive loss of life in the sprawling slum that is the city of Gonaives.
In both cases, the immediate cause is the absence of trees on the country's hills and mountains, leaving a surface unable to absorb any rainfall. But these disasters demand deeper consideration of why Haiti in particular suffers -- and why its people will inevitably suffer again.
Blame for the deforestation that has reduced tree cover from an estimated 60 percent
in 1923 to less than 2 percent today falls easily on the country's peasant farmers, who make up nearly two-thirds of the population. But while they do indeed cut down the trees, they are not the guilty ones.
Haiti's peasants are desperately poor: four out of five farmers cannot satisfy their families' basic food needs. When you have nothing to eat, no animals to slaughter, no seeds to plant, nothing to sell, no prospect of finding paid work and your children's hair is turning orange because of malnutrition, what can you do? Felling saplings and digging roots to produce a sack of charcoal to sell for cash is, for many, a matter of life or death.
Part of the reason why the Haitian countryside got to
such a state goes back to the country's birth as an independent nation 200 years ago. In the 19th century, former slaves and their descendants took what they most wanted -- their own land -- when and where they could find it. A nation of smallholders developed. Meanwhile, the country's ruling elite congregated in the coastal towns, living off the spoils
of agricultural export taxes
and plundering the national treasury.
This situation remained pretty much the same until the middle of the last century, by which time individual landholdings had been divided into smaller and smaller plots over successive generations.
Farming methods had remained primitive, and the continual need to produce crops to live on meant that farm land was being consistently overworked. As yields decreased, peasant farmers could not afford to leave land idle, nor allow trees to remain where new crops could be planted.
Haitian agronomists and foreign development experts have been considering the
relationship between land use, farming techniques and soil erosion since the 1940s. Remedies were proposed, but under the Duvalier family dictatorship (1957 to 1986), Haiti's well-established corrupt style of government was taken to new extremes. Taxes went up and prices paid for agricultural surpluses went down. The pressure on the land grew ever greater.
When democratic government was restored in 1994, following three years of military rule, there was a chance to implement bold moves to address the rural crisis. But
the Haitian government was
entirely dependent on foreign
assistance, and the structural adjustment policies favoured by the international finance institutions (IFIs) had no place for agricultural development.
In a leaked paper in 1996, the World Bank warned that two-thirds of the country's workers based on the land would be unlikely to survive the economic measures demanded by the bank and
the IMF.
The World Bank concluded that the rural population would be left with only two possibilities: to work in the industrial or service sectors, or to emigrate.
This has come to pass. Foreign aid to Haiti has been turned on and off, but nearly all of it has been allocated to governance, security, elections and support for the private sector. Next to nothing has been done to support the
agricultural sector -- no land reform, no subsidies for fertilizers or storage facilities, no subsidized credit, no reforestation campaign and no irrigation projects. At the same time, the free marketeers have insisted on the reduction -- and, in some cases, the elimination -- of import tariffs, effectively destroying much local food production.
A ministry of the environment set up in early 1995 had plans to reduce urban consumers' demand for charcoal by promoting the use of gas stoves, to explore the option
of importing alternative fuels,
and to reforest mountain areas where key watersheds were located.
However, none of these initiatives ever got off the ground because only 0.2 percent of the US$560 million in foreign aid that was allocated to Haiti during the mid-to late-1990s was assigned to the environment.
The new government, formed after the fall of Jean-Bernard Aristide in February, is led by Gerard Latortue, a veteran of the UN system, and is stuffed with technocrats who are well aware of the IFI's preferences. Its decision to downgrade the environment ministry to a state secretariat gives a clear indication of its sense of priorities.
In May and June this year, while the southwest was still recovering from its fatal floods, hundreds of development experts were flown to Haiti to help the new government draw up plans for economic renewal.
At an international donors conference in Washington in July, the pledges of support for Haiti exceeded the government's request for US$1.37 billion. Less than 10 percent of this total was allocated to the agricultural sector, and less than 2 percent for environmental protection and rehabilitation.
By doing nothing to support the poverty-stricken peasantry, the international community is complicit in the loss of life and misery caused by this year's "natural" disasters in Haiti. More tragic still is the realization that, if things continue as they are, future catastrophes are inevitable.
Charles Arthur is the author of Haiti in Focus.
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