17546: Lemieux: Sun-Sentinel: Haiti: `The world doesn't have any idea how bad this situation is getting' (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>

Haiti: `The world doesn't have any idea how bad this
situation is getting'

 Tim Collie
Sun-Sentinel

December 7, 2003

PORT-AU-PRINCE--The floods that blight the seaside slum
known as God's Village arrive with a vengeance, even on
days when the rains are light.

Waves of coffee-colored mud slide off the mountains into
canals heaping with garbage. Sewers overflow and stone
walls topple. The waters rise above sandbags and the
rusting auto chassis that line a canal. Drowned pigs, dogs
and rats float in the fetid mix -- a reddish-brown swirl
seeping into the sea as though the very land is
hemorrhaging.

"The mud, it comes fast and hard, but this one isn't so bad
-- we've had much worse," says Boss Nirva, wading through
the muck that swamps his shanty. "It didn't even rain hard
here. This is the consequence of what happens in the
mountains up there, the lack of trees and all. We're always
at the mercy of the floods."

In Creole they are called lavalas -- "cleansing floods"
that rush down from the mountains like an avalanche from
June to November. But the floods no longer cleanse in
Haiti, an eroding nation whose very soil is vanishing
beneath its people's feet.

A quest for fire has destroyed trees and forests, turning
once-lush mountains into yellowing, naked rocks. Rivers and
lakes are dying, and tons of mounting garbage and
contaminants are breeding disease.

Perverted by poverty and environmental destruction, the
natural cycle that once nourished the land is spiraling out
of control.

By every measure, Haiti's 8 million inhabitants are living
in a state of profound ecological crisis, an ongoing
catastrophe little noticed by world leaders preoccupied by
wars and conflicts in much larger lands.

Less than 1 percent of Haiti remains covered in forest. In
the last five decades, more than 90 percent of its tree
cover has been lost -- an area three times the size of the
Everglades. The resulting erosion has destroyed an
estimated two-thirds of the country's fertile farmland
since 1940, while its population has quadrupled.

The United Nations calls Haiti a "silent emergency," noting
its vital statistics rival those of sub-Saharan Africa:

Haiti has the third-highest rate of hunger in the world,
behind Somalia and Afghanistan.

Its people have less access to clean water and sanitation
than residents of Ethiopia or Sierra Leone.

Its malnutrition rate is higher than Angola's, and life
expectancy is lower in Haiti than in Sudan.

A greater percentage of Haitians live in poverty than
citizens of the war-ravaged Congo.

The links between environmental and health problems in
Haiti are complicated but undeniable. Yet few nations are
working closely with Haitian officials to help solve them.
Even the United States, Haiti's largest benefactor, has
suspended aid to the government because of concerns about
fraudulent elections in 2000. And almost no one believes
Haiti can solve its own mounting problems.

"The world doesn't have any idea how bad this situation is
getting here; nobody's paying any attention to Haiti," says
Alain Grimard, a senior diplomat with the United Nations
Development Program based in Haiti. "And at the heart of it
is the very severe environmental crisis in this country.
The Haitian case is really quite unique in the world now;
you have too many people living on land that can no longer
support them."

A STRUGGLE TO SURVIVE

Despite more than two decades of rampant deforestation,
Haiti has stayed afloat with billions of dollars of
international aid. The Haitian exile community from the
United States and elsewhere sends an estimated $800 million
every year in cash, food and clothing to relatives on the
island.

"If you stopped that food aid overnight, the population
would probably be cut in half to 4 million," says Simon
Fass, author of Political Economy in Haiti: The Drama of
Survival. "The rest would starve to death.

"You have a society in which everyone is trying to get out.
But nobody wants them to get out. Yet nobody wants them to
starve. If it were someplace far away, like Somalia or
Ethiopia, then that would be fine. But it's too close. So
what you end up with is a sort of `Haiti World,' where
everyone stays alive on welfare from abroad."

Most of that $800 million comes from Florida, the promised
land for Haitians, many of whom risk their lives every year
to make it to U.S. shores. In the last decade, Florida's
Haitian community has more than doubled and, with 267,000
legal residents and about another 230,000 undocumented, is
now the largest recorded outside Haiti. Many immigrants
maintain strong ties to home -- a connection that could
lead to a major Haiti-to-Florida exodus in the event of a
natural or political crisis on the island.

"When you get on that boat, you're just praying to God,"
says Louis Boilo, 40, who came to Delray Beach in Palm
Beach County from the Artibonite Valley town of St. Marc
seven years ago. "My boat was so overcrowded, and it was so
dark, I don't know how many people were on it. But when you
see shore, you're just so happy and thankful to be alive.
You're in Delray."

The harsh environmental and economic conditions driving
Haitians to leave can be traced through the nation's
complex 200-year history of political turmoil and class
conflicts. The legacy of slavery -- followed by
international isolation and a succession of corrupt,
predatory governments -- has created a culture where few
have faith in government or large-scale enterprises, such
as environmental-protection initiatives.

Despite international efforts during the last 20 years, and
a U.S. invasion in 1994 that restored President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power after a 1991 coup, Haiti
has been unable to nurture democracy, economic growth or
sustainable environmental programs.

Crop harvests are shrinking, malnutrition rates are growing
and the population has outstripped the land's ability to
sustain it. One example: The production of rice, a key
component in the Haitian diet, has fallen dramatically
during the past decade. One in three Haitian children are
malnourished, leaving many with telltale reddish-orange
hair.

Famine-like conditions plague many parts of the country.
Eating weeds and bark to stave off hunger, once an
off-season practice among poor farmers, is common
year-round. Many have turned to eating clay, a folk remedy
once common among pregnant women.

"Who knows when the end point will come, when it all just
collapses?" Grimard says. "Every year the situation grows
so bad you can't see how it will last much longer. Last
year we forecast different crisis points -- the price of
oil, the price of food -- and things have surpassed those."

But while Haitians are resilient, survival has its limits.

"People don't want to leave here, but in the end we have to
eat, we have to survive," says Liberus Mesadieu, a
schoolteacher and farmer who lives outside of
Bombardopolis, a small town in the country's bleak
northwest. In this region, farmers are so desperate that
they are digging up the roots of long-gone trees to make
charcoal -- the only crop that brings a steady income.

While Mesadieu is acutely aware that uprooting trees is
threatening his ability to raise other crops, "the choice
is between a tree and my children," he says.

"Which would you pick?"

NATURAL CYCLE CRIPPLED

Haiti's problems begin in the mountains.

The storms of the Caribbean darken the sky nearly every
afternoon during the rainy season. Purple clouds swell like
bruises around the peaks, and cool breezes scatter the
garbage that fills city streets.

As night falls, torrents of wind and rain sweep over remote
villages and vast mountainside shantytowns lit only by
slender veins of lightning. The heavy drops hit the soft
soil hard, sending water down barren slopes so steep that
peasant farmers must hang by ropes to till tiny plots of
land.

Water -- both as bringer of life and herald of death --
informs the proverbs, poems and folklore of the Haitian
people. Every year, dozens, sometimes hundreds, die in
floods triggered by storms that do little damage elsewhere
in the Caribbean.

The flash floods are a powerful metaphor in this former
slave colony, where rebellions have often emerged in the
rugged mountains and fallen down upon the cities. The
floods give their name to the nation's democracy movement,
the Lavalas Family, which brought Aristide to power and
ushered in the country's first freely elected government in
1990.

With nothing to absorb the rain -- no trees, shrubs or
terraced hillsides -- water and topsoil wash over the
stunted crops. The runoff sweeps into deep ravines that
erosion has carved through the mountains, filling rivers
and streams with silt that is carried out to sea.

Haiti's geography compounds its environmental problems. The
country, one-fifth the size of Florida, has few plains and
is more mountainous than Switzerland. The terrain rises
from sea level to peaks of 5,000 feet in just a few miles,
creating a variety of micro-climates.

Tropical islands, under natural conditions, typically have
a thick veneer of topsoil and foliage. That top 10 percent
of the soil contains most of the nutrients that nourish
plant life. But in Haiti, that layer has largely vanished.
With 99 percent of its natural tree cover gone, millions of
tons of topsoil are washed away by the rains annually or
left to fry under the Caribbean sun.

An estimated 400 small rivers and streams have silted up
and disappeared over the last two decades. Twenty-five of
the country's 30 watersheds are bare, with just 10 percent
of rainfall penetrating the ground -- a quarter of what is
typically needed to replenish water supplies and aquifers.

Occupying one-third of the island of Hispaniola, Haiti was
once so thick with magnificent timbers in deep, rich soil
it was known as the "Pearl of the Antilles," the string of
Caribbean islands. Now it ranks last in the world for
access to drinkable water, according to the Centre for
Ecology and Hydrology in the United Kingdom. The
northwestern part of the country is an expanding desert,
with cacti and vast dusty expanses that resemble Arizona.

With the natural cycle crippled, the country's ecological
devastation affects every aspect of politics, culture and
economy.

The erosion has turned the nation's highways into muddy
roads with only occasional sections of pavement. It can
take a day to drive 60 miles through mud-slicked mountain
passes.

Health care also is compromised, as food, water and
medicine cannot easily be transported from one part of the
country to the other. When silt collects in waterways,
disease spreads.

"For every 100 deaths of children under 5 years old, more
than 50 had symptoms linked to typhoid, dysentery bacilli
and various parasites that infest the fetid water," a
report for the Canadian International Development Agency
concluded in 1998.

"Haiti's roads are a threat to public health," says Dr.
Paul Farmer, a Harvard Medical School professor who runs a
clinic in Cange, a town in the rugged Central Plateau.
"There are terrible accidents all the time, and it's not
easy on us, either; we have to move medical supplies and
staff along that road."

Farmer blames such conditions for the loss of many
patients, including 15-year-old Isaac Alfred, who had
contracted typhoid from dirty water. He had to be
transported from his village to Farmer's clinic -- an
eight-hour drive.

"Microbes had bored holes through his intestines and when
he was at the clinic, hooked up to morphine and
antibiotics, he was in excruciating pain," recalls Farmer.
"By the time Isaac reached Cange, he received medical
treatment, but it was too late."

FOOD AND HEALTH

Farmer has seen how Haiti's deteriorating environment is
contributing to the nation's crisis.

"As topsoil is washed off of the treeless mountainsides,
crop yields drop," he says. "Hunger ensues. Then they end
up in my hands, with tuberculosis or AIDS if they're
adults, and with kwashiorkor [malnutrition] or diarrhea if
they're kids."

Dr. Guillaume Lionel, 34, who runs a clinic in God's
Village, says the biggest danger posed by the floodwaters
is the contaminants they carry.

Once the sun begins to bake the pools of dirty water,
bacterial and viral agents from human waste and other
pollutants become airborne. Many children and adults in
Haiti die not only from drinking dirty water but also from
waterborne contaminants and infectious respiratory
diseases.

"We haven't had a huge flood lately, but on a daily basis
the lavalas dump the bodies of animals, sometimes a person,
right in the canal that goes through the center of this
village," says Lionel. "The carcass slowly becomes dust and
it hits the kids the worst because in these tight places,
where everyone lives so close to one another, kids just
touch everything."

The environmental conditions also have undermined
agricultural efforts. Dramatic political unrest has ensued
as small farmers struggle to survive.

In the Artibonite Valley, the nation's rice basket,
agricultural officials are often targets of angry farmers
whose canals have become so clogged with sediment that rice
can no longer be grown in the surrounding arid fields. A
Haitian government study in 1998 estimated that 37 million
tons of topsoil washes away every year, most of it in the
Artibonite.

Some international efforts have hurt more than they've
helped. After the restoration of democracy by U.S. troops
in 1994, the International Monetary Fund and other
institutions required Haiti to lift price supports in
return for hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid.
Rice farmers were buried by a glut of cheap food imports.
Even if farmland conditions allowed them to grow rice, it
became too expensive. In the past two decades, exports of
American rice -- known here as "Miami rice" -- to Haiti
have grown to 200,000 tons a year, making the nation one of
the largest consumers of American rice in the world.

"Some days you wonder why you're even out here," says
Nevres Cadet Claudius, 60, overseeing laborers farming his
tiny strip of land in the Artibonite. "You grow and grow
but the price you get for rice is less and less. Nobody
cares for us, not the government, not the world. We need
fertilizers, better tools, investment to compete in the
world."

Unrest over these conditions has caused Jean Willy
Jean-Baptiste, the local head of the Development
Organization of the Artibonite Valley, to travel with
shotgun-toting bodyguards as he surveys the agricultural
lands under his control. Angry farmers and opponents of the
government's policies have shot at him three times this
year. The wall outside his office compound is covered with
graffiti calling for Jean-Baptiste's death.

"They are farmers who cannot grow food," he explains,
standing beside a silt-filled canal. "The capacity of the
canals here to irrigate the land has been cut in half.

"If there's no water in the canals, you cannot grow rice.
If you can't grow rice, then you cannot feed your family,
pay for your children to go to school, buy drinking water."

In the small village of Fabius, which hasn't seen water in
the surrounding canals in several years, farmers are
resorting to violence to settle squabbles over how to share
limited water resources.

"The zones here are always in conflict now. The Artibonite
is a very real hot zone because we have people taking their
machetes to solve their irrigation problems," Jean-Baptiste
says. "Sometimes one fight over a canal leads to 10 or 12
deaths. It's neighborhood vs. neighborhood because one
place is getting water, but further down the canal it's
dried up."

Mercily Dukern, 39, who grew up in Fabius, remembers when
the canals were waist-deep in water. "Look at my fields,
they're just dead," he says. "We've pretty much given up on
getting water here for growing again anytime soon. Whatever
water collects in these ditches, people here need to drink.
We're all just waiting for God's mercy, waiting for his
help."

LIFE IN THE SLUMS

As topsoil washes away in Haiti's rural areas, tens of
thousands of economic refugees have flooded its cities.

Port-au-Prince is growing at a rate faster than the world's
mega-cities and has a greater share of the national
population than any other city in the Western Hemisphere.
About a third of the country's population -- some 2.8
million people -- live in the capital city.

"The farm families come here looking for a better life, but
it's a life in hell," says Jacques Hendry Rousseau, a
Haitian demographer for the International Organization of
Migration. "These people have no urban skills, and the one
skill they do have -- growing food -- is of no use in the
city."

The population density in the capital city's largest slum
is among the highest in the world. As many as 1,500 people
live on every two acres of land in Cite Soleil and other
shantytowns. Conditions are so crowded that many dwellers
pay to sleep in shifts. Mothers and fathers often sleep
standing up in shacks that have less than 8 square feet of
space for 10 or 12 people.

"It's the lack of space -- there's literally no space at
home or on the streets or anywhere -- that's what's
hardest," says Baby Lumeus, 35, of God's Village, who is
paid by residents to keep children from falling into a foul
swamp on Port-au-Prince's waterfront. "One of these days
we'll all be dead when the big rains hit, the water comes
rushing down the mountain and we're all pushed out to sea."

Hundreds of thousands of poor Haitians have overtaken the
city's waterfront in vast slums with names like the Eternal
City, God's Village and Tokyo.

"In any other capital city in the world, the waterfront is
where the rich live," says Helliot Amilcar, a geologist who
specializes in coastal development at the Haitian Ministry
of Environment. "Here, it is where the poorest of the poor
live."

The slums are hotbeds of crime and political discontent,
and home to gangs of young men who hire themselves out as
political muscle known as chimere. They use military titles
and often mark territory with the names of American hip-hop
artists like Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg.

To escape conditions, refugees from Cite Soleil have moved
up into the steep mountains surrounding the capital city,
building homes on sheer, treeless slopes that often
collapse during heavy rains. In early October, at least 15
people were killed when mudslides buried homes in Cite
Bourdon, the slum at the mouth of the Bois de Chien canal.

"There's really no place else to live; people here want to
avoid the worst slums like Cite Soleil," says Jean-Claude
Fenelon, 36, bathing with several other men and women in a
stream that runs through Cite Bourdon. A native of the
Central Plateau region, he came to Port-au-Prince 10 years
ago because his plot of land barely grew anything.

"When I was growing up in the Central Plateau, you'd see
people coming from Port-au-Prince all the time," Fenelon
recalls. "They looked good. They were clean, wore nice
clothes. They even smelled good. So you think good things
happen here, but looks can be deceiving."

Haiti's deplorable living conditions have promoted the
spread of preventable diseases that have been contained or
eradicated in many other countries.

Polio, eliminated from the Western Hemisphere in 1994,
re-emerged on the island in 2000. The Pan American Health
Organization said only 30 percent of Haitian children had
been fully vaccinated against measles, polio, mumps and
rubella in the 1990s. Since then, inoculation rates have
declined. HIV/AIDS kills 30,000 Haitians and orphans an
estimated 200,000 children each year. That gives Haiti the
highest per-capita AIDS death rate in the hemisphere and
one of the highest in the world.

In city streets, Rousseau and other demographers have
observed a large increase in the number of street children
-- known as kokorats or grapiays (leftovers) -- orphaned by
AIDS or other diseases.

"There's no reliable numbers on these children because the
situation in Haiti is so complex it's hard to tell anymore
what a street child is," says Rousseau. "The collapse of
the countryside and the urban environment, the sheer
overpopulation, has resulted in a complete breakdown of the
Haitian family. In such an environment, a child who
survives past the age of 5 is usually on his own."

LEAVING IN ORDER TO LIVE

A growing number of Haitian refugees are fleeing for the
relative stability and economic opportunity of the
Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola
with Haiti.

The 223-mile frontier between the two nations has become a
teeming border area where Haitians and Dominicans compete
for food and work. On the Dominican Republic side, trees
are clustered tightly in rich tropical foliage. Roads are
paved, houses are painted in bright tropical blues, yellows
and greens, and there are numerous automobiles. But in
Haiti, the mountains are bare and coffee-colored. Trees
exist in solitary clusters so small they would hardly shade
a family picnic. Houses are ramshackle huts, where they
exist at all. The roads are muddy trails or worse.

"On one side there's order, and on the other side there's
really no authority at all," says Calixte Aldrin, a Haitian
environmentalist who specializes in border issues. "I don't
even know if you can call what's on the Haitian side an
environment anymore. It's just barren, scalded land that
doesn't grow much."

As Haiti deteriorates, the Dominican Republic has grown
increasingly alarmed. Earlier this year, the chief of the
armed forces described Haiti as a security threat.

The World Bank estimates that at least 6 percent -- more
than 500,000 -- of the Dominican Republic's 8.4 million
people are Haitian immigrants. Some experts think the
number is at least twice that figure. Many Haitians are
literally without any country: They have no records of
their birth in Haiti and live as illegal workers in the
other nation.

"I supposedly have rights here because I was born here, and
my mother was Dominican," says Violine Philogene, a
16-year-old Haitian farmworker who lives in a shack outside
the Dominican border town of Dajabón. "But the truth is
that I cannot get any papers here, and I have no rights.
I'm Haitian, but I'm really just nothing, nobody, on either
side of the border. But the life is better here."

Ronald Joseph, a local congressman in Ouanaminthe, a
northern Haiti border town, estimates that the area's
population has grown from about 5,000 a decade ago to about
120,000 people today. All have fled the interior for a
better life in the Dominican Republic. The average income
of Dominicans is five times that of Haitians -- $2,000 a
year compared to less than $400 in Haiti.

"The misery is just increasing here," he says. "The only
commerce is what you can make on the Dominican side."

Louis Louis-Jeune, a 19-year-old Haitian who lives in a
shack on farmland outside another border town, La Ceiba,
says he often journeys to farm and construction jobs in
Dajabón or the capital city of Santo Domingo.

But he and other Haitians are on continuous guard for
sweeps by soldiers and policemen. He recently was robbed of
$150 by soldiers before being dumped over a section of
border hundreds of miles from his hometown.

"The yucca grows too small in Haiti," says Louis-Jeune,
referring to the cassava root that is a staple of Caribbean
cuisine. "Nothing at all really grows there anymore, so I
came here basically to save my life because there just
wasn't any food where I grew up, and my family was too
large.

"I had to leave in order to live."
Copyright © 2003, South Florida Sun-Sentinel


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