23333: (Arthur) Grinding poverty rather than farmers' greed is the real culprit (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Tttnhm@aol.com

A slightly edited (including the addition of the title, 'General', in front
of Aristide's name!?!?!!!) version of the text below appeared in the British
newspaper, The Guardian, on 29 September 2004.

Squalid excuses

Deforestation has left Haiti vulnerable to natural disaster. But it is the
failure to address the grinding poverty of local farmers rather than their own
greed that is the real culprit, says Charles Arthur

Wednesday September 29, 2004 - The Guardian

The floods in north-west Haiti come just four months after a similar
catastrophe claimed the lives of over 2,500 people in the country's south-east 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 Gonaïves. As most commentators have
observed, 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%
in 1923, to less than 2% 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 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 some saplings and digging some roots to produce a sack of
charcoal to sell for cash is, for many, literally a matter of life or death.

How did the Haitian countryside get in such a state? Part of the answer lies
in a complex interaction of historical, political, and economic factors
stretching back to the country's birth as an independent nation two hundred years
ago. During the nineteenth century, former slaves and their descendants took
what they most wanted - their own land - when and where they could find it. A
nation of small-holders 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
twentieth century, by which time individual land-holdings 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
(1957-86), Haiti's well-established corrupt and 'kleptocratic' style of government
was taken to new extremes. Taxes went up. Prices paid for agricultural
surpluses went down. The pressure on the land grew ever greater.

In the late 1980s peasant organisations flourished, and there was a glimmer
of hope for Haiti's failing rural sector. Through the peasants' collective
action, co-operatives and credit systems were set up, take-overs of idle land
organised, and silos to stockpile grains built. Peasant leaders stressed the need
to involve peasant farmers themselves in plans for rural renewal that would
necessarily involve steps to restore the environment.

Land reform, and especially the need to resolve disputes over land ownership,
were on the political agenda for the first time. Insecurity stemming from the
confusing state of land titles left peasants feeling vulnerable to eviction
and therefore unwilling to plan for the future - unwilling to leave a sapling
to mature.

When the 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. Unfortunately, the Haitian government was more or less entirely
dependent on foreign assistance, and the structural adjustment policies favoured by
the international finance institutions had no place for agricultural
development.

In a draft Country Assistance Strategy paper leaked in 1996, the World Bank
warned that two-thirds of the country's workers based on the land would be
unlikely to survive the neo-liberal economic measures demanded by the Bank and the
IMF. The paper concluded that the rural population would be left with only
two possibilities: to work in the industrial or service sector, or to emigrate.

And so it 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 fertilisers or storage
facilities, no subsidised 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% of the US$560 million foreign assistance
allocated to Haiti during the mid to late 1990s was assigned to the environment.

The new government formed following the fall of Aristide in February is led
by Gerard Latortue, a thirty year veteran of the United Nations system, and is
stuffed with technocrats 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 south-east 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 DC in July, pledges of support exceeded the
government's request for US$1.37 billion. Less than 10% of this total was allocated to
the agricultural sector, and less than 2% 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 realisation that, if
things continue as they are, future catastrophes are inevitable.

If Haiti's countryside and its people are left to an increasingly
unproductive future, more and more of them will move to the fetid slums of Haiti's
swelling cities in the hope of finding a livelihood. Must the fate experienced by
the people of the shanty-towns in Gonaïves today, be shared by the poor
inhabitants of Cap-Haïtien and Port-au-Prince tomorrow?

· Charles Arthur is author of Haiti in Focus (published by Latin America
Bureau, 2002).
http://www.societyguardian.co.uk/societyguardian/story/0,,1314531,00.html

More information: www.haitisupport.gn.apc.org