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27071: Hermantin(News)Fruit of their labor (fwd)






HAITI

Fruit of their labor



BY LETTA TAYLER
STAFF CORRESPONDENT

January 3, 2006



SAUT MATHURINE, Haiti -- Two decades ago, Ilson Dorcy considered the mango trees dotting his rugged, mountain farmland so useless that he'd cut them and sell the wood to charcoal makers. Now, he views them as gold.

Since he began grafting mango trees with a fancy variety of the fruit that is popular in the United States, Dorcy earns more exporting mangoes than he would selling trees for charcoal.

"At first, my friends thought I was crazy," Dorcy, 60, recalled as he stood proudly in front of his mango grove in this remote hamlet on Haiti's southwest peninsula. "They said the group telling me to grow more mangoes must be communist."

Actually, the Organization for the Rehabilitation of the Environment, a nonprofit group that launched the grafting program, relies on a purely capitalist tenet to combat Haiti's massive deforestation.

"If you don't offer people an alternative that earns them more than cutting down the trees, you won't succeed," said Mousson Finnigan, the group's co-director.

For a half-century, nonprofit and government programs have largely failed to stem deforestation, which is driven by Haiti's dependence on charcoal for cooking and on lucrative timber exports. Though 3 million trees are planted each year, an estimated 50 million others are felled.

The problem, environmentalists say, is that reforestation programs rarely provide jobs to tree-cutters, most of whom are subsistence farmers. So as soon as saplings are planted, farmers cut them down.

ORE, in contrast, supplies farmers with fruit trees or stalks for top-grafting - a process in which high-quality fruit varieties are grafted to pruned, low-quality fruit trees to produce lucrative strains of mango, avocado and citrus in just two to three years.

Dorcy top-grafted his mango trees with ORE saplings that produce the exceptionally sweet, fragrant Madame Francique mango. He earns $15 to $45 per tree each year by selling those mangoes to the United States. Sold as wood, each tree might fetch him $50.

The communist moniker was no joke when Sean Finnigan, a British-born photographer-turned-environmentalist, and his wife, Mousson, a Parisian-trained Haitian doctor, started ORE two decades ago in Camp Perrin, a town an hour's drive south of here.

Perhaps encouraged by lumber and charcoal barons, peasants were so suspicious of the sapling-bearing Finnigans that they reported them as possible communist recruiters to the military. At the time, Haiti, just 45 miles from Cuba, was winding down a U.S.-backed campaign to suppress suspected leftists.

But paranoia became ecstasy when the fruit began to sell.

"This is my new mother!" exclaimed Maurice Joseph, 55, a barefoot farmer in the nearby hamlet of Navarre, as he pointed to the shiny green fruit on his three avocado trees.

In eight years, the avocados have financed a concrete floor for his shack, paid tuition for two of his four children, and helped him buy a tiny plot of land, Joseph said.

ORE has helped plant or graft more than 882,000 trees here that earn an estimated $9.3 million a year. Still, the progress is hard-won.

Farmers wince as they describe the obstacles in getting produce to market: bandits who demand protection money, bridges washed out along the bumpy dirt road that passes for a highway, and fruit that spoils in transit because producers lack sufficient crates to pack it properly.

While Haiti could easily double its fruit exports, international donors shun long-term projects like ORE's, preferring 18-month commitments because of Haiti's instability.

So, above Saut Mathurine, peasants keep cutting trees. Topsoil tumbles down the mountains to Camp Perrin, blocking irrigation canals and filling the local river with so much silt that it frequently overflows, flooding homes and businesses.

"We haven't won the war," said Mousson Finnigan, "just one battle."
Copyright © 2005, Newsday, Inc.