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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.