30557: Lemieux: news article (blog) (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

Jacques Lemieux

JUNE 12, 2007
Haiti: Anse d'Hainault (Part 1)
In Haiti, the divide between the capital and the rest
of the country, between center and periphery is so
great that one author has spoken of the ?two worlds?
of Haiti. Yet life in the periphery is not totally
unconnected to the tumultuous events of the center.
Anse d?Hainault, a seaside fishing village that has
the distinction of the town furthest from
Port-au-Prince, gave us a first-hand view of this
dynamic.
Deforestation is endemic to Haiti, with some 98% of
the original forest cover destroyed. While the
degradation the environment began well before
neoliberalism came to Haiti, the IMF-mandated economic
reforms of the mid 90s accerated this process.
When agricultural imports from the US flooded into the
country following the slashing of tariffs, many
Haitian peasants were forced to the wall. Faced with
declining prices for their products and desperate to
find a new way of making money, many turned to cutting
down trees for charcoal, the cooking fuel of the
majority in Port-au-Prince.
This initiated a vicious cycle: Peasants cutting down
trees led to soil erosion, soil erosion led to a
decline in the productivity of the land, and lower
productivity led more peasants to switch to cutting
down trees.
Located at the tip of Haiti?s southern peninsula, Anse
d?Hainault and the surrounding area (the Grand?Anse)
are covered with trees. The region escaped the
environmental fate of the rest of Haiti largely thanks
to the terrible state of the roads (the term here is
used very generously) connecting the region to the
capital, making charcoal more difficult to bring to
market.
Although only 65 km away from Jeremie, the provincial
capital, the drive to Anse d?Hainault takes nearly 3
hours. The winding road through the mountains is paved
only at the turns and heavy rains often create deep
ruts or provoke landslides. In at least one sense
then, Anse d?Hainault?s geographical and
infrastructural isolation has been a blessing in
disguise.
Haiti: Anse d'Hainault (Part 2)
Anse d?Hainault?s isolation, however, did not save it
from an earlier agricultural catastrophe: the
eradication of the kreyol pig. In the early 80s, while
the dictator Jean-Claude ?Baby Doc? Duvalier was still
in power, there was a rumored outbreak of African
swine fever among Haiti?s pigs. At the behest of the
US government, ever mindful of the interests of its
pork industry, the Haitian government wiped out nearly
the entire pig population.
Owning a pig had served as a form of economic security
for the Haitian peasant, an asset which could be sold
in hard times, so the eradication program represented
an enormous loss. Malnutrition in the countryside
skyrocketed while school attendance rates dropped. One
author described the impact as a ?Great Depression?
for the peasant.
Guy Monlouis, an elementary school teacher in Anse
d?Hainault, is part of a cooperative that was formed
specifically to respond to the plight of the peasants
in the area following the pig eradication. Monlouis
said that his group started a pig repopulation project
in the late 80s and obtained funding from CIDA to
build a pig shelter. Peasants who had lost their pigs
would be provided with new ones and the cooperative
would take back a few of the female pigs of subsequent
litters to in order to extend the project to other
people.
Nearly 20 years later, the concrete structure stands
empty. Monlouis says the group is considering
converting the building into a place to raise
chickens, but vows they will never try pork production
again. What went wrong?
One problem was that when the pigs were replaced,
American-bred pigs were used to replace the indigenous
kreyol pigs that had been killed off. The kreyol pigs
were hearty animals that required little upkeep and
survived by eating the garbage produced by the
household. The American pigs, on the other hand,
needed shelter from the sun (hence the CIDA-funded
building) and refused to eat anything but grain.
When the price of grain rose sharply, the pigs ended
up costing more than they were worth. People stopped
breeding the pigs and started killing them off for
meat, and by 2003 the project had collapsed.
"Every year [since 1986] things have gotten worse
here," laments Monlouis, reflecting on the heady times
of the struggle against the dictatorship. With
hardships increasing in the town, many residents have
left for Port-au-Prince in search of work.




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