18007: (Chamberlain) Haiti wood (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

(Sun-Sentinel, 7 Dec 03)


'We know that this is destroying the land, but charcoal is what keeps us
alive'

A quest for fire is decimating Haiti's forests, as trees are turned into
charcoal.


By Tim Collie



BOMBARDOPOLIS -- The men in this town hunt their trees in packs.

Fanning out in groups of four or five with handmade axes, picks and
crowbars, they may happen upon a mango tree, a vital fruit producer, that
no longer earns its keep. Down it comes. Or they may bring down a gayoc --
an extremely rare hardwood tree once prized for the medicinal quality of
its resin.

When a tree cannot be found, men turn on the stumps of timber long gone and
dig, hack, poke and pry the wood out of the ground.

They then dig a pit in the wet, brown soil and set the wood -- trees or
stumps -- ablaze. The burning pile is covered with mud, grass and leaves in
a mound from which smoke rises. Joining milky white tendrils from other
mounds, the resulting haze wafts over denuded mountainsides that look like
scar tissue on the once-verdant landscape.

A week passes and the men known as charbonniers dig up the "black gold" --
charcoal -- the product that fuels this poor nation's cities while
devouring what's left of its countryside.

Sold by charbonniers to urban residents -- for use in home cooking,
bakeries and dry cleaners -- charcoal has been the chief source of energy
for decades, accounting for 85 percent of energy consumption. Electricity
has never penetrated the rural interior where half the country's 8 million
people live. Oil prices have risen dramatically in the last two years,
making the dwindling forests the only fuel option for most Haitians.

But with every downed tree, this nation's natural legacy is going up in
smoke. Charcoal production is the engine driving Haiti to the brink of
environmental collapse.

"We're not fools; we know that this is destroying the land, but charcoal is
what keeps us alive," said Liberus Mesadieu, a 34-year-old farmer, as he
hacked at a tree stump, sweat staining the old Domino's Pizza delivery
shirt on his back. "This area used to be dense with trees, but we uprooted
them all for the wood."

Added his neighbor, 44-year-old Delius Alcius: "Cutting trees leads us to
more misery. If we didn't have to cut the trees, the soil would be richer
here. But to make money here, you have to take all the wood to make the
charcoal."

The practice is not only decimating once-lush forests. The dearth of wood
for homes has led to mining of rock and sand from Haiti's mountains to make
cement, which intensifies erosion problems. In Port-au-Prince, at least
7,900 acres of land has been mined to build small homes in the expanding
slums, according to the United Nations.

As trees disappear, so do parts of the culture. The nation's artists no
longer have enough wood to make sculptures. Indigenous dishes are
disappearing as certain fruits and vegetables become more rare and harder
to grow, and cheap imports like breakfast cereal replace them.

Rural farmers don't use charcoal; the product evolved to meet the growing
demand for fuel in Port-au-Prince and other large cities, as people fled
the countryside for urban areas. Yet as more trees fall in rural areas to
meet the demands of the cities, ever more young men and women leave the
countryside for urban slums, escalating the nation's deforestation.

The economics of charcoal production are so favorable that even when
conventional crop harvests are good, they pale in comparison to the money a
farmer can make burning trees.

To raise lima beans during a single harvest on 3 acres of land, Mesadieu
must work with three other farmers and buy the seed for about $15 -- the
equivalent of 500 gourdes in Haitian currency. A good harvest yields 60
pounds of beans, earning 900 gourdes, or $28. The profit: $13, or $3.25 for
each partner.

But in a single week, one charcoal pit yields at least three bags, earning
375 gourdes, or $11 in total. If he finds a way to transport it to local
markets, he can make nearly twice that amount.

The impact on local economies is similar to that of the coca industry in
Colombia, where food crops are forsaken for the environmentally damaging
plants and practices that provide the key ingredient in cocaine.

In Bombardopolis, charcoal has become a form of currency. Heaping bags of
it lean against homes, an outward reflection of wealth. Farmers take out
loans against it and use the bags to pay for food or school.

But the area around the village is almost treeless, and farmers say the
next generation won't even have charcoal to fall back on.

"For the first time, people are really talking about leaving"
Bombardopolis, said Alcius, explaining that he must harvest charcoal to buy
medicine for his ailing wife. "You never saw that before because it was too
hard a trip to make to the Dominican Republic. And finding a boat for the
United States is very difficult."

The United States, foreign governments and international charities have
been sponsoring reforestation projects in Haiti for decades. But the
multimillion-dollar efforts are overwhelmed by Haiti's political
instability and staggering poverty.

The Atlanta-based CARE organization has extensive nurseries and
tree-planting programs in Haiti's northwest, but its agriculture
specialists concede that weaning farmers off charcoal is an immense task.
Their nurseries produce 300,000 seedlings a year, usually fruit trees like
mango and citrus, as well as forest trees like eucalyptus and cedar.

"You can't force people to keep trees on their land, if for no other reason
than there's no government enforcement around here," said Wilbert
Pierreval, CARE's reforestation chief in Bombardopolis. "One guy will tell
you he needs this tree for money to send his wife to a hospital, another
will say it's for school. What we can do is suggest they not cut down one
tree and then give them 10 seedlings to grow some more trees."

Bombardopolis and three other nearby villages are famine zones with 180,000
people at risk, according to the United Nations World Food Program. It is a
region so poor that young men climb up stone walls to study textbooks under
the single light at a local CARE compound.

In a report last December, the United Nations noted: "Most of the
households can hardly afford one meal a day ... others live on coconuts or
mere tea. Because of lack of income and hunger, some parents can no longer
maintain their children in school. Others are just too hungry to commute to
school. In some areas, part of the able population [mostly males ages 14 to
40] are migrating to the cities and abroad, hence diminishing the
agriculture labor base.

"Young girls who migrate to urban areas in search of food are forced by
circumstances to engage in prostitution, putting them at the risk of early
pregnancy or contracting HIV/AIDS. Some young schoolgirls have returned to
their villages with babies, hence creating additional burden for their
parents."

Environmental experts date the charcoal boom to the early 1960s, when world
coffee prices fell so low that Haiti could no longer compete in the coffee
market. The country was in the early years of the Duvalier dictatorship,
which ruled brutally for three decades. Haitian farmers began ripping up
their coffee plants to replace them with crops that would fetch a better
price.

"Coffee was being exported, but during the Duvalier years there were lots
of high taxes on it and lots of exploitative practices by the government --
predatory practices," explained John Currelly, an agronomist with the Pan
American Development Foundation in Haiti. "More and more of it was smuggled
out, and less and less of it was actually harvested. And the techniques for
growing it were very bad. It was just part of the whole disintegration of
Haitian society during that time."

Because coffee beans grow on a bush that doesn't have to be replanted every
year, it holds tropical soil very well. Coffee also grows well with
surrounding tree cover, so there is no need to clear forests.

But as farmers grew desperate, they began moving to other crops --
including corn, peanuts and bananas -- to support their families. But those
crops were unsuitable for Haiti's mountainous terrain.

"Geography plays a key role: It tells you what you can plant and what you
can't," explained Currelly. "What you cannot plant on highly sloped fields
is corn. Or peanuts, which you have to pull up out of the ground in order
to harvest them."

In the village of Figuiers, 79-year-old Fabius Augustin recalls the day an
entrepreneur named Thomas showed up to tell farmers about the charcoal
industry in the 1960s. Thomas taught them how to make charcoal and set up a
system of middlemen to bring the product to markets in Gonaives, six hours
away.

"Everybody here overnight went crazy," said Augustin, a local minister
regarded as a village elder. "They began chopping down trees everywhere,
and nobody paid much attention to planting new ones. There was shade all
over here. It was a dark, thick jungle. But look at it now: It's a desert."

Local officials oversaw the thriving trade but protected larger forests
controlled by the government or large landowners.

That system broke down with the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986.
Tree harvesting, charcoal production and wood transport exploded overnight.
Charcoal production spread into previously protected forests. The expansion
moved into new forests, flooding the market and keeping wood cheaper than
alternatives such as fuel oil. The devastation intensified in 1991, after
Haiti's first democratically elected government was overthrown in a coup.

An international trade embargo later that year so ransacked Haiti's economy
that peasants who could not afford seed or fertilizer turned to trees to
survive. Some 65 million trees that the United States Agency for
International Development had planted during the 1980s were chopped down
for wood fuel.

In June 1994, the embargo was extended to include mangoes. For the first
time, farmers turned their axes against fruit trees. Many peasants believe
that mangoes and other trees are homes to ancestral spirits. They also are
important sources of folk medicine used to treat everything from diarrhea
to lung infections.

"I recall going up to the top of a watershed at the height of the embargo,
turning off the jeep, in an area that was well-planted and had always been
left alone because it was the area that had always collected water for the
hydroelectric facility," recalled Currelly. "This was absolutely essential
to maintain the water flow to maintain electricity for the area. Nobody cut
down trees there ever. And all you could hear was the tap-tap-tap-tap of
trees being cut down all over the area.

"There are ups and downs in this economy. And every time there is a
down[turn], trees get cut. Remember, the Haitian farmer is the greatest of
environmentalists. He knows precisely what he is doing. Like any of us, he
will make the decision to feed his child today at the expense of the
environment tomorrow. And if he didn't he'd be a murderer."