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HAITI: Drought, Poverty, Hunger - and Little Foreign Aid
By Darío Montero
JEREMIE, Haiti, Jun 7 (IPS) - The Sud province of Haiti is suffering a
drought so severe that the planting season has been postponed. Yet no
international financial assistance has come through to confront the crisis,
reported Cécile Banatte, the local official designated by the interim
government of Haiti to govern the largely agricultural southern province.
The situation is even more drastic in view of the fact that the sprawling
southwest portion of the country - where the Uruguayan contingent of the
United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) is based - produces
the bulk of the limited food supplies for the nation's estimated 8.5 million
inhabitants (no exact figures are available).
The effects of the shortage of water and the delayed start of the rainy
season, which usually brings torrential downpours from late April through
June, were clearly apparent from the plane that took a group of Uruguayan
journalists from Les Cayes to Jeremie, the province's two main cities.
There are normally rivers flowing down the slopes of the mountain that cuts
through the region from east to west. Now the river beds are mainly mud, and
produce just enough of a trickle of water for nearby residents to bathe and
wash their clothes, as they have done for centuries (the infrastructure for
running water and sewage systems has yet to reach this area). Also visible
are arid terraces where food crops once grew.
In spite of the drought, southern Haiti is still greener than most of the
country, where almost all vegetation vanished years ago. The central valley
of Artobonite was carpeted with rice paddies that fed the entire nation just
20 years ago. Today, it produces barely enough for the last peasants who
refuse to move out of the area.
Because of this, and the central government's historic neglect of the south,
separatist sentiments flare up from time to time, noted Banatte.
Trees still grow a short distance away, and family farming remains a
constant, with a small plot planted next to every house along the gravel
roads that are rendered impassable by the yearly arrival of heavy rains and
flooding. It seems that life in Haiti moves from one extreme to the other,
and the only middle ground is the preponderance of disturbing statistics
with the number 50.
Haiti produces only 50 percent of the food consumed there, the average life
expectancy is around 50 years, 50 percent of the population is illiterate,
and the same proportion is aged 21 or under. Just over 50 percent of
Haitians have access to drinking water and sewage services, and roughly the
same percentage suffer from malnutrition.
In this Caribbean island nation, a child dies of hunger every hour, and in
the northern regions, where there is little or no agricultural production,
the figure rises to 29 deaths a day, out of a total population of slightly
over a million.
Infant mortality as a result of malnutrition and lack of sanitation is 69
per 1000 live births, according to Anne Poulsen, a Danish representative of
the World Food Programme (WFP) in Haiti.
These statistics are quite understandable given that three out of every four
Haitians depends in one way or another on agriculture, primarily subsistence
farming.
The predominance of human and animal traction makes travelling through the
rural areas of Haiti like going back to the 19th century: during a whole
week in the country's southern region, the Uruguayan journalists saw only
one tractor.
At a press conference with the Uruguayan delegation, Minister of
Agriculture, Natural Resources and Rural Development Philippe Mathieu
reported that some 700,000 Haitian families live off the land, which has
been eroded to the point of exhaustion by centuries of deforestation. Barely
two percent of the trees standing when the colonial era began remain today.
With an enthusiasm that seemed more like an attempt at sending the visitors
away with a positive image than a reflection of reality, Mathieu stressed
that the country retains an abundance of natural wealth, such as mangoes, of
which Haiti is the world's fifth largest exporter.
The country also produces rice, squash, cacao and pepper, as well as
poultry, goats and pigs, many of which can be seen in downtown
Port-au-Prince, feeding upon the piles of garbage on the streets.
"The south is an example of the effort to overcome the violence that has
forced many people out of the countryside," stated Mathieu.
"There, the situation is under control," he added, praising the work of the
Uruguay 1 Joint Battalion posted in the south by the MINUSTAH leadership.
"We also expect the peacekeeping forces to work with our peasants," he
noted.
But he underlined that "international solidarity is essential for rebuilding
our institutions," an obvious allusion to the delay in the arrival of the
financial aid promised by wealthy countries.
According to a study carried out last year by international experts and the
caretaker government of Boniface Alexandre (appointed after the Feb. 29,
2004 overthrow of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide), at least 1.3 billion
dollars over the course of two years will be needed for reconstruction and
for rebuilding the country's institutions.
That figure was later revised with the addition of another one billion
dollars, but so far the donor nations have only come through with 250
million dollars, claiming that the eventual beneficiaries have either not
been accurately identified or that the institutions in charge of handling
the aid are not reliable.
While Mathieu was quite well-versed on the details of overdue foreign
assistance, he was unable to come up with any accurate information regarding
the sector for which he is responsible. IPS received similarly vague answers
when talking to one of his colleagues, fisheries director Roberto Badieu.
Plans for the sector include reviving rice production, "a strategic
commodity," according to Badieu. Rice was once the country's leading export,
until Haiti succumbed to external pressures and opened its borders to
foreign trade in the mid-1980s, the international heyday of the free-market
"neoliberal" economic model.
With the elimination of trade barriers, the country was flooded with
subsidised U.S. rice, which spelled disaster for local producers.
Domestic and foreign sales of Haitian rice dropped by 50 percent, pushing
droves of almost famine-stricken peasants towards the capital. In just over
two decades, the population of Port-au-Prince doubled to an estimated four
million people today.
Given the current state of the agricultural sector, international food aid
is crucial, particularly in this nation where the average annual income is
barely 400 dollars and the lack of clean drinking water results in frequent
outbreaks of diseases like diarrhoea, dysentery and typhoid.
"Fortunately, there are not many children with acute malnutrition, but a
great many are undernourished, and that is very serious in itself," Poulsen
told the Uruguayan journalists.
In some regions of Haiti, 47 percent of children lack proper nutrition, and
many suffer physical and mental problems as a consequence.
Approximately 1.5 million Haitians depend on humanitarian aid from the WFP,
despite the fact that the country is home to a large variety of ecosystems
that offer ample opportunities for diversified agricultural production, for
both domestic consumption and export, said the Danish expert.
This year, she noted, the WFP has assisted 550,000 families at a cost of 20
million dollars, contributed by both national governments and private
donors, particularly the United States, the European Union, Switzerland,
Canada and Japan.
Over the next two years, more than 40 million dollars will be required to
reach the 850,000 families in need of aid, who also receive assistance from
other U.N agencies, like the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), as
well as non-governmental organisations.
But donors are difficult to find, remarked Poulsen, because "there are a lot
of problems in the world," and this small nation, devoid of any strategic
value, is not a priority for the countries of the industrialised North.
"In my country, Denmark, people know nothing about the political and
economic situation in Haiti, because it's not in the headlines of the world
media, but even so, there are civil society and church groups that provide
cooperation," she said.
"Haiti is not in the spotlight," she lamented.
(END/2005)
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