Cassia siamia trees (used for charcoal) planted on farm borders in Haiti. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
WARSAW, Nov 18 2013 (IPS)

Small farmers could play an important part in making Haiti – where just two percent of trees are still standing – green again.

With a population of 10 million and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of 7.8 billion dollars, Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country, has been crippled by environmental degradation for several years. “There is already a firm foundation to build on in some areas where present and past forestry and agroforestry projects had been implemented." -- Tony Rinaudo

But there is a flicker of hope for the country and its neighbour, Dominican Republic (DR), with which it shares the island of Hispaniola.

Inspired by the success of its Humbo forestry project in Ethiopia, developed under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), World Vision Australia has just completed a scoping mission to both countries, to examine the potential for natural regeneration of forests through “Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration” (FMNR).

“Healthy lives for children and their families are underpinned by a healthy environment and so more and more we’ve been looking at how we can help communities to build sustainable environments, and particularly in the face of climate change this is becoming increasingly important,” Timothy Morris, World Vision’s business unit manager, food security and climate change, told IPS on the sidelines of the United Nations climate change conference underway here at the national stadium of Poland.

The CDM allows for reforestation projects to earn carbon credits (Certified Emission Reductions – CER’s) for each tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent “sequestered” or absorbed by the forest. In the case of World Vision’s Humbo project, revenue continues to be generated for the communities who manage the forest assets under seven cooperatives, representing almost 50,000 people.

“We understood that Haiti is an area that is being heavily degraded through deforestation, a high population and the need for fuels,” Morris said.

Devastating floods and landslides have also left bare many areas previously covered with forests, he noted.

World Vision’s point person on reforestation, Tony Rinaudo, recently visited Haiti and the Dominican Republic to examine the degraded landscape in the area.

“There is already a firm foundation to build on in some areas where present and past forestry and agroforestry projects had been implemented,” Rinaudo told IPS.
“I met individuals who valued and cared for trees – fruit, timber, charcoal – successfully.”

Rinaudo stressed that FMNR is certainly not a new concept since he “saw cases of it on some farm borders, in some cases within cropland”. But he said this understanding can be built on – to improve technique, scale up activities – and create greater awareness and practice.

“There is enormous potential for FMNR – for example, with prosopis which is a very aggressive thorny species. With systematic management a sustainable charcoal, pole, timber, honey, fodder industry could be established,” he told IPS.

Indi McLymont-Lafayette, regional coordinator for Panos Caribbean, which works to give voice to poor and marginalised communities, told IPS that some grassroots groups in Haiti were already actively involved in this issue.

“We have been working over the past two and a half years implementing a project looking at the rehabilitation after the earthquake,” she said.

“We include climate change and biodiversity issues with policy making. Part of that has entailed working with areas that have reforestation initiatives and one of the organisations in Haiti, Fondation Seguin, is very crucial, I think, for collaboration because they are already doing tremendous work in reforestation so I think World Vision could bring value to what is already being done.”

World Vision has had tremendous success with a community-managed forestry project in the Humbo region of Ethiopia, 342 kilometres south of the capital Addis Ababa. Over a 30-year crediting period, it is estimated that more than 880,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent will be removed from the atmosphere, making a significant contribution to mitigating climate change.

Prior to the project, Humbo’s mountainous terrain was highly degraded and chronically drought prone. Poverty, hunger and increasing demand for agricultural land had driven local communities to overexploit forest resources.

Hurricane-ravaged Haiti and the Dominican Republic are among the countries most affected by climate change. A study by the World Bank released this week states that if the sea continues to rise at the current rate, Santo Domingo, the capital of DR, will be one of the five cities most affected at a global level by climate change in 2050.

Another report released here shows that Haiti led the list of the three countries most affected by weather-related catastrophes in 2012.

A continuously growing urban population and an increasing demand for charcoal and fuel wood have all contributed to depleting Haiti’s natural environment. But Morris said the two Caribbean nations stand to reap many benefits from a forestry regeneration project.

“When we do this kind of work there are multiple benefits that can come from it, particularly in a coastal environment and environments that are exposed to storm activity,” Morris told IPS.

“The sorts of things that we would like to do by regenerating and planting trees are to enhance soil integrity; prevent erosion; build coastal land integrity for resilience to storm surge and coastal inundation; and to re-establish the natural asset base of the area for more sustainable usage over the long term.”

He said there could also be benefits in the form of increased food production, since “often we find that once we get into this technique – particularly around the water catchment areas and steep slopes – it can improve the soil integrity” for agricultural purposes.

Joel Monfiston next to his shed in Sector 3 of Corail-Cesselesse Camp. Credit: HGW/Milo Milfort

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jun 19 2013 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Despite the unforgiving sun and its sweltering heat, Joel Monfiston is working, hammering a piece of worn plywood, watering flowers and picking the weeds out from between rocks and pebbles.

Monfiston, a 34-year-old father and husband, is one of about 10,000 people who live in what was publicised as the model settlement for the 1.3 million Haitians displaced by the January 2010 earthquake.

Monfiston lives at the Corail-Cesselesse camp, inaugurated in the spring of 2010 by Hollywood actor Sean Penn, then-Haitian President René Préval and other officials. The settlement is 18 kilometres from the capital in the middle of an almost lunar landscape.

Soon after it opened, tens of thousands of squatters set up tents, huts and houses on over 1,000 hectares of land surrounding the camp, laying the groundwork for what will soon be Haiti’s largest slum. (See “Reconstruction of Haiti Slum to Cost Hundreds of Millions of Dollars”.)

At first, Monfiston and his family lived in a tent. Now they have a 24-square-metre “temporary shelter” built by the humanitarian agency World Vision for 4,500 U.S. dollars and made mostly of plywood and sheet metal. Like most Haitians, he survives with day jobs here and there and with help from friends and family. He also tries his hand at commerce.

“Things are not easy. Imagine: they put you here, but there’s no work,” he said.

Monfiston has dreams. He hopes to set up a shop in the little shed he is building. He would like to grow more in his garden. But those remain dreams. For now, all he has are a few flowers and a few walls for his “store”, which has no shelves, no door, no cooler, no products.

And, like other Corail residents, while he does have access to latrines, some electricity (solar-powered street lamps), playgrounds, a clinic and schools, water is not so easy to find.

In 2011, the United Nations and international humanitarian agency Oxfam promised that a new system of cisterns and kiosks would soon provide residents with water from the state water agency.

Two years later, the faucets remain dry. Residents buy water at five gourdes (about 12 U.S. cents) per bucket from private vendors or from the committees that manage the few still-functioning water “bladders” left from the camp’s early days, when water and food were free and when agencies provided “cash for work” jobs and start-up funds for entrepreneurs.

Today, all of the big agencies are gone. Trumpeting their successes and claiming to have prepared a “transition” to the local authorities, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), American Refugee Committee (ARC) and World Vision all pulled out (although World Vision still supports the Corail School, which it built).

“Mayor of Croix-des-Bouquets is the New Camp Manager“, a cheery article from the United Nations peacekeeping mission declared in a May 27, 2011 bulletin. But HGW found no evidence of any local authorities or assistance on two separate visits to the camp.

The “City Hall Annex” at the Corail camp was shuttered, and residents told journalists that they could not remember when they last saw anyone from the government.

“Nobody from the mayor’s office has set foot here for many months,” said Racide d’Or, a member of the Corail residents committee.

“They were only around when they knew there was land in the area they could ‘sell’, ” continued the mother of two, who lost her home in earthquake. “There is no ‘government’ or ‘state’ for those of us who live here. We have to figure out everything ourselves.”

The Croix-des-Bouquets City Hall annex in the nearby squatters’ settlement known as “Canaan” is sweltering at midday. The “office” is an empty container and a “conference room” of plywood and a blue plastic tarp roof. Two men there said they worked for City Hall but refused to give their names or allow their voices to be recorded.

“They just dumped us here,” said one, aged about 30. “We don’t have the means to work. Our supervisor never comes to see how we are doing.”

“I’d like to know what they were thinking when they put this office here,” said the other one, older, who was slouched in a plastic chair. “We don’t do anything.”

The absence of humanitarian agencies has one benefit. When agencies were handing out food, jobs and cash, gangs and “mafias” ran various parts of the camps. An Oxfam programme that handed out up to 1,000 dollars to some – but not all – small businesspeople led to disagreements, rumours, protests and eventually arrests.

“The NGOs divided us. People fought with each other,” Auguste Gregory told HGW as he sat with friends next to his telephone-charging business: a table covered with power strips and chargers.

“Some people went to prison. Others went into hiding. We were all there for the same reason, but they divided us,” he remembered.

For much of 2010, a gang calling itself “The Committee of Nine” threatened residents and aid providers alike, so much so that ARC Camp Manager Richard Poole quit his job and left the country.

“My three months at Corail were one of the most difficult periods I have experienced in my 30 years as a humanitarian worker,” Poole later told HGW in an email interview. ARC received about 400,000 U.S. dollars to manage the camp for eight months in 2010.

Still, some humanitarian actors say the Corail settlement was not a complete failure.

“It is important to look at where the families were at the beginning of the earthquake and where they are now,” World Vision told HGW in an email. The agency said it spent about 7 million dollars on 1,200 shelters, a school, playgrounds and various programs.

People “came from areas which were prone to flash flooding, mudslides and disease outbreaks, but now they are in a safer and more secure community”, the agency pointed out. “The families have homes and are protected.”

For Monfiston and his neighbours, however, the “outcome” has not yet produced a way that can pay for food and school for his children.

Alexis Roffy Eddiness Djoly Barns, an artist, is tired of waiting for work, for water and for an “outcome”. He is also nervous about the changing landscape of the region, which is now home to the 10,000 camp residents and perhaps 100,000 squatters.

“They are starting to build a slum right over there,” he said, indicating the expanse of small houses in Jerusalem and Canaan. “Each person is fighting for his little piece of land. The government should do what it’s supposed to do and say – ‘No, this must stop!'”

Read the first article in this two-part series here. Original story at http://www.haitigrassrootswatch.org.

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

Excerpt:

Festus Kaleli of Radio Mang'elete interviews a young farmer in Makueni County. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Isaiah Esipisu
MAKUENI, Kenya, Jun 28 2012 (IPS)

On a Wednesday morning in Mutitu-Andei township in Makueni County, one of Kenya’s driest areas, smallholder farmer Josephine Mutiso tunes into Radio Mang’elete 89.1 FM and listens as meteorological experts discuss the changes in rainfall patterns in the county.

In the past Mutiso has implemented much of the advice from the community station and has been able to successfully use “Zai” pit farming to rehabilitate her dry farmland.

This is a traditional technique which involves digging pits about 30 centimetres deep and filling them with manure and topsoil. When it rains, the mixture of topsoil and manure is able to retain moisture for a longer period, and it ensures that the crop nutrients are concentrated in the pits.

“I’m in the process of trying it on my one hectare plot for the first time, and it is clear that the spinach crops I planted in the pits are healthier than those planted in furrows,” said Mutiso, a 32-year-old mother of one.

While Makueni County in Kenya’s Eastern Province has always been an arid area, over the last 15 years there has been a significant change in rainfall patterns, which have become more erratic. As a result Mutiso and other farmers here have had to resort to alternative farming methods.

Michael Arunga, the World Vision Emergency Communications Advisor – Africa, says that out of 10 rainy seasons in Makueni County and the greater eastern Kenya, only one season yields enough rainfall to sustain agricultural growth.

“This is an emerging pattern that never existed three decades ago when rains would fail only once every two years,” he said.

Locals here agree.

“From the beginning of 2009 towards the end of 2011 there was no rainfall to warrant the planting of anything,” Mzee Francis Kioko, a smallholder farmer from Mutitu-Andei township, told IPS through a translator.

Makueni County suffers with persistent drought and famine, and 56 percent of the population lives below the poverty line here.

In June 2011 the drought in the region was declared a national disaster and many harvests failed. As a result, the dependence on food aid has increased. According to the United Nations World Food Programme, over two million people in Kenya alone were given emergency food aid towards the end of 2011.

The constant food insecurity in Makueni County and in Eastern Province is one of the reasons why Radio Mang’elete was set up in 2009.

The Mang’elete Community Integrated Development Programme (MCIDP), a network that brings together 33 women’s self-help groups from the Nthongoni constituency in Makueni County, owns the station.

“The world is changing very fast. New challenges are emerging … We have new diseases, new technologies, new climatic conditions, and as a result the world is completely new. Yet to survive in the new world, we thought that we needed a tool that would guide us as we cope with it,” said Sabina Mwete, chairperson of the MCIDP.

The station’s producers schedule much of their programming around climate change adaptation.

The station has been able to address topics like how to plant drought-tolerant crops and keep drought-resistant animals such as goats. They have also discussed the integration of emerging agricultural technologies with traditional methods of farming, the use of appropriate farm inputs, and new methods of pest and disease control.

“We usually invite people who are either experts or have the relevant experience on such issues into the studio to share their knowledge with our audience,” said Dominic Mutua, the head of programmes at Radio Mang’elete.

“For example, to inform the community about the timing for planting, we have been forced to integrate the scientific meteorological forecasts with indigenous weather prediction knowledge.”

And it is something that is greatly needed in rural Kenya. According to a 2010 study by the Heinrich Böll Foundation titled “Climate Change Vulnerability and Adaptation Preparedness in Kenya”, climate change awareness in Kenya is still very low. The research quoted the results of an opinion poll carried out between 2007 and 2008 by Gallup, which found that only 56 percent of Kenyans reported knowledge about global warming. A majority of those unaware of the situation, the study said, were the rural poor.

While smallholder farmers in the region are benefitting from the knowledge broadcast on Radio Mang’elete, the MCIDP has also profited. Each of its 33-member groups are involved in various agricultural and climate-related projects that include initiatives in horticulture, and projects that focus on irrigation and domestic water use.

“We have seen positive change, especially in how people are adapting to climate change. And they attribute it to the information learnt from Radio Mang’elete. This gives us much pride,” said Mwete.

Susan Wambua is one of the rural smallholder farmers who are now very aware of the changing rainfall patterns in this country.

The 66-year-old mother of six has a one-hectare piece of land in Makongeni village in Nthongoni constituency.

“It didn’t rain in this area for eight months,” said Wambua of her experience last year. But then this February, on the second day of the month, the rains finally came.

And Wambua had been expecting it. Radio Mang’elete’s meteorological experts had made the prediction and following their advice Wambua had planted her maize seed in the dry soil the very day before it rained.

Though the predictions are not always accurate, Wambua is ready to take the risk.

Wambua admitted that she has had losses as well. It happened last June when the rains fell one and a half weeks after they were predicted and she had already cast her seed in the soil.

“We have seen people wait until it rains before they plant. But they sometimes end up losing out because in many cases the rainfall is not sufficient or, as we have witnessed in the recent past, it may rain just once.”

But, Wambua said, in February she planted ahead of the rainfall and had a crop to harvest, while many who waited for the rain to fall first before planting lost out.

“It is better to risk with the seed than to risk with the harvest. That is why I’m preparing for planting at any time now, because from what we heard from the radio, and from our own indigenous knowledge, I believe that it will rain in not less than six days from today,” she said.

It is hard to believe. The soil on her land appears arid and even the weeds here have dried up because of the blazing sun. And when IPS visits her, there still appears to be no rain in sight. The skies are clear.

But, five days after her interview with IPS, it rained.

Just as Wambua predicted.

* This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

The release of the final communiqué of the Group of 20 (G20) summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, on Tuesday evening has been met with widespread derision from observers across the ideological spectrum.

Critics have been particularly scathing of the summit’s lack of discussion on development issues.

According to Oxfam International, an aid agency, the G20 countries “sidelined development” in Los Cabos.

“This is a hugely disappointing outcome for developing countries,” Oxfam spokesperson Carlos Zarco said on Tuesday. “Leaders failed to keep the world’s poorest in their sights, despite the fact that more than half these people live in G20 countries.”

Even while many had begun to forecast that world leaders attending the summit, held June 18-19, would be hobbled in making long-term commitments by roiling economic downturns at home, many had continued to hope that progress would be made on individual programmes.

Yet during the event, the financial problems in Europe seemed to eclipse much of the rest of the agenda.

U.S. President Barack Obama admitted as much in post-summit comments. “The (threat) that’s received the most focus…is the situation in Europe,” he said, despite the fact that “most leaders of the eurozone…are not part of the G20”.

Nonetheless, the entirety of Obama’s comments was devoted to European issues, a trend reflected in the Los Cabos declaration as well as the text of the signature Los Cabos Growth and Jobs Action Plan.

No new action

Some new initiatives did receive cautious praise from development experts. These included a new 100-million-dollar pot to fund agricultural innovations, as well as a renewed focus on nutrition and food security.

Even in Washington, however, critics noted that much of the momentum on these issues had already begun well prior to the Los Cabos summit, meaning that little new progress or detail emerged in Mexico.

“With food prices swinging wildly and the planet burning, this was the moment for bold proposals from the G20,” Neil Watkins, with ActionAid USA, a watchdog group, said. “Instead, on food security and climate change, the G20 turned in last year’s homework, content to reaffirm old plans and commission more studies.”

World Vision’s Adam Taylor voiced similar complaints. “The summit focused more on recycling previous commitments and sharing best practices and not enough on making measurable political commitments in the fight against poverty and hunger,” he said.

John Ruthrauff, director of international advocacy with InterAction, a Washington-based network of nearly 200 international NGOs, offered support for several of the initiatives, but expressed exasperation that “these words … are not accompanied by concrete steps, action plans, or benchmarks for completion”.

More IMF funding

Perhaps the biggest news to come out of the summit was the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) successful raising of an additional 456 billion dollars, a push that had encountered friction leading up to the talks.

While IMF head Christine Lagarde praised this doubling of the Fund’s lending capacity as a demonstration of “the broad commitment of the membership to ensure the IMF has access to adequate resources to carry out its mandate in the interests of global financial stability”, the new money is, in fact, aimed largely at shoring up faltering European economies.

A critical percentage of those commitments came from the “middle income” countries that define the G20.

Although last week these governments, led by Brazil, China, India and Russia, had threatened to withhold some or all of this additional funding pending assurance of the passage of a suite of reforms within the IMF’s voting structure, the money was ultimately given with little forward movement on the reforms, which would increase the voting power of developing countries.

The G20 “lost sight of developing countries reeling from aid cuts, climate change and volatile food prices”, Oxfam said in a statement. “Poor countries depleted their reserves defending themselves against the economic crisis caused by the rich world, and are also having to cope with massive aid cuts.”

“When confronted with a severe crisis on your own doorstep, it can be easy to sideline development issues,” said Samuel A. Worthington, the president of InterAction. “But these problems are real and they are not going away unless we take measurable steps to address them.”

“G-Zero”

Many commentators have interpreted the lack of results at the Mexico summit as indicative of a broader lack of global leadership at the moment, amidst economic crisis and with several heads of state facing election this year.

“Political courage seems to be in short supply in Los Cabos,” said Michael Elliott, the head of ONE, an international campaign against extreme poverty. “Too much of the work that was started (in previous summits) has not been advanced by leaders in Los Cabos.”

Oxfam’s Zarco agreed, saying, “This collective failure of political will is shocking, and must be dealt with in the last months of Mexico’s G20 presidency.”

While Mexico’s G20 secretariat will be expected to answer for any lack of focus during the proceedings, much handwringing is being reserved for European and U.S. leaders, particularly Obama.

“He may well be appropriately focused on economic issues at home, but there is no denying that at the G-20, in the UN, at the world’s international financial institutions, and confronting key challenges, no one is touting the transformational presence of Obama the multilateralist as they did a couple of years ago,” wrote David Rothkopf, the influential editor at large for Foreign Policy magazine, this week.

Citing the G20’s recent agenda as “almost laughably remote from the big issues of the day”, Rothkopf suggested that the world is currently seeing more of a “G-Zero moment”, using a term recently coined by an American political scientist named Ian Bremmer.

Another commentator, the noted Indian economist Jayati Ghosh, suggested that the events at Los Cabos underscored the G20’s overall lack of relevance.

The Mexico summit was “arguably the most important meeting of this group since it was formed”, Ghosh wrote in a recent blog post. “The reason for this significance is that for some time now, the G20 appears to have lost its way…(having) increasingly shied away from addressing the more important questions.”