I really don’t think anyone can even begin to imagine the amount of desperation in Haiti. A country that was in need of aid, help, infrastructure long before a magnitude 7.0 earthquake shook Port au Prince, quite literally to the ground. Once one of the largest agricultural economies in the Caribbean, Haiti ranks 148th of 179 countries on the United Nations Development Programme Human Development Index; 76 percent of Haitians are in absolute poverty -living on less than US$2 per day and 56 percent on less than US$1 per day. If you have ever seen satellite images of Haiti and it’s island neighbor, the Dominican Republic – you would notice a rather stark difference which immediately begins at the border. One is green, the other is the color of rust.
Deforestation of Haiti’s landscape for agriculture and the manufacture of charcoal have left only 3% of the land surface forested. Charcoal, produced by cutting trees and slow burning them in mud pits, meets about 85% of energy needs as cooking fuel - because there are no alternatives when there is no infrastructure or development. The countryside is ravaged and it is tempting to blame this on Haiti’s high population density. However, what is not as apparent, is how environmental degradation stems from a legacy of colonial resource extraction, slavery, corrupt governments, foreign intervention which was horribly planned and executed, and poor choices about energy, agriculture, and industry.
Today, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with the lowest combination of lifespan, education, and standard of living of any country outside Africa. Demographic, social, and economic changes happening elsewhere in the Caribbean are not happening as rapidly in Haiti. The abject poverty in which 80% of the population exists deteriorates the country’s environmental and political conditions and constrains economic development. People are forced to choose between life in urban slums and life as poor, small-scale, subsistence farmers. More than a million Haitians have emigrated to the United States and elsewhere since 1950.
In recent decades, many Haitian farmers have abandoned agriculture in search of greater profits from supplying charcoal to large urban and rural populations. With the collapse of agricultural and industrial exports, an unemployment rate of 33%, and sliding deeper into poverty, Haitians are forced to destroy remaining forests for charcoal fuel production. Consumption of natural resources just to stay alive is contributing to degraded environmental conditions. Although Haiti’s population size is similar to the Dominican Republic’s and population density is the same as Puerto Rico’s, the loss of forests, with their capacity to prevent soil erosion, has left Haiti vulnerable during hurricanes and tropical storms: heavy rains let loose massive mudslides on deforested hillsides. This earthquake isn't the first time Haiti has suffered such a devastating loss of life. During the 2008 hurricane season, severe storms devastated more than 70 percent of Haiti’s agriculture and most of its roads, bridges and other infrastructure, creating pockets of severe malnutrition and killing 800 people. Nearly all agricultural land was flooded, resulting in the loss of the corn, bean and banana harvest, 800 people were killed and 3.3 million people were left in need of food support.
In 2008 I wrote a paper called "In Defense of Soil" and in that paper I discovered that rice makes up 20 percent of the typical Haitian's diet, and that percentage is on the rise. In 1981 Haiti imported 18,000 tons of rice. Now the country imports close to 400,000 tons annually. They grow less than a quarter domestically. "Tè a fatige," said 70 percent of Haitian farmers in a recent survey when asked about the major agricultural problems they faced. "The earth is tired." Since 1492, when Columbus first set foot on the heavily forested island of Hispaniola, the mountainous nation has shed both topsoil and blood—first to the Spanish, who planted sugar, then to the French, who cut down the forests to make room for lucrative coffee, indigo, and tobacco. Even after Haitian slaves revolted in 1804 and threw off the bondage of colonialism, France collected 93 million francs in restitution from its former colony—much of it in timber. Soon after independence, upper-class speculators and planters pushed the peasant classes out of the few fertile valleys and into the steep, forested rural areas, where their shrinking, intensively cultivated plots of maize, beans, and cassava have combined with a growing fuelwood-charcoal industry to exacerbate deforestation and soil loss. Today less than 4 percent of Haiti's forests remain, and in many places the soil has eroded right down to the bedrock. From 1991 to 2002, food production per capita actually fell 30 percent. So what do you do if you live in the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, and the price of the primary carbohydrate—"Miami rice" from the U.S.—doubles? You go hungry and watch your children do the same.
Haiti's problems are long standing. If there is any hope to be gleaned from the devastation of this earthquake, it is that it will turn the eyes of the world to the horror, not only of the present, but of what people in Haiti have been living with for so long. Maybe this time, those eyes and this world will not look away.
Geologist Explains Why Haiti Earthquake Was Such A Disaster
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