http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/opinion/who-will-speak-for-haitis-trees.html 2016-10-17 16:36:17 Who Will Speak for Haiti’s Trees? Reforesting the country requires getting local residents to play a key role. === Durham, N.C. — Flying over the mountains into Port-au-Prince, Foreign descriptions of the country frequently claim it is almost completely deforested; people often reference a striking 1987 National Geographic photograph of the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, forested on one side and barren on the other, as proof. In the common imagination, Haitians literally devour their forests; last week a meteorologist in Florida, describing the impact of Hurricane Matthew, said, “Even the kids there, they are so hungry they actually eat the trees.” In fact, The destruction of Haiti’s forests has been going on for centuries. When the French colonized the island starting in the 17th century, they cut down trees for lumber and fuel, and mahogany for furniture. By the late 18th century it was the most profitable plantation colony in the world, populated mostly by slaves and producing sugar and coffee for export. Hillsides near towns were already bare, and colonial towns frequently flooded. After Haiti’s successful war of independence in 1804, former slaves got access to the country’s land, and deforestation continued apace. They grew trees for coffee, fruit and lumber on their farms, which were part of an expanding economy rooted in a network of markets and ports. Dyewood was harvested and exported from Haiti throughout the 19th century. The first aerial photographs of the island, taken during the American occupation in the early 1930s, still show relatively widespread tree cover. By the 1940s and 1950s, however, deforestation was accelerating. In their novels, Haitian writers like Jacques Roumain and Marie Vieux Chauvet depicted a rural country tilting into poverty in a steadily worsening cycle: Increased population put more pressure on the forests, whose overuse and destruction made the land less productive. Many left for the cities, which expanded exponentially, their populations dependent on charcoal produced by cutting down trees in the countryside. The Haitian government did little to help, instead courting outside corporate interests. In the early 1940s, a Haitian-American project cleared 50,000 acres to plant rubber trees to contribute to the American war effort. The plan foundered and left the landscape scarred; in the area of Jérémie alone, as many as a million fruit trees were destroyed. Industry wasn’t the only culprit: In 1941, as part of a “anti-superstition” campaign led by the Roman Catholic Church, sacred mapou trees were cut down. The situation worsened during the three decades of the Duvalier dictatorships. François Duvalier ordered sections of the border with the Dominican Republic cleared to make it easier to police. By the time his son was overthrown in 1986, the country faced an environmental crisis. The new Constitution included a call for the protection of “forest reserves” by developing alternatives to charcoal, but little has been done to carry this out. Some projects, however, have succeeded. In the 1980s the American anthropologist Gerald Murray developed a program to help Haitian farmers plant trees for charcoal and lumber. Saplings were provided from a network of nurseries, and over two decades roughly 300,000 households participated in planting, growing and harvesting millions of trees. More recently, the Roadblocks to reforestation remain, especially for hillsides. Rural residents are wary of putting the effort into cultivating trees far from their homes, where it is easy for someone else to cut them down. But in recent years some have succeeded in tackling this problem by organizing reforestation efforts along entire watersheds. Where there are trees higher up, their roots and richer soils absorb rain, which decreases flooding below. When organizations tackle the problem holistically, connecting communities up and down a watershed, deforestation can be reversed with remarkable success. Over the last two decades, for instance, an organization called These initiatives provide clear examples of what works. Such strategies should be scaled up and shared on a national level, so that they can be applied in Haiti’s diverse watersheds. The challenges are daunting, to be sure. But this is the moment to build on the knowledge already present in many communities about how to reforest the country. We should imagine a Haiti covered in trees, and begin to plant that future.