What Haiti Really Needs are A Lot More Trees

Andres Oppenheimer

One year after the earthquake that killed an estimated 300,000 people in Haiti, the international community's $3 billion reconstruction pledges are focusing on almost everything except one thing that would most help the country -- trees.

Granted, when you have more than 800,000 people still living in tents, 95 percent of the earthquake's rubble has not yet been cleaned up, 90 percent of the population lacks access to electricity and you have an outbreak of cholera, it's hard to concentrate on anything but short-term relief efforts.

But, reading the report Haiti: One Year Later released earlier this week by the U.S. State Department, I was dismayed not to find the word "trees" anywhere in the nearly 10,000-word document.

The report accurately notes that deforestation has left Haiti's soil vulnerable to devastating floods and has crippled the country's agriculture, but includes no indications that there is a Marshall Plan-type international effort under way to plant tens of millions of trees.

Likewise, a one-year-after evaluation released Wednesday by the Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), the international reconstruction group led by Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive and former President Bill Clinton, says it is focusing on seven key sectors -- including job creation, housing, education, healthcare and debris removal -- but I couldn't find the term "re-forestation."

Does this make sense? Judging from what I heard last year after the earthquake and from what I have long seen in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere's poorest country will have little chance of recovering unless it addresses its environmental problem.

Over the past century, Haitians have cut down about 98 percent of the trees in the country to use as firewood or charcoal for cooking. When one flies into Haiti, it looks like a desert: It's hard to see any green spaces anywhere.

The near-total absence of trees has ruined Haiti's soil. Without trees, the earth can't retain water when it rains, leaving the people without potable water and farmers without fertile land for agriculture. Without farming, there are no jobs nor food.

In addition, when there are heavy rains or hurricanes, the water slides down from the barren mountains into towns with nothing to absorb it, often killing thousands.

The IHRC report mentions, almost in passing, that the U.S. has funded the planting of a million trees in Haiti last year as part of its reconstruction programs. But to put things in perspective, United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) forestry expert Walter Kollert told me last year that it would take 220 million trees just to raise Haiti's forested areas from the current 2 percent to 10 percent.

Another FAO agricultural expert, Javier Escobedo, says there are some reforestation programs under way, "but there is no massive program financed by the international community. I would be surprised if more than 2 percent of what's being spent goes to reforestation." Relief efforts are the No. 1 priority, and understandably so, he said.

In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Haiti's agriculture minister, Joanas Gue, confirmed to me that "at the moment, we do not have a master plan for reforestation sponsored by the international community."

The Haitian government has a $100 million investment plan to plant 10 million trees a year over the next five years, but it has only received commitments worth about $25 million from various donors, including the Inter-American Development Bank and the U.S. government. Haiti would need to plant 20 million trees a year to start making a difference, "but we don't have the money," he said.

Several nongovernmental organizations, including Trees for the Future, are carrying out other tree-planting programs in Haiti.

My opinion: In addition to humanitarian relief services, the international community should start a massive tree-planting program even if that means going slower with reconstruction of public buildings. Simultaneously, international donors should give away natural-gas cooking stoves to Haiti's poor so that they stop cutting trees for firewood. The government in the neighboring Dominican Republic, which shares Hispaniola with Haiti, started subsidizing cooking stoves five decades ago, and it helped keep its forests alive.

Without trees, Haiti will have no water, no food and no jobs -- only more misery.

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