By NATHANIAL GRONEWOLD of Greenwire

http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2010/03/08/08greenwire-post-quake-revitalization-plans-collide-in-hai-15994.html

THOMONDE, Haiti — This com­mu­nity once bus­tled with farm­ers grow­ing and sell­ing corn, sugar cane, cof­fee, man­goes and potatoes.

No more.

Patrick Belizaire, 37, who returned here in 2008 to start a farm coop­er­a­tive after liv­ing with his fam­ily in Boston for more than two decades, was shocked by what he found. He saw half the fer­tile fields lying fal­low, land that his fam­ily farmed for gen­er­a­tions over­run by grasses.

“They went from grow­ing every­thing to buy­ing every­thing, and that land sits there,” Belizaire said in a recent inter­view. “This field here used to be full. There was always some­thing each season.”

The farm econ­omy here and else­where in rural Haiti has been in a 20-year nose dive. A nation that once eas­ily fed itself has become depen­dent on imports and food aid for 75 per­cent of its needs, accord­ing to the U.S. Depart­ment of Agriculture.

The Hait­ian gov­ern­ment has long ignored its rural areas, leav­ing once-vital roads to turn into some­thing resem­bling parched riverbeds. Farm­ers here say trans­porta­tion is so dif­fi­cult and costly that they long ago stopped ship­ping pro­duce to the cap­i­tal, Port-au-Prince, which is about 50 miles away to the south­west. Mean­while, farms often flood as trop­i­cal down­pours wash mud waves from defor­ested hill­sides into cul­ti­vated fields.

“They don’t farm half the amount they used to farm, and if you drive you can see it,” Belizaire said. “You see field after field empty.”

The inter­na­tional com­mu­nity has also had a major role in destroy­ing Hait­ian agri­cul­ture. The World Bank and Inter­na­tional Mon­e­tary Fund have been threat­en­ing for years to cut off financ­ing if the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment pays for irri­ga­tion, fer­til­iz­ers or equip­ment for its poor farm­ers. And in 1995, as a con­di­tion for restor­ing Pres­i­dent Jean-Bertrand Aris­tide to power after he was ousted by a mil­i­tary coup, the United States forced Haiti to adopt the low­est food import tar­iffs in the hemi­sphere, to pro­vide U.S. farm­ers another mar­ket. A flood of cheap, heav­ily sub­si­dized U.S. rice even­tu­ally pushed domes­tic vari­eties from the mar­ket­place, and Hait­ian landown­ers fired thou­sands of workers.

The result: “a dis­in­vest­ment in agri­cul­ture,” said Nigel Fisher, a Cana­dian offi­cial with UNICEF sent to Haiti to help plan the nation’s recov­ery after the cat­a­strophic Jan. 12 earth­quake. “Today,” he said, “Haiti is import­ing many of the foods that it pro­duced 20 years ago.”

With the rural econ­omy in tat­ters, peo­ple fled to cities, mostly to Port-au-Prince, fill­ing hill­side shanties that crum­bled in the pow­er­ful quake that killed an esti­mated 230,000 Haitians. Today, the streets of Thomonde are filled once again, not with farm­ers, but rather with some of the 500,000 peo­ple that returned to rural areas from the dev­as­tated capital.

Hait­ian author­i­ties and U.N. offi­cials, includ­ing Fisher, are des­per­ately try­ing to keep those half-million dis­placed from return­ing to Port-au-Prince. Their goal is to rebuild Port-au-Prince — which is located on a fault line and is prone to another earth­quake — to be much smaller and more sus­tain­able than it was. The “rebuild small” strat­egy is rem­i­nis­cent of that tried in flood-prone New Orleans after Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina in 2005.

But unem­ploy­ment in rural Haiti stood at 80 per­cent before the quake, so offi­cials are unsure of how to con­vince the dis­placed to stay away from the cities.

“Step one, how can you get mas­sive employ­ment in the rural areas?” Fisher said. “So cash-for-work pro­grams for tree plant­ing, for build­ing of dams, for build­ing of rural roads, which will allow money to come into the rural house­hold while at the same time you’re start­ing to regen­er­ate the environment.”

Edmond Mulet, the new chief of U.N. oper­a­tions in Haiti, envi­sions fac­to­ries being moved from the city to the coun­try­side, or new for­eign invest­ment boost­ing employ­ment here. Farm­ing is out of the ques­tion, he insists, as the land is already spo­ken for, so a service-oriented econ­omy must be built instead.

But Haiti’s farm­ers are tired of being ignored and would like to put new­com­ers to work grow­ing food. They wel­come plans to mobi­lize new labor for refor­esta­tion and road build­ing — after decades of promises, the Inter-American Devel­op­ment Bank is finally con­nect­ing Thomonde to Port-au-Prince with a new paved high­way — but farm­ers point out they need extra hands as badly as they need roads, seeds and fertilizers.

“They would be a huge advan­tage … because what would take a hun­dred days to do we could do it in three,” said Evonne Balouse, who last year lost his sugar-cane crop because he had no labor to help get it out of his field.

Wanted: farm labor

Belizaire and Jean Velarus, another Boston res­i­dent of Hait­ian descent, say refugees from the city could be eas­ily inte­grated into the farm­ing economy.

“There was a lot of land just sit­ting, and it was obvi­ous that there was a great deal of poten­tial,” said Velarus, 36, describ­ing the scene when he and Belizaire arrived after hur­ri­canes pounded the region in 2008. Those storms, experts say, destroyed as much as 80 per­cent of Haiti’s crops.

Belizaire and Velarus returned to Haiti to orga­nize a kon­bit, or farm­ing coop­er­a­tive, a tra­di­tional sys­tem that kept Haitians employed and self-reliant for more than a cen­tury before inter­na­tional aid poli­cies turned hos­tile to Third World agri­cul­ture. The kon­bit sys­tem is a model that could be repli­cated else­where, even for land­less peas­ants, they say.

More than 20 farm­ers here share land and labor. About 67 acres is grad­u­ally being put to use, includ­ing tracts untouched for decades.

The non­profit that Belizaire, Velarus and oth­ers have started, the Coop­er­a­tive Farm Ini­tia­tive for Haiti, has deliv­ered a trac­tor to this com­mu­nity, reduc­ing three days’ work to three hours. Small irri­ga­tion projects are start­ing, help­ing boost yields ten­fold and end­ing the over-reliance on sea­sonal rains. All of this work is being financed out of pocket or through small donations.

In exchange for their labor, the co-op mem­bers split 50 per­cent of the crop. Twenty-five per­cent of the crop is diverted to seed bank­ing, and the rest donated to poor fam­i­lies. A vari­ety of crops are involved, includ­ing sugar cane, corn, congo beans, bananas and sweet pota­toes. The most essen­tial ingre­di­ent, water, is abun­dant here but has not been tapped sufficiently.

“Water man­age­ment of all types, whether it’s irri­ga­tion, wells or reser­voirs,” is needed, Velarus said. “Last year, many farm­ers lost half their crops because the rains came all at once, and then dried up and didn’t come again.”

Haiti’s farm­ers need rel­a­tively lit­tle in the way of inputs to dra­mat­i­cally boost pro­duc­tion, they say. Sim­ple, steady irri­ga­tion, a small trac­tor, and small quan­ti­ties of fer­til­iz­ers can dra­mat­i­cally increase yields. But what is needed most is labor. There were so few able hands here that last year the coop­er­a­tive had to recruit work­ers from a neigh­bor­ing town to help plant seeds.

Some in the gov­ern­ment and inter­na­tional com­mu­nity have expressed an inter­est in encour­ag­ing Hait­ian farm­ers to orga­nize them­selves into co-ops along the lines of this one. The U.N. Food and Agri­cul­ture Orga­ni­za­tion (FAO) is work­ing with what is left of the country’s Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture to explore options. But most aid work­ers dis­miss any sug­ges­tion that dis­placed peo­ple could be put to work in agri­cul­ture, aside from per­haps build­ing irri­ga­tion projects and new roadways.

“Those who went back to the rural areas, I don’t expect them to go back to farm­ing,” said Fran­cois Batalin­gaya, a human­i­tar­ian offi­cial with World Vision. “Our wish is to pro­vide them with ser­vices, to pro­vide them with health, edu­ca­tion, food, at the same time cre­ate eco­nomic oppor­tu­ni­ties in gen­eral in the rural areas. We need some kind of income-generation activities.”

This type of talk is deeply frus­trat­ing to the Haitians who stayed on the farms. Here, coop­er­a­tive mem­bers showed dis­may when told that the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity wants to put dis­placed city dwellers to work mak­ing T-shirts and jeans instead of grow­ing food. They reject notions that incor­po­rat­ing new work­ers into the farm econ­omy will inevitably lead to conflict.

“The only time we have frus­tra­tion is when we can’t get help,” said Deliv­oix Velarus, a mem­ber of the co-op. “But when the help is there, we are extremely happy about it. We would be extremely happy and would wel­come them with open arms.”

Deliv­oix Velarus, Balouse and other co-op mem­bers say land own­er­ship is not an issue. They say they would be ecsta­tic to hear for­mer Port-au-Prince res­i­dents express inter­est in becom­ing farm­ers. In exchange for their help in the fields, the co-op mem­bers say, land could be found for them to build houses. Expe­ri­enced farm­ers would work along­side new­com­ers to teach them every­thing they need to know. Crops would be shared accord­ing to how much labor is put in, pro­vid­ing food for sub­sis­tence or for nearby markets.

Agen­cies focus on food aid

Relief agen­cies are mobi­liz­ing to help the coun­try grow more food, mind­ful of the fact that Haiti can­not rely on hand­outs forever.

FAO is ask­ing for per­mis­sion to divert $4 mil­lion to grow more food in Art­i­bonite depart­ment — Haiti’s prin­ci­pal food pro­duc­tion area — from a $13 mil­lion grant by the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion, in response to the emer­gency the quake cre­ated. They say the pro­gram would yield 4,500 met­ric tons of rice, 850 tons of beans and 1,700 tons of sorghum.

But thus far, most indi­ca­tors show devel­op­ment agen­cies con­tinue to pri­or­i­tize food aid instead of food pro­duc­tion, in Haiti and other needy nations.

In its most recent bud­get request, the U.S. Agency for Inter­na­tional Devel­op­ment (USAID) pro­posed spend­ing $1.2 bil­lion glob­ally on help­ing poor farm­ers grow more food, while ask­ing Con­gress for $4.2 bil­lion for food aid, almost all of which will be spent on pur­chases from Amer­i­can farm­ers. Most recently, USAID was help­ing agri­cul­ture offi­cials boost Haiti’s pro­duc­tion of man­goes — for export to the United States.

With food prices ris­ing sharply in the wake of the quake, agen­cies are boost­ing food aid. The quake-affected areas are now nearly com­pletely cov­ered by food dis­tri­b­u­tion efforts, and aid dis­burse­ment will shift in weeks ahead to rural areas, par­tic­u­larly to the food-growing regions of Cen­tre and Art­i­bonite departments.

World Vision, USAID and the United Nations all insist that the com­ing rush of free food won’t com­pete with local farm­ers but will instead help feed pop­u­la­tions that the rural com­mu­ni­ties can­not sup­port. Over time, the World Food Pro­gramme promises to pur­chase more food aid locally as a means to pro­mote Haiti’s agri­cul­tural econ­omy and restore its bro­ken links to urban markets.

WFP had ten­ta­tively begun such a pro­gram in late 2009, but the earth­quake forced changes. The agency and non­govern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions made some local food pur­chases in the days fol­low­ing the dis­as­ter, but they admit that all of their pur­chases involved U.S. rice stored in store­houses that sur­vived the quake.

As author­i­ties plan for Haiti’s revival, mem­bers of the co-op here are hop­ing that offi­cials over­see­ing the plan will change their vision of what dis­placed city dwellers should do for a liv­ing in their new homes.

“We feel that the co-op model also gives them the access to that, to learn more about the agri­cul­tural piece of soci­ety and how impor­tant it is,” Jean Velarus said.

Belizaire, hav­ing seen first­hand how his old home­town turned from food abun­dance to scarcity, is emphatic that the oppor­tu­nity should be seized, uti­liz­ing the mas­sive influx of peo­ple to help Haiti grow its own food.

“This town is full of peo­ple,” Belizaire said. “We have tons of peo­ple who can help with the coop­er­a­tive now.”