Last August, I stood in Haiti’s Art­i­bonite val­ley with sev­eral peas­ant orga­niz­ers and looked out at the moun­tains lead­ing up to the Cen­tral Plateau. The older lead­ers in the group explained in depth how green the moun­tains once were, while the younger orga­niz­ers and I lis­tened in amaze­ment. The trop­i­cal lime forests they described from their past were the antithe­sis of the sandy naked slopes we saw in the distance.

Haiti is a prime exam­ple of how nat­ural dis­as­ters are exac­er­bated by envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion and cen­tral­ized devel­op­ment. Haiti con­tin­ues to have one of the high­est rates of soil ero­sion and defor­esta­tion in the world–less than 2% of the country’s nat­ural for­est cover remains. Not only does this dra­mat­i­cally dimin­ish water resources and threaten agri­cul­tural yield, but it also inten­si­fies the destruc­tive­ness of hur­ri­canes, caus­ing deadly mud­slides and flood­ing in areas devoid of vegetation.

Export-driven trade agree­ments and depen­dence caused by food aid have con­cur­rently dev­as­tated rural Haiti by under­min­ing local pro­duc­tion. These are the very poli­cies that caused more than two mil­lion rural Haitians to migrate to Port-au-Prince over a period of less than thirty years. The city was com­pletely unpre­pared to han­dle the swelling num­bers, and most ended up in impov­er­ished dan­ger­ous slums and poorly con­structed housing.

A decen­tral­ized rural devel­op­ment strat­egy rooted in simul­ta­ne­ous refor­esta­tion and food pro­duc­tion could have less­ened the dras­tic death toll of the Jan­u­ary 2010 earth­quake. The reverse migra­tion from the cities to the coun­try­side result­ing from this tragedy is a chance to start over. Despite the emer­gency sit­u­a­tion and many set­backs to mea­sur­able progress, Hait­ian peas­ant orga­ni­za­tions are still mov­ing for­ward with their work and look­ing to grow.

Hait­ian peas­ant move­ments and orga­ni­za­tions pro­vide prac­ti­cal demon­stra­tions of sus­tain­able agri­cul­tural meth­ods and prac­tices and act as an exam­ple of the way out of poverty. One of these groups, Grass­roots International’s part­ner the Peas­ant Move­ment of Papaye (MPP) has been work­ing in Haiti’s Cen­tral Plateau for nearly 40 years. Today, the MPP is one of Haiti’s largest and most suc­cess­ful peas­ant move­ments with over 60,000 mem­bers — 20,000 of which are women and 10,000 are youth.

The Cen­tral Plateau was one of the most defor­ested areas in the coun­try before MPP started work­ing there and sur­round­ing areas are still severely parched. While some inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tions, gov­ern­ments, and cor­po­ra­tions have eyed the bare land to make room for Jat­ropha plants for agro­fuel pro­duc­tion and export, Hait­ian groups like the MPP rec­og­nize that the land should be used to grow healthy food to feed their com­mu­ni­ties and sus­tain their livelihoods.

The MPP has devel­oped com­pre­hen­sive strate­gies for refor­esta­tion, soil con­ser­va­tion and improve­ment. They con­sis­tently cre­ate and main­tain fruit and for­est tree nurs­eries and farms to replen­ish both the land and food sup­ply, using entirely organic prac­tices. Since they began this work, the MPP has grown and planted over 20 mil­lion trees.

MPP agron­o­mists have iden­ti­fied which trees are native to Haiti and make every effort pos­si­ble to recre­ate the nat­ural land­scape. “You wouldn’t have believed that it was the same place if you had seen it about 15 years ago,” said MPP agron­o­mist Mulaire Michel against a back­drop of heavy green­ery. “Every­thing we do here is a mar­riage between food pro­duc­tion and soil con­ser­va­tion,” he added.

In addi­tion to agroe­col­ogy, MPP sup­ports eco­nomic devel­op­ment, trains com­mu­nity groups, and pro­vides health and med­i­cine — and often con­nects across all areas of work. For exam­ple, MPP trains a com­mu­nity group in grow­ing med­i­c­i­nal herbs that can be trans­formed into mar­ketable prod­ucts. These prod­ucts stock the shelves of MPP’s health clinic and the excess is traded at local cooperatives.

As peas­ants are orga­nized to join these projects, they also par­tic­i­pate in pop­u­lar edu­ca­tion pro­grams. Com­mu­nity mem­bers explore struc­tural issues such as U.S. for­eign pol­icy in Haiti, eco­nomic glob­al­iza­tion, and other impor­tant polit­i­cal, eco­nomic, and social real­i­ties. It is in large part because of this cou­pling of com­mu­nity orga­niz­ing and pop­u­lar edu­ca­tion efforts with “seeds and tools” devel­op­ment that the MPP has been so successful.

Today their labor has come to fruition. The Papaye region of the Cen­tral Plateau is now rich with var­i­ous fruit and for­est cover, young forests, and farms–a hum­ble par­adise at the cross­roads of hard­ship. Forty years ago, it was a waste­land. The MPP has spear­headed a national peas­ant coali­tion (National Con­gress of the Papaye Peasant’s Move­ment) in order to repro­duce their results else­where in Haiti. This coali­tion is active in all of Haiti’s 10 departments.

Hait­ian peas­ant orga­niz­ers know that local lead­er­ship and agroe­col­ogy works–and they want those fac­tors to lay the foun­da­tion of the rebuild­ing process. If we lis­ten, a new gen­er­a­tion of Haitians will be able to show off trop­i­cal lime forests and tell the story of just how far they have come.