Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

Soil loss from the uplands in the rainy season is so severe that bulldozers
function as tropical snowplows to clear the streets of the capital, Portau-Prince.
The United Nations estimates that topsoil loss over at least half
the country is severe enough to preclude farming. The U.S. Agency for
International Development reported in 1986 that about a third of Haiti
was extremely eroded and practically sterile from soil loss. Farmers worked
an area six times larger than the area well suited for cultivation. The UN
Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that soil erosion destroyed
6,000 hectares of arable land a year in the 1980s. For the past few decades
estimates of the remaining area of “good” farmland showed a long-term
decline of several percent a year. With little more than 50 percent of the
island’s potential farmland still arable, the island’s growing population no
longer can feed itself.
Prosperity disappeared along with Haiti’s topsoil. As subsistence farms
literally disappeared many rural families resorted to felling the last remaining
trees to sell as charcoal to buy food. Desperate peasants flocking to
cities created huge slums that fostered the insurgency that toppled the government
in 2004.
Haiti’s crippling soil loss is not simply a colonial legacy. Land distribution
in Haiti is far more egalitarian than elsewhere in Latin America. After
independence the Haitian government confiscated colonial estates and
freed slaves began farming unclaimed lands. Early in the nineteenth century,
Haiti’s president distributed a little more than 15 hectares of land to
each of some ten thousand beneficiaries. Since then, land holdings generally
were divided upon inheritance and several centuries of population
growth gradually reduced the size of the average peasant farm to the point
where by 1971, the average farm size was less than 1.5 hectares. With an
average of between 5 and 6 people per household, this comes to about 0.25
to 0.3 hectares per person. More than three-fourths of rural households fall
below the poverty line and two-thirds of Haitian households fall below the
UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s minimum nutritional standard.
This is Ireland all over again, this time without the landlords.
As the population grew, the land inherited by each successive generation
was subdivided into smaller plots that eventually became too small to allow
fallow periods. Declining farm income reduced the ability to invest in soil
conservation measures. Unable to support themselves, the poorest farmers
move on to clear steeper hillsides—the only remaining land not already
cultivated—and start the cycle all over on land that can last only a few
years. Eventually the shortage of arable land and rising rural poverty
islands in time 229