Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Haiti: The Economy
Forestry
Haiti has had a long and sad history of deforestation, which
has had a devastating effect on the country's economy. The
most direct effect of deforestation is soil erosion. In turn, soil
erosion has lowered the productivity of the land, worsened
droughts, and eventually led to desertification, all of which
have increased the pressure on the remaining land and trees.
As far back as the 1950s, it was becoming obvious that environmentally
unsound agricultural practices, rapid population
growth, and increased competition over scarce land were accelerating
deforestation problems uncontrollably. Intensified
demand for charcoal has worsened the situation by accelerating
logging operations. The FAO estimated that deforestation
was destroying 6,000 hectares of arable land a year in the 1980s.
As a result, an impetus to act came from abroad. USAID's Agroforestry
Outreach Program, Proje Pyebwa, was the country's
major reforestation program in the 1980s. Between 1982 and
1991, the project distributed some 63 million trees to more
than 250,000 small peasant farmers. Later efforts to save Haiti's
trees—and thus its ecosystem—focused on intensifying reforestation
programs, reducing waste in charcoal production, introducing
more wood-efficient stoves, and importing wood under
USAID's Food for Peace program. Much of the tree cover continued
to be cut down indiscriminately for use as charcoal until
the cutting reached alarming proportions in the 1990s. Only
an estimated 60,000 hectares, 2.2 percent of the total land area,
were forested in 1993.
Livestock and Fishing
Most peasants possess a few farm animals, usually goats, pigs,
chickens, and cattle. Few holdings, however, are large, and few
peasants raise only livestock. Many farm animals, serving as a
kind of savings account, are sold or are slaughtered to pay for
marriages, medical emergencies, schooling, seeds for crops, or
a voodoo ceremony. Haiti had an estimated 200,000 pigs in
1994, compared with a record high of 1.2 million in the early
1980s. In the late 1970s, the island's pig stock became infected
with the highly contagious African swine fever, which had
spread from Spain to the Dominican Republic and then to
Haiti via the Artibonite River. Panicked farmers first slaughtered
their own infected animals, about one-third of the total
pig population. Fear of further infection eliminated another
395