From: bstring@mainz-emh2.army.mil (BOB STRINGFIELD)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american
Subject: Haiti Action Alert Environment
Date: 29 Jul 1992 05:12:07 -0500
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu


Haiti is a beautiful tropical country with rich environmental and
cultural resources.  It is also almost completely deforested and the
recipient of toxic garbage produced in the United States.  Haiti's
environmental problems cannot be separated from its economic and
political situation.  And its environmental problems are compounded
by specific U.S. policies.  By seeing how what we do in the U.S. is
connected to the state of the environment in Haiti, we can begin to
address the ecological crisis in the Third World by changing
ourselves and our own country.

Haiti's environment is threatened because people are poor:
     The annual per capita income in Haiti is only 300 dollars.  While
over 64% of the population is involved in farming, 60% are landless,
and 620,000 farms operate on an average of only 1.3 hectacres per
farm.  The poor and landless have consistently turned to Haiti's
forested mountains in a desparate search for arable land.   Many
steep and forested hillsides have been converted to fields, despite
low fertility and problems of erosion.  The soil on these slopes
quickly washes away when they are cleared, and fertility soon
declines.  People are less able raise less food, and poverty increases.
More poverty means more need for land under cultivation.  More
hillsides are converted to fields, and the cycle continues.
       Despite the fact that poverty is the cause of much environmental
degradation in Haiti,  U.S. efforts to halt the process of environmental
degradation there have been consistently unsuccessful because they
have failed to address the root cause.  In fact, although poverty is the
cause of much environmental degradation in Haiti, U.S. efforts to help
Haiti's environment have sometimes contributed to the growth of
poverty.
      In 1981, USAID, together with the US, Canadian, and Mexican
Departments of Agriculture, began a program to eliminate the Haitian
pig in order to eradicate a disease called "African Swine Fever."  The
program had a devastating effect on Haitian small farmers, who
depended on pigs for income to send children to school and family
members to the hospital and to survive the seasons when no crops
were produced.  Though a new, larger brand of pigs was imported to
Haiti to replace the Creole pigs, the small farmers were not able to
buy or keep these new breeds because of their high price and need
for imported feed.  Without their Creole pigs, small farmers were
forced to find other emergency sources of income.  Often that meant
cutting down trees to make charcoal, farming fragile hillsides for
cash crops, or moving to the cities to look for work.  Even many
mango and avocado trees were cut down in the search for immediate
cash needed for survival.  The net result has been the degradation of
the natural environment and migration to the cities. By creating the
conditions that result in environmental problems, the United States
has participated in the destruction of Haiti's environment.

Haiti's environment is threatened because Haiti has
traditionally been ruled by governments that ignore the
needs of the majority of the people and the land:
     Conservation and democracy have always gone  hand in hand in
Haiti.  From 1957 to l986, Haiti was governed by the repressive
Duvalier regime.  Under the Duvaliers, the peasants were subjected
to the viciously oppressive "squeeze and sap system" (Sistem peze-
souse in Creole) by big landowners and corrupt government officials
in the countryside.  In the mid-seventies,  peasants began to organize
themselves to confront this system of extortion.  They formed
marketing cooperatives to avoid exploitative middlemen and credit
unions to avoid moneylenders.  From the beginning, these
organizations were involved in conservation efforts.  Because the
peasants depended so directly on the land, they could not afford for
it to erode or to become desert.  Grassroots groups planted trees,
constructed terraces for soil conservation, and organized communal
forests.  These local initiatives, multiplied many times over
throughout the country, amounted to a full-fledged environmental
movement that was directly tied to peoples' well being.
      The democratic processes begun in the countryside finally
reached the national level with the election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide
in December, 1990.  Aristide received 67% of the popular vote in the
internationally supervised elections.  Under Aristide, the peasants'
organizations flourished, aided by a literacy campaign and extensive
anti-corruption program.  For the first time, the national government
supported the citizens' efforts to improve their own lot.
      Because to take care of oneself is to take care of the land in
Haiti,
the opportunity for self-government resulted in a substantial
increase in local conservation efforts.  All over the country, local
chapters of peasants' organizations worked to combat erosion, plant
trees, and restore the land to health and productivity.
      The rich and powerful who subsisted off of exploiting the
peasants were threatened by these changes.  Opposition to Aristide
grew among the traditional elites, and on September 30, 1991, the
military staged a coup.  Immediately, Haiti's fledgling institutions of
democratic self-government were attacked.  Aristide was ousted, and
all self-help intitiatives, including conservation efforts, were
targeted
for repression.
      Since the coup, reforestation projects, erosion control efforts,
and
communal forest projects have all been slowed down or stopped,
primarily because small farmer groups are no longer permitted to
meet.   In Haiti, where the democratic movement and the
environmental movement have traditionally been linked, the
repression of democratic intiatives has also been the repression of
intiative to take care of the land.
    The United States government has failed to offer its full support to
the restoration of full democratic self-government in Haiti.  While the
Bush administration has consistently stated a commitment to the
return of Aristide, our country has often acted to the contrary.  Most
recently, on June 6 the Bush Administration began talks on a political
settlement that would involve an international peacekeeping force in
Haiti and a prime minister selected with the participation of the
army.  Aristide and other Haitian democratic leaders deplore this
solution as unconstitutional.  Under such terms, many analysts
believe, Aristide would become nothing more than a figurehead
president.  Only by consistently supporting the return of full
democracy to Haiti can we support the environmental movement
that is based in the small, community based grassroots organizations.

Haiti's environment is threatened because the United States
takes advantage of its poverty and political instability to
avoid addressing its own environmental problems.
     In January, 1988, the renegade waste ship Khian Sea dumped in
Haiti about 4,000 tons of toxic ash produced at Philadelphia's
municipal incinerator.  It was falsely labelled as fertilizer.  Corrupt
officials in the Namphy military government accepted money in
exchange for the dumping of the toxic ash on Haitian land.  It was
left unprotected on a beach, where it remains to this day.  The
government that accepted the ash is gone, and the individuals that
received money are no longer in power.  Local residents suffer the
health effects of living near this toxic material, but the current
military government in Haiti refuses to take responsibility for the
people's health problems.
       The United States government refuses to address the issue
unless it hears from the Haitian government.  While the garbage was
produced in the U.S.,  the consequences of the waste for the health of
people and the environment has been passed from the U.S. to Haiti,
where people are too poor and powerless to avoid getting dumped
on.

People in the United States can do something about Haiti's
environmental problems:
By focusing on our own government, we can help Haiti address its
environmental problems.  Specific U.S. policies compound the current
state of ecological crisis in Haiti, and it is these policies that we,
as
Americans, can change.

     1)  By supporting federal legislation banning the international
trade in hazardous waste, Americans can both stop this country from
contributing to Haiti's environmental problems and force ourselves to
address the problems we face with waste disposal in a constructive
way.  We need to solve the problem of garbage, not pass the problem
on.  Write or call your representative and ask him/her to write a
letter to the Rules Committee of Congress urging that the
Amendment to RCRA offered by Representative Town's (D-MN) be
allowed to come to a vote on the floor of the House of
Representatives.  This amendment calls for a ban of the waste trade
with non-OECD (less industrialized) countries.  Ask your
representatives to support this amendment in the event of a vote.
     2)  Americans can support the movement for the restoration of
democracy in Haiti.  Because the military represses conservation
efforts in Haiti when it represses small community groups, the
restoration of a democratic government there is necessary for the
protection of the ecology and the land.  Call or write President Bush
and your representatives in Congress, and ask them to support the
quick and unconditional  return of President Aristide to Haiti.
     3)  Finally, Americans can encourage the U.S. development
agencies to integrate the needs of people into their environmental
protection programs.  In Haiti, environmental problems are human
problems.  People depend on the land for their survival.  The cannot
afford for the environment to be destroyed, but neither can they
protect their environment without the possibility of organizing
democratically. Write to Paul Roe at the Haiti desk of USAID and ask
that the U.S. support sustainable development in Haiti through
working with the farmer groups and other community organizations
that are struggling to survive in Haiti. His address is ARA/CAR, U.S.
State Department, Washington DC 20520