• by IPS Correspondents (port-au-prince)
• Thursday, November 17, 1994
• Inter Press Service

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Nov 17 (IPS) - Haiti's reputation as an environmental disaster zone - a barren, depressing landscape with vast areas of land left unused - was reinforced last weekend by the ravaging winds of Tropical Storm Gordon.

Trees were uprooted and houses were covered in mud as the storm hit the Caribbean nation of 6.3 million. Hundreds of people and livestock were killed. Scores were listed as missing: damage to infrastructure was costly.

But agriclutural experts, confident that the nation with the tag of poorest-in-the-hemisphere can grow enough food to help itself, are pressing ahead with an ambitious plan to create breadbaskets out of desolate terrain.

"Given the human resources Haiti has at its disposal and concrete aid from the international community... Haitian agriculture can (be restored) to its rightful place in the national economy," says Jacques Wiame, resident representative of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

In concert with other donors and the Agriculture ministry, FAO has launched a multi-million dollar programme to revitalise agriculture in a nation whose land has been desecrated as harshly as its political freedoms have been ravaged.

Haiti's seemingly unending sequence of coups and vicious dictatorships, counter-coups and ruptured attempts at democracy have shaped its world image as much as its poverty tag.

Under the programme, peasants will be given direct aid to promote farm prroduction and encourage viable alternatives to the destruction of the environment - which in Haiti has been rapid and unrelenting.

Action to safeguard the environment is a key component of the new programme. FAO wants to prevent - or at least minimise - disasters of the kind that occurred here last weekend. Flood waters will be prevented from overflowing into ravines - many of which have shanty-towns erected on their banks.

There will also be an intense programme of reforestation, done jointly with the Agriculture Ministry and Non governmental organisations (NGOs).

Later this month FAO will allow rural communities to collect water from streams trickling down the slopes of ravines, Wiame said. Peasants will be encouraged to raise fish and to plant fruit trees.

© Inter Press Service (2014) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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