Haitian National Coalition for the Environment

Excerpts from the Peasant Movement of Papaye (MPP) 35th Annual Congress

4. On the issue of food security:

Haiti was a self-sufficient country in terms of food. Haitian peasants always produced enough food to nourish the entire population. The country even exported and sold food and other agricultural products in foreign countries.
Haiti was known for exporting organic produce, produce that is the best for health. Today the country has turned into a restavèk in terms of food. We buy 80% of the rice we eat from foreign countries, even though we have the capacity to produce enough rice to nourish ourselves, and to have a surplus we can export to sell abroad.
Our stomachs now depend on secondhand food like turkey wings, chicken wings, rotten chicken, secondhand fish and a lot of other secondhand products that destroy our health.
Today we have lost the eating habits that identified us as a people. There are Haitians who no longer want to eat native rice. Peasants who don’t want to eat local cornmeal porridge anymore. When a konbit (community work team) happens it isn’t with a big pot of cornmeal porridge anymore. We should be eating food like tchaka, chanmchanm, doukounou, akra, anpanan, tonmtonm, tayo mazoubel, tayo dijannankou, breadfruit, labapen, sweet potatoes, manioc, plantain, etc. Instead we prefer to eat bread, spaghetti and macaroni. Instead of cooking the food with fresh herbs like thyme and basil leaves we opt for bouillon cubes like Maggi, Accent, all kind of chemical products that are making us ill.
Today our stomachs are on our neighbor’s hands. It is our neighbors who sell us a million eggs each day, 84,000 white chickens each day. It is our neighbor who sells us key limes, coconuts and all kinds of products.
5. On the issue of hunger and the high cost of living
Today, if we were relying on the production of local food, hunger would have already reached 60% of us.
We are experiencing national hunger that has our stomachs in knots. A hunger that is truly painful and the people are calling it “klorox”. We are in this klorox because the government of the republic has abandoned its national production. The peasants have been abandoned like a millet field without a caretaker. They are obligated to drop the production in their own house to work the land at the neighbor’s house and to import and sell to us.
The country’s president and prime minister are always saying to us that it is food that brings down the price of food, as a way of confusing those who are incapable of analyzing the situation. We the peasant to do not participate in this lie, when we know it is only 4.5% earmarked for agriculture in the national budget. In that 4.5%, there is not even 1% that reaches us. The money in the budget for agriculture is a joke, because that is what the funders have promised them. They don’t really have these funds and the majority of this little money will pay bureaucrats.
The country’s president and prime minister are mocking the people’s hunger. They say they can’t make miracles. They don’t have any national production policy, no food production policy.
President Preval no longer talks about agrarian reform. They closed the BCA [1], even though it wasn’t of that much use to the pesants anyway. They speak of rural banks but it is truly a bluff.
The government does nothing to support the peasants in the face of the high cost of living. There is no job creation in the rural areas. The social appeasement didn’t reach the rural areas and was truly a bluff. This government is not interested in peasants’ affairs.
The government’s policies for peasants are making the peasant class disappear or return to slavery on the jatropha plantation to make gas to export to quench the thirst of American cars, or to go work for potato peels in the free-trade zone, this government is putting their plan in play all over the country.
6. On the environmental problem
At the moment of our independence, 80% of the country’s territory was covered with forest, today we have less than1% vegetable cover. It is the existence of the country and its entire population that are in jeopardy. The country cannot stand heavy rain without a catastrophe descending upon the population. The situation becomes more serious everyday, because the majority of peasants are obligated to enter into charcoal production to survive. But, we don’t have trees anymore to cut down. The peasants have to dig up the roots of trees to make charcoal. There are no more trees to make food in many communal sections of the country. What makes things more difficult is that the Haitian government has never had any plan to create another source of energy to alleviate the pressure on trees.
Each rain that falls, a part of the thin layer of soil that can still produce food washes into the sea. The worst is that the flood water washed away the people, their house, their animals and their garden. In many areas, like Ansafolè, Lapwent, Polen lakòn in the north west to give only those examples, peoples’ lives are in danger at all times. The rivers overflow their banks and destroy whole community
The mountains are crumbling into the sea. Our fish cannot repopulate anymore. The mangroves have nearly completely disappeared, our fish cannot reproduce anymore and people who live as fishers can catch them. Unfortunately, we do not have the means to go far out at sea to fish. In this way, it is other countries that are exploiting the maritime resources of our country. Our birds have gone into exile, our fish have gone into exile.
Garbage has chased people out of the town. There is no drainage in the cities, there is no policy for managing the trash. The water sources for drinking water are contaminated. The peasants don’t have latrines to take of their business. We are truly living in a catastrophe.
In the face of all these threats, we don’t have any policies for protection of the environment. The government does not plant any trees anywhere in the country. We don’t truly know which ministry is responsible for reforestation in the country.