Island of Hunger

Even in the best of times the tropical Caribbean island nation of Haiti has severe problems feeding itself. More than 80% of the country's 5 million people live on tiny farms. Agricultural techniques are generally primitive; in some areas plows and draft animals are unknown, and the unfertile limestone terrain is cultivated with hoes and machetes. When it rains in Haiti, the corn and beans flourish and the people eat. When drought comes, as it has with increasing frequency over the past two decades, crops shrivel in the arid soil and people starve. The Haitian government believes that nearly 300,000 of its citizens now face possible starvation or malnutrition.

The worst-hit section of Haiti is the northwest, a region of rugged, treeless hills where only cactus and mesquite seem to flourish. There were heavy rains in November when, as Baptist Missionary Vance Brown puts it, "the people went crazy planting like they've never planted before. And then we didn't get another sniff of rain for seven months." The winter crop was lost and the spring crop, which normally would be planted in April, was never put in at all. To make matters still worse, a mysterious disease called "yellowing" has killed coconut palms that were a source of nourishment during previous droughts.

Running Sores. "For months," reports TIME Correspondent Jack White from the area, "peasants have been trickling into villages like tiny Bombar-dopolis, where they sit in eerie silence in the dirt courtyards and dusty streets hoping to find food and waiting for rain. In the village of Desforges, five miles to the north, children, too debilitated to brush away the flies and insects that swarm over their bodies, sit for hours outside mud and stick huts without moving or speaking. Until recently, many have eaten nothing but mangoes; their arms and legs are covered with running sores that never heal. Monique is a six-year-old boy shorter than a properly developed child half his age. His mother says, Tm afraid that he will die.' "

Although the prospect of disaster has been apparent to food experts since last winter, Haiti's President for Life Jean-Claude Duvalier, 23, formally declared a food emergency only six weeks ago. Belatedly the government has provided a few thousand dollars to charter trucks carrying food over washboard-rough back roads to the stricken areas. The current relief effort has been fairly well coordinated, in part because various U.S. agencies were already at work in Haiti when the food emergency was declared. The distribution program, which is being administered by CARE, is intended to feed 120,000 people until the end of the summer, when a crop, planted in early June when spotty rains began to fall, can be harvested. Several dozen people have already died of starvation and the total may well grow.

The emergency program is hardly a solution to Haiti's underlying problems. Basically, the once abundant island is an ecological disaster area. The relatively few acres of good bottom land are owned by American sugar growers or by the Duvalier family and their friends. The rest of the island consists largely of steep hillsides that have been denuded of trees--the wood is converted to charcoal and sold in the capital of Port-au-Prince for five times the 300 a bag the peasants receive for it. When it does rain, the soil on the hills is washed away. There is, moreover, virtually no catchment system to conserve the water and free the peasants from the whims of the weather. "Irrigation" generally means hauling water in an old oil can from nearby creeks.

Elusive Reality. There has been much talk in Port-au-Prince about the need for agricultural development, especially in reforestation and irrigation. Unfortunately, development plans usually get bogged down in the dusty corridors of one of the world's most uncaring and corrupt bureaucracies. The Duvalier family alone skims at least $6 million a year from the government's revenues--about one-fifth of the country's entire budget--while Jean-Claude recently inaugurated a huge $3 million mausoleum honoring Papa Doc. "We live only in fantasies; reality eludes us," Publisher Dieudonne Fardin recently complained in Haiti's bimonthly Le Petit Samedi Soir. "One comes to the realization that there is an absence of national will to search for solutions to the problems which affect the future of the country." Fardin is probably right, but the government's response to his forthright criticism, typically, was to have him thrown in jail. Meanwhile, thousands upon thousands of hungry Haitians stoically endure the most abject poverty in the Western Hemisphere.

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