Haiti's Missing Green Jobs

by Te-Ping Chen · 2010-07-19 11:57:00 UTC
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When a 7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti this January, headlines stayed riveted on Port-au-Prince — the urban epicenter of rubble, chaos and maimed and lost lives. Once the immediate disaster subsided, though, it was plain that recovery efforts needed to encompass Haiti's countryside, too.

Since the 1980s, Port-au-Prince has grown into a grimly overcrowded city, even as Haiti's countryside has suffered from lack of investment. As the population of Haiti's capital swelled to 3 million — this in a city that was never designed to hold more than 400,000 — the country's Ministry of Agriculture, by contrast, languished. Its 2006-2007 budget, for example, was just $1.5 million.

Today, over half of Haiti's population is undernourished, with many seriously dependent on imports as well as food aid. In recent decades, local rice production has been swamped by a flood of cheap, so-called "Miami rice" from the U.S — to the point that today, fully 80% of the rice consumed by Haitians each year is imported. Meanwhile, 90% of its eggs are trucked in from the Dominican Republic.

As stars from Wyclef Jean to George Clooney made their pleas for Haiti earlier this year, the UN asked the global community to pull together $60 million in emergency reconstruction aid for agriculture. Now, though, six months later, only about half of that amount has actually materialized.

It's not just better food stability for Haiti that's at stake. It's jobs. Projects that emphasize large-scale irrigation, reforestation and farming can provide stable employment and opportunities for Haitians that have fled Port-au-Prince to seek refuge in the countryside — but donors haven't exactly stepped up to the plate.

Mark Cohen of Oxfam says it's because investment in agriculture doesn't produce the short-term results that donors crave. "If you send seeds, they have to be planted, they have to cultivated, they have to be harvested before there's an impact," he tells Voice of America.

So far the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has helped 100,000 families harvest crops, with the donation of seeds, fertilizer and tools. The FAO hoped to help an additional 25,000 families, too — but the agency ran out of funds before they could get started.

Photo Credit:treesftf

Te-Ping Chen Te-Ping Chen is a freelance writer and U.S. Truman Scholar whose writing has appeared in the Nation Magazine, the South China Morning Post magazine, Le Soir, and Slate.com.
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