The busy hurricane season dealt a lethal blow to Haitian and Cuban
agriculture, wiping out food reserves, sustenance crops and produce
for the world market, where prices continue to rise.
Posted on Wed, Sep. 17, 2008
By FRANCES ROBLES AND JACQUELINE CHARLES
jcharles@MiamiHerald.com
LIANCOURT, Haiti --
Hurricanes a 'tremendous blow' to Haiti, Cuba food production
Rice paddies in this northwest village lie submerged in pools of
water, some of them the size of lakes. In the south, entire groves of
plantain trees have toppled. And in the central plateau, wilted
beanfields and cornfields limp in ruin -- remnants of Haiti's
battering by four consecutive storms.
In Cuba, trucks loaded with stacks of plantains rumble down storm-
wrecked roads. Farmers are in a hurry to salvage what they can in a
country that just lost 80,000 acres of bananas and 4,355 tons of food
that was stored in warehouses when two hurricanes in as many weeks hit
there.
''That's the one thing we will have for days and days and days,'' said
Rosa Arrencibia, 47, of Camagüey. ``Plantains.''
A busy hurricane season has hit Cuba and Haiti where it hurts most: in
the heart of agriculture. This hurricane season hasn't just brought
death, but also destruction to those two countries as well as to the
Dominican Republic and Jamaica, washing away months of food staples at
a time when nations face rising global food and fuel prices.
For Haiti, the toughest loss was in the Artibonite Valley, the heart
of the country's already paltry breadbasket. Cuba suffered
agricultural losses on both coasts, where storms wiped out not just
the bananas that farmers scrambled to recover, but the entire sugar
cane crop, 135,000 tons of citrus and a staggering 700,000 tons of
food.
''That's devastating,'' said Bill Messina, an agricultural economist
at the University of Florida, who monitors Cuba's farming industry.
``For agriculture, this is a tremendous blow.''
Cuba was already struggling to increase food production and had
recently begun a quest to give unused state land to farmers. But with
huge losses to coffee, tobacco, sugar and most other crops, experts
say it will take more than extra incentives for farmers to recover.
CUBA'S FOOD CHAIN
''The big unanswered question in this story is the food supply,'' said
Cuba expert Phil Peters, vice president of the Lexington Institute
think tank in Arlington, Va. ``They lost food in the warehouses, crops
in the fields, and the crops that earn the foreign exchange they use
to earn revenue to import food. That's three problems that add up.''
Feeling an equal blow is Haiti, where widespread hunger triggered
deadly riots earlier this year, and where the storms ruined more than
50,000 acres of crops and dashed any hope of reviving this nation's
agriculture to replace expensive, imported rice and other food
products.
Government officials estimate the loss at $180 million -- and
counting.
''This couldn't have happened at a worse time for us,'' said Joanas
Gué, the country's new agriculture minister.
``The four storms that arrived came during a period of harvest. We've
lost all of the beans in the mountains. We've lost all of the plantain
fields, especially in Belle-Anse and Marigot in the southeast, the
plantain bed. We've lost a good portion of the corn harvest.''
There is little promise of a quick recovery for Haiti, where farmers
say all they can do is pray for no more rain.
''Things are not good, but what can we do?'' said Selonger Pierre, 50
and a father of five, who was feverishly plowing and plucking away in
his flooded rice paddy just hours before Hurricane Ike flooded the
valley once more. Wading in thigh-high muck, he reflected on his
situation: The rains didn't just flood his fields -- they washed away
livestock.
''We are nearing starvation,'' he said.
Just before the storms, Haiti had poured more than $30 million in to
this season's rice crop and invested $13 million in more than
26,600,000 pounds of fertilizer, selling it at 80 percent below market
value to already-struggling farmers.
Haitian farmers and consumers were close to reaping the rewards --
120,000 metric tons of rice, 30,000 more than than last year -- of
those investments when the storms came barreling through, sending mud
and rocks rolling from the hillside, rivers overflowing their banks
and irrigation canals into disarray.
''We will have a huge food deficit,'' said Gué.
Mostly used for domestic consumption, the crop is a lifeline for most
Haitians, who often can't afford much else.
''We lost all of our trees,'' said Jean-Mario Pierre, 24, looking at
his backyard in Vialet, a rural community in southern Petit-Goave,
where not one plantain grove survived Hanna's destruction.
Pierre said the grove, which has been in the family since 1982, feeds
and clothes 17 family members, all of whom live in the yard. When the
family grows tired of eating plantain, they barter.
''Sometimes you sell the plantain, and you can't even buy three cups
of rice because the rice is so expensive,'' he said. ``We have no
other choice but to suffer.''
Less than a quarter-mile down the road, Clermont Beaubrun, 60, waded
through his grove of toppled trees with a machete, looking for the
last of his plantains.
''The grove is destroyed,'' he said, his voice laden with frustration.
``We are now at the mercy of God, and the government.''
Even before the storms, Haiti's government was struggling to feed the
country's nearly nine million people. The riots toppled the prime
minister and sparked a worldwide appeal by the United Nations and
others for aid. The United States shipped $45 million worth of food,
which was supposed to last until the end of the year, but is running
out because of the storm crisis.
RECIPE FOR DISASTER
''We have a good recipe for a disaster that's worse than a
humanitarian crisis,'' said Joel Boutroue, the United Nations
Development Program resident representative in Haiti.
Boutroue, like others in the international community, is concerned
about how long Haitians, resilient in the face of misery, will battle
hunger this time around before a repeat of April's deadly riots.
''The security situation is even more fragile than what it was,'' says
U.N. Special Envoy Hédi Annabi. ``Prices will go up, the scarcity of
food, all of that could make the security situation more fragile.''
That impending reality worries Haiti's international donors.
''It used to be a question of affordability,'' U.S. Ambassador Janet
Sanderson said about Haiti's food crisis. ``Now it's a question of
availability as well. That's a double whammy.''
Miami Herald staff writers Jennifer Lebovich, Trenton Daniel, Patricia
Mazzei, correspondents in Cuba and El Nuevo Herald contributed to this
report.
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/cuba/story/689501.html
No comments:
Post a Comment