ARTICLE - THEY DREAM OF FIELDS OF GOLD

HAITI: THEY DREAM OF FIELDS OF GOLD
(Montreal Gazette) - By Rene Bruemmer

It's seen as the way to get Haiti on its feet, but farmers need equipment and markets to make it work

LASCAHOBAS, HAITI - Roland Hyppolite gazes out over 50 hectares of farmland that lie mostly fallow and untilled in the heart of Haiti's mountainous Central Plateau region and sees fields of gold. A small plot, less than half a hectare, is bursting with tightly planted rows of new seedlings of cabbages, tomatoes, eggplants and, most important, peppers, a high-profit cash crop.

If things go as planned, 20 hectares of the land will be tilled by an association of 100 farmers to receive the seedlings, which must be spaced a metre apart so the pepper bushes can produce maximum yield. An irrigation system will bathe the arid soil through the dry season. And buyers will be found in Canada and the United States for the tonnes of produce that will be ripe for the picking starting in three months.

"We can harvest 15,000 pounds of peppers alone every 10 days," says Hyppolite, a bespectacled 55-year-old with greying hair and the air of a university professor thoroughly smitten by his field of study. "That means $15,000 U.S. in sales every 10 days, for a period of six months."

But the realities of Haiti have a way of taking the dreams of the well-intentioned and grinding them into dust. Experience has taught Hyppolite this all too well. It hasn't stopped him, though.

More than $30,000 was granted by a Haitian non-governmental association two years ago to get the farming association's project started, but Hyppolite estimates it needs another $50,000 to cover additional costs like irrigation pipes, workers' wages, boxes to crate the produce and shipping fees.

Once that's in, the fields will reap gold and pay for themselves, Hyppolite says. The people will have enough to eat. Their children will get an education. Life will finally move beyond the subsistence farming they and their ancestors have lived by for the last 200 years.

In most countries, entrepreneurs with a good business plan and the will to work would just get a bank loan and move ahead. But this is Haiti.

If the money doesn't come through, "all this," Hyppolite says, casting his arm out over his fields of gold, "will likely go to ruin."

One year after the earthquake, conditions in Haiti have improved, at least in a physical sense.

The rubble has been largely cleared from most streets in the teeming capital of Port-au-Prince.

The remnants of many destroyed buildings have been removed and rebuilding has begun for those with money or connections. The tents of bedsheets and branches for the roughly one million homeless have been replaced by real tents, or makeshift mini-homes with walls of wood or tin for the more well-off. There is water in the camps, and port-a-potties, and vendors selling food. But not many have money to buy.

"We live a life that is sub-human," says Icille Tleard, a 43-year-old camp resident with five children age 7 to 22, none working or in school. If there is one comfort, she says, it's that "Haitians are accustomed to misery."

Beneath the surface improvements, it's the same old Haiti, the one with not enough jobs, where groups of men loll listlessly on dusty streets and starving dogs roam for scraps. Garbage is still dumped in piles by the roads. The smell of the dead is gone, the bodies retrieved and buried or decomposed in the tombs of cracked concrete. The occasional skull or bone is picked up and tossed unceremoniously into the wheelbarrows of cleanup crews that are composed of young people making $5 to $7 a day who don't work very quickly.

People sell plastic buckets and corn and shirts by the side of the road as always, but sales are even worse than before, the plagues of cholera, political instability and the aftermath of the earthquake making life even more difficult than it was. Traffic is clogged, indicating many are going to work and school again. But even higher education brings few opportunities, so 70 per cent of Haiti's university graduates leave the country.

Much of the post-earthquake reconstruction plan for Haiti focused on the agricultural sector, long ignored even though roughly 60 per cent of the population relies on farming to live. But the experience of farmers like Hyppolite shows that the promises have yet to translate into deeds.

Despite it all, there is still hope. For many, that's all there is.

In Hyppolite's peaceful city of Lascahobas, most of the population of about 53,000 work the land, living in squat "ti-kays" -small two-room homes with concrete walls and tin roofs -located on modest plots of land of roughly one hectare. Gerta Pierre, 45, grows Congo peas, yams, bananas and many other products, which her husband will bring to Port-au-Prince, 50 kilometres and three hours away by bus on a switchback road through the mountains. He leaves at 5 p.m., paying $3 for the one-way fare, and awaits the truck carrying his produce, which will arrive in the capital at 10 p.m. He'll sleep outdoors at the market, staying for one to three days, depending on how sales go. These days, sales are slow. People have less money. Gerta's husband has to look out for robbers. They make enough to eat and to send their seven children to school, but not for much else.

"Life is hard -very, very hard," she says as she and two of her daughters sit on a sheet in the dirt outside their house, sorting through the kilograms of beans destined for market, taking out the bad ones. "We don't really live. It must change for everyone."

Not much has changed in Lascahobas since 1804, when Haiti's slave population overthrew their French colonialist masters after a 13-year rebellion to become the world's first free black republic, says Hyppolite as we bump and lurch over the rutted dirt road to the farming association's land. (He has asked the government several times to fix it, to no avail. "After a while, you get tired of asking.") The poor masses toil, and the elite minority enriches itself by taxing them, and charging export taxes on the food they produce.

A bottle is not meant to be stood upside down, supported by its small cap, says Hyppolite, who studied business and agricultural development as a young man in the U.S. and Puerto Rico before returning to Haiti. It is on its solid base that it must stand, he says.

"The elites are embarrassed by our past as slaves and peasant farmers, they try to distance themselves from it. But that is who we are, and we should embrace it, and exploit those strengths that we have, our knowledge of the land and this work."

Hyppolite was executive director of the Haiti-Canadian Chamber of Commerce, but came back to the homeland of his parents, both agriculturists, in 2006 to return to the soil in his roots, and make a better salary to feed his seven children, one of them adopted, one just four months old, all living in a small concrete home almost devoid of furnishings.

Subsistence farmers with no access to refrigerated storage typically harvest the same crop and bring it to market at the same time, driving down prices and leaving as much as 60 per cent to rot for lack of sales. Wholesalers buy up much of the produce at low cost, store it, then resell it at three times the original price a few months later.

Hyppolite joined forces with the local farming co-operative - l'Association des paysans pour le developpement de Grand Boucan -which formed in 2002 to harness strength in numbers, giving the locals enough manpower so they could export en masse to foreign buyers who demand large, regular shipments at competitive prices. The association was fortunate to win a $33,000 grant from a Haitian non-governmental organization in 2008. The farmers used the money to buy a Chinese-made diesel pump and PVC piping to divert water for more than a kilometre from the Thames River to their 50-hectare plot so they could grow during Haiti's seven-month dry season.

But now they need the additional funds to pay for the rest -shipping the produce out would require at least 10,000 crates, for example, which sell for 75 cents apiece, meaning $7,500 for boxes alone -and money is hard to find. Hyppolite spends his days on the Internet seeking donors -he has tried USAID and World Vision, to no avail. He tried to raise $7,000 through the Zafen Internet donation site, but didn't hear anything. The Trade Facilitation Office Canada (TFO Canada), covered 70 per cent of his expenses for a recent trip to Canada to meet wholesalers, and two promised to buy. Tina Brooks of Rigaud, who makes the Brooks Pepperfire brand of hot sauces, has been a regular purchaser. Hyppolite would love to buy a $5,000 motorized tiller to turn the hard, root-filled soil, typically done slowly by hand and hoe. At this point, however, he'd settle for an ox, which costs $900, to pull the tiller. Or money to pay the farmers to do it.

"Don't get me wrong, my goal in this is to make money," he says. "But I also want everyone else to make money, so we can all prosper. ...

"For the first time in Haitian history, my objective is to get the money to the people, because they are the ones that work, that produce."

Much of Haiti shut down for days after results of November's presidential elections were announced on the night of Tuesday, Dec. 7. The outcome was widely considered fraudulent by both Haitians and the international community, so Haitians by the tens of thousands took to the streets to demand their democratic right be respected. The way out of their latest political mess is still being contested.

Haiti has been closed to progress for 200 years in large part because of its political instability.

The constant infighting and battles for power leave it unable to form a cohesive government capable of building the infrastructure needed to create a working country. Combined with a cholera outbreak and the political upheaval, it's like Haiti was rocked by three earthquakes in 2010.

It's hard to build up when the ground beneath is constantly shaking.

When Hyppolite returned to start his life anew from the soil at the age of 52, he purchased two hectares of land from his brother on the outskirts of town. With the enthusiasm of a new owner, he invested his life savings of $20,000, preparing the land, building two large stone storage buildings and a concrete basin to collect water. He set up an irrigation system to pump water from the river below and planted his fields with sugarcane, yams, bananas and peppers. Fruit trees bearing oranges, coconuts, avocados, grapefruits and mangos already lined the borders. He hired seven labourers to work the land. He even planted two rows of flowering hibiscus shrubs to create an avenue of bright colour. It was his new corner of paradise.

In 2008, the hurricanes came and wiped almost everything out. He harvested what he could, but he was dead broke. He had to lay off his workers, and the land was neglected. Robbers broke through the wooden door of one shed, so Hyppolite put an iron door in its place. The robbers broke through the stone walls. They stole the pipes and valves from his irrigation system, and the fruit from his trees. Villagers let goats graze in his fields, happily chomping the flowers off his hibiscus plants. This field of dreams now lies mostly unkempt and untended. He's renting out one hectare to a fellow farmer who's also the village voodoo priest. The priest pays young labourers $2.50 a day. They come from villages even worse off than Lascahobas to work for a few months, sleeping outdoors.

"I don't like to come back here," Hyppolite says. "It depresses me."

Yet in people like Hyppolite lies hope, because he and his fellow farmers are still trying, organizing to martial their strength, reaching out for a hand up so that one day they will no longer need one.

"Yes, I still have hope, because I believe in God," he says. "If I could make it for this long with absolutely nothing, it's because God still wants me around."

An aid worker with years of experience in Central America notes that in certain countries there, peasant farmers' efforts to organize themselves into more powerful collectives were crushed by government-sponsored squads who executed thousands of peasant leaders in the 1980s. The farmers there now are beaten down, they've given up. They're a sad bunch, he says.

Whereas in Haiti, pride remains, as do the dreams, for young and old.

"I'm from an agronomist family," says Lucien Ernst, a 24-year-old memberof the farmers co-operative in his first year of a five-year agronomy degree.

"I'm young," he said. "But I love development. And I love my country as a Haitian."

On the wall of a side street in Port-au-Prince it is written: "Haiti renait de ces cendres" -Haiti will rise from its ashes. A phoenix in flight is drawn above the words.

A few blocks down, a dog, tan-brown and filthy, scavenges lunch from a burning garbage pile, the flames illuminating its protruding ribs.