No place left to grow

Christa Fertilice still has nightmares about the giant wave that poured into Gona�ves, turning the city into a lake and drowning at least 1,900 people in one of the worst natural disasters in Haiti's calamitous history.

A torrent of water 10 feet high engulfed Fertilice's shack when Tropical Storm Jeanne struck in September 2004, sweeping her and eight relatives out the windows.

Fertilice managed to crawl onto a rooftop and huddled there all night, watching the blurry silhouettes of bodies, pigs, cows, chairs, tables, motor scooters, radios, television sets and most of the hope pour out of this desperately poor city. For days afterward, corpses filled the streets and alleyways. Fertilice found those of her daughter and three grandchildren floating in her back yard. She dragged them to the street for rescue workers to collect and bury, but they never came; they couldn't keep up with the piles of dead. After the bodies lay for three days in the broiling sun, Fertilice dragged them out back and buried them herself.

Asked recently what caused the flood of Gona�ves, Fertilice, 55, lifted her palms to the sky. "It's God's work," she said.

Across this city of roughly 200,000, which is still reeling from the deluge, almost no one seemed aware of the scientific explanation: deforestation, a phenomenon that is turning tiny Haiti into a Caribbean desert and causing increasingly deadly flash floods and mudslides.

With three-fourths of Haitians dependent on charcoal to cook their food, and most subsistence farmers unable to earn a living without a quick cash crop, tree cutting is one of Haiti's biggest industries. About 50 million trees are felled to make fuel or to sell as lumber each year, according to the Haitian Environmental Association.

Less than 2 percent of Haiti's once lush forests remain, compared with 20 percent in the Dominican Republic, with which it shares the island of Hispaniola.

Without tree roots, topsoil is loosened and easily washes away. Without topsoil, the ground can't easily absorb water. So when the rains fall, water pours down denuded hills, overflows riverbanks and fills up the plains.

Criss-crossed with rivers and ringed on three sides by mountains so badly stripped they look from afar like a three-day beard, this western coastal city didn't stand a chance.

"There are many more Gona�veses in Haiti just waiting to happen," said Jean Andre Victor, Haiti's leading environmentalist. "We're sitting on a time bomb." Sewage canals blocked from years of neglect caused water to build up even faster. But even if they had been cleaned, the toll still would have been catastrophic, environmentalists say.

Reforestation is one of the biggest challenges facing the new president that Haitians will elect in voting tentatively scheduled for later this month. It also is one of the most daunting, because the tree-cutting is fueled by poverty, soil degradation and energy needs.

More than four-fifths of Haitians have little or no electricity, ruling out that energy source for heating their beans or boiling their rice. Three-fourths of Haitians live on less than $2 a day, so they can't afford gas or kerosene, which often costs four times the price of charcoal.

"Gas? Sure, I'd love to cook with it. But who can afford it?" asked Christine Jean, a mother of six, as she bought a small bag of charcoal for 25 gourdes (62 cents), one-fourth of her daily earnings, at the March� Salomon in the capital, Port-au-Prince.

Business is always brisk at March� Salomon, a warren of alleys packed with buckets and mounds of charcoal where everything, from the walls to the footpaths to the already black faces of vendors, is coated in soot.

With nearly three-fourths of the workforce lacking steady jobs, Haiti's mountains are filled with farmers chopping trees, or tending smoldering mounds of wood that they're slowly burning into charcoal.

Above Gona�ves, some farmers who continue those practices lost relatives in the flood.

Farues Lomilis, 43, a father of 10 from the hamlet of Menguelte, watched the waters devour his 11-year-old son, Cholo. The flood also killed his two cows, six goats and three pigs, and destroyed his house, rice crop and banana trees.

But on a recent day, Lomilis stood barefoot with a friend in a clearing in Passe Reine, about an hour's drive northeast of Gona�ves, hacking at a 60-foot tree with an axe. Asked if he knew that cutting trees contributed to the killer flood, Lomilis shook his head so vigorously it appeared he was trying to chase away the thought.

"If I don't cut the trees, we don't eat," he said finally. Then he picked up his axe and resumed hacking.

Like more than half of Haitians, Lomilis can't read or write, and the only work he knows is farming. He estimated he and his friend will earn 2,500 Haitian gourdes (about $62) for the tree, which he'll use to supplement the corn, beans and rice he grows on a tiny plot.

Every year, Lomilis said, yields on his land are scarcer. In a vicious cycle across Haiti, topsoil erosion caused by deforestation has washed most of the nutrients from farmland, making peasants even more dependent on the cash crop of tree-cutting.

About 36 million metric tons of Haiti's topsoil is flushed away each year, one of the highest rates in the world, according to the United Nations Development Program. Most of it lands as sediment in rivers and canals, causing them to overflow, and in the ocean, where it kills coral reefs and seafood, threatening what little remains of Haiti's tourism and fishing industries.

Deforestation dates to colonial times, when the French cleared forests to create sugar plantations and sold the country's mahogany for export. Since then, a succession of governments, pressured by powerful charcoal and lumber interests, has lacked the will or the resources to bring the forests back.

"The environment is totally forgotten by most decision-makers in Haiti, and even the international community is in a state of denial about the severity of the problem," said Lyes Ferroukhi, who coordinates environmental programs in Haiti for the UN Development Program.

Haiti's Environment Ministry, a shabby building in Port-au-Prince, is stuffed with proposals to solve the deforestation crisis. Possible solutions include converting to solar and wind energy and using sugarcane pulp to run thousands of charcoal-fired bakeries, dry cleaners and mills that make clairin, Haiti's popular moonshine.

"We'd love to invest in renewable energy," said Serge Pierre-Louis, chief aide to the environment minister, with a weary smile. "But where is the money?" The poorest nation in the hemisphere, Haiti received pledges of $1.3 billion in foreign aid for a two-year transition period when President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted in an armed uprising in February 2004. Less than 2 percent of that was earmarked for the environment.

Further compounding the problem, the Environment Ministry has almost no authority, the few environmental laws on the books are outdated, and the country lacks inspectors to enforce them.

Gona�ves remains in a state of crisis from the 2004 flood.

Children crowd classrooms missing walls. Scores of businesses remain closed. Low-lying neighborhoods are still flooded with mud or filled with mounds of garbage dumped here by the waters.

Survivors who returned to flood-prone areas because they had no place else to go are bracing for a repeat of the disaster.

They include Fertilice, who moved back into her two-room shack after scrubbing out the mud, using rags created when the flood tore curtains from windows, sheets from beds and clothes from people's backs.

But she had neither savings nor insurance money to rebuild her business - a tiny depot of salt that dissolved in the flood. With no income, she relies on relatives for cornmeal, rice and a bit of fish.

Fertilice cooks that food out back, not far from where she buried the bodies of her daughter and three grandchildren.

She uses a charcoal grill. "What choice do I have?" she asked.