NEWS ANALYSIS : Drought, Embargo Cast Deadly Shadow on Haiti : Caribbean: Forces of nature and politics are breaking the economy and starving the people.

The dark faces of nature and politics shadow this heart of Haitian misery, a combination of horrors that is killing the land, the people’s hope and, slowly, the children.

“There are two embargoes here,” says Edinel Jean Baptiste, this disintegrating town’s school administrator. “One by the Americans and one by God.”

And so it seems. There is so much misery, so much starvation, so much hopelessness that it appears some force has picked out the peasants of northwestern Haiti for the most terrible retribution, as if they had committed an unforgivable sin.

In reality, the 1 million peasants in the area are the victims of a pitiless drought now entering its sixth year and a hard-nosed decision by the United States and other countries to destroy Haiti’s economy to achieve a political end.

Perhaps that goal--the restoration of Haiti’s first democratically elected president and the end to military rule--can be achieved. But for now, and for the future, the result is a vicious, downward spiral into a hell of ecological putrefaction and death, experts say.

Immaculate Moresett is the nurse here, the only health care professional for the 17,000 people living in the Bombardopolis area.

Her 10 years in the town have all been hard, even desperate. But in the early days, a doctor came every few months and the Baptist mission that operates the clinic sent enough medicine to prevent an epidemic of illness and death.

Now, however, no doctor has been here for two years and all shipments of drugs and other equipment stopped last October when the Organization of American States ordered an economic boycott of Haiti to punish the military and its civilian allies for the violent Sept. 30 overthrow of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

That decision--which has virtually stopped all normal economic activity, severely limited petroleum supplies, curtailed transportation and brought unemployment to perhaps 90%--broke the back of what was already the hemisphere’s worst economy.

“People here were just barely holding on before,” said Marie-France Racette, administrator of the only large-scale relief program in the northwest, an operation run by the American group CARE.

“There was and there is a drought,” she said in an interview in her barely furnished office in the city of Gonaives. “But the embargo has pushed things five years into the future. . . . “Now if the situation continues, yes, maybe in seven or eight months, we are going to have another Ethiopia on our hands.”

The Children Suffer

In the Bombardopolis clinic, in the neighboring farms, in the villages that dot the nearby desert created by years of drought and land abuse, the images of Ethiopia--with its dying young--already are reality.

Here, there are youngsters suffering from third-degree malnutrition. They lie listlessly, unable to walk. Their eyes are glazed, their bellies swollen, their arms and legs are shriveled. “Forty-five percent of the children in the northwest under the age of 5 are in third-degree malnutrition,” Racette said, “and most of the other children suffer from second-degree (malnutrition). It is a catastrophe.”

It is a disaster that brings reports of four or five area children dying weekly of starvation; even more fall to curable diseases--measles, diarrhea, parasites.

“Malnutrition destroys the body’s resistance to these other things,” said Douglas A. Clark, a CARE food program administrator who also is a registered public health nurse. “These people now can be saved only by hospitalization, but there are very few hospitals here and the people have no money to pay for health care.”

Even before nurse Moresett opens the clinic at 9 a.m. in Bombardopolis, dozens of people have lined up for treatment. Most are children who sit patiently. They do not display the restlessness or playfulness typical of youngsters their age. Instead, they wait for whatever is to happen, watching the world through lifeless eyes, clinging to the parents and elders who bring them.

Mesila Renus has walked six hours from her home, carrying her 7-month-old baby, who has run a fever for nearly a week.

As she answers questions, an odd buzzing sound--a rasp--is audible. It comes from a nearby boy, age 6 or so. As he huddles next to his mother, his chest heaves as he tries to breathe. He has been like this for six days, she says. She hopes the nurse can help her boy.

But she can’t. There is no money for health care or nearly anything else--not for medicine, clothes or food. Moresett says she has no penicillin and only two boxes of other antibiotics. The syringes are all used up.

While the hemispheric embargo of Haiti is supposed to exempt food and humanitarian supplies, medicine doesn’t always get here because there is no transportation.

A mother waiting to see the nurse is asked what she knows about the embargo. “I don’t know what it means,” she answered. “I hear people talk about it. I know it means starvation.”

Exploited Land

Haiti’s desperation can be traced to a relatively modern era, when first Spanish, then white French conquerors began the agricultural exploitation of the land that once was covered with trees. The plantation owners stripped the natural vegetation to plant rice, cotton and other exportable crops.

As the trees disappeared and the land was depleted by exhaustion and erosion, more trees were cut. As the population grew, more land was needed for food and more trees were cut. Today, less than 4% of Haiti’s land is arable; there are almost no forests.

To this situation, add the embargo, which has drastically reduced supplies of fuel oil, electricity and water. Then, factor in the crop-killing drought. Even if beans and corn can be grown, they now can’t be moved or sold. There also is no money to buy seeds.

What is left? Charcoal. This means even more destruction of trees. With almost no other way to support themselves, Haiti’s peasants are cutting whatever trees and other woody plants they can find to make charcoal.

But workers in Bombardopolis say they must walk three or four days to find even stumps, and then they must wait six days by the dirt-covered pits they use to convert the wood into charcoal. They turn around and walk home for three or four more days, carrying two or three 50-pound sacks of charcoal.

For all their labors, they will be paid $3 or $4 per bag. That will be the sole support for their families, which, on average, include seven or eight members, CARE says. But because there are so many poor people scratching to make a living off charcoal, it is in oversupply and its price is dropping.

Misery in this region is no abstract concept. It is evident in the drive from Gonaives to Bombardopolis, four hours of spine-wrenching lurching across a land that seems to produce only tire-shredding boulders and skin-piercing cactus.

This is a man-made desert in a tropical land, where there should be six or seven months a year of drenching rain, flowering and bountiful fruit and mahogany trees.

Meteorologists say the desert is a product of natural droughts, exacerbated by residents cutting down the trees. And as bad as this land is, the desert is getting more arid. Once-flourishing fishing villages nearby also are slowly being abandoned because the runoff from the poisoned land has killed the fish.

Relieving the Hunger

In the Bombardopolis area and throughout the northwest, the only hope is CARE’s emergency food program. It feeds 5,000 people in 400 CARE canteens in Bombardopolis. Twice a day, six days a week, children, mothers and the old receive 1,500-calorie meals, mostly rice, beans, peas and canned herring.

The newest canteen is called La Croix. Opened four days ago, it feeds about 150 people a day. As at the clinic, the needy arrive early. They clutch tin plates, old cans and battered plastic buckets. As their meal simmers under banana tree leaves, the children stare. Most have the hallmarks of second-degree malnutrition--swollen bellies and knees, orangish hair, stick-like legs, filmy eyes and ghostly skin.

Even in the midst of the hopelessness, the summer rains should offer some respite. There were downpours last Saturday, again on Wednesday and Thursday.

But the rain brought no hope for Decilin Delin, a widow standing in the bean field her husband planted before he died in April. “It will make the beans start to grow, but the rain will stop and the beans will die,” she said.