Sorry Harvest of Hunger in Haiti’s Blighted Northwest

It will be a sorry harvest in Haiti’s barren northwest. Patches of pea, bean and sorghum plants are as skeletal and weak as the starving children of the poor.

Blighted by drought and deforestation, squeezed by a U.S.-backed trade embargo, the area is turning more than ever to foreign charity. Aid officials say they have doubled the number of people fed in the northwest to 274,000, about one-third of its population, since the embargo began last fall.

Not everyone is hungry. Markets have food, and some apparently well-fed people can be seen in the streets of Bombardopolis at the tip of the island’s northwest peninsula.

In a trip through the area, however, a reporter and photographer who visited feeding stations saw hundreds of children with the bloated stomachs and orange-tinted hair of severe malnutrition.

People started dying at the end of March, Marie France Racette of the aid organization CARE said in Gonaives, trading hub of the northwest.

“The children will go first because they cannot fend for themselves,” she said. Then, raising her hands 3 feet apart: “Every time I travel, I see coffins that size.”

Racette blamed the food crisis on “a combination of things” including three years of drought, but said the embargo “precipitated the situation.”

The Organization of American States ordered trade cut off after the army overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The embargo hurt peasants by driving up prices for basic goods, including seed and fuel.

“People lost the ability to take food to market with increased travel costs,” said Gregory K. Brady, farm project coordinator for CARE.

Farmers have taken desperate measures, first selling their livestock, and finally, cutting down precious trees to make charcoal.

“We have no choice,” Aniel Valmont, 32, said as he and other peasants loaded a 5-foot-high pile of charcoal into large sacks for sale. “If we don’t, we will die.”

Because the embargo has created a propane shortage, charcoal is the only cooking fuel for many Haitians.

Deforestation has been one of Haiti’s worst problems. Over decades, the tropical hills have been denuded for charcoal. The northwest, once lush with forests, has become a desert.

Reforestation efforts by foreign relief agencies are on hold because the OAS allows only essential humanitarian aid.

Valmont said he used to grow sweet potatoes and beans, but finally gave up his battle with the dry, overworked soil.

On the rocky hillsides, stunted, worm-riddled corn was only knee-high. Beans and other crops were dry and yellowed.

Even when food is available, Brady said, most people have neither money to buy nor anything to trade for it.