The majority of Haitians could not keep up the pace and fled to the cities.

UN Agenda21: Port-au-Prince, as the fastest growing town in the country, faces the toughest ecological and population problems. The population density for Port-au-Prince is more than three times the national average, with two million people crowded in the metropolitan area. The largest towns are subjects of studies on solid waste, dumping sites and for cemetery relocations and population explosion.

Haiti's cities and hamlets face not only sanitation problems but impacted medical problems as well.

Partners In Health:With only one physician for every 20,000 citizens, the country suffers from staggering indices of illness and death. Average life expectancy at birth is under 50 years, a figure that has plunged by seven percent over the past three years. Almost five percent of the population is HIV-positive, the highest rate in the Western Hemisphere. Poor health outcomes are especially pronounced in the rural interior of Haiti, likely the most impoverished area in the Western hemisphere. And yet, almost all of the health problems that afflict its residents are entirely preventable or treatable. (emphasis mine-JRM)

I suppose part of this has to do with other, imponderable, factors that affect well-being: Assam may be "poorer" than Haiti, but it is not remotely as poor in terms of environmental degradation. And even the PPP measure of income for Assam does not do justice: commercial labor force participation rates in that country are no doubt far lower than in Haiti. In Haiti, $1,400 per year really is what a typical person has to live on; this, in a settlement where somebody has to be paid to haul human waste out of the settlement, somebody else paid to truck in semi-potable water, or most comestibles must be bought in the market. Only a minority of Assamese need to do that. A more compelling comparison, obviously, is with the Dominican Republic, which shares the sland of Hispaniola with Haiti: with real incomes nearly 4.5 times that of Haiti, social welfare programs in the country are infinitely superior (Caveat: the entry for DR is extremely old), although it surely will be noted that the DR has an agrarian economy and 1.45 times the arable land per capita.

Another country facing similar problems is another Black francophonic nation, Madagascar. While the latter is more politically stable than Haiti, it is significantly poorer. Madagascar became a French colony in 1896, 92 years after Haiti won its independence. Curiously, about the same time Haiti was falling under foreign domination (in the form of venture capitalists and railroad speculators), Madagascar was becoming entangled in French colonial ambitions. As Haiti's population was falling under peonage to the coastal merchants, the French administration of Madagascar introduced taxes, which then required the Malagasy to work for wages (which the latter regarded as akin to slavery, and rebelled against often). Despite the tiny size of Haiti, there were many gradations of ethnicity/confessionalism between the highland Maroons (adherents of Voudon) and the urban populations in cities like St. Marc and Cap Haitien. The urban leaders would seek to impose a regimented order and the plantation system in order to supply sugar on world markets; those within reach of the plantations would flee into the highlands, slash and burn plots in the mountains, and hope to avoid conflicts with the Maroons. In the early 20th century, escape was far harder and the hinterlands had filled up.

As in Haiti, the main crop for personal consumption was rice; when the cash economy penetrated the northern highlands, the birthrate tended to rise sharply because farmers had to find seasonal work on the plantations in order to have cash, and a large family was necessary for social security. Madagascar's population began to increase sharply in the 1930's and '40's; today, while Madagascar is actually larger than France, the population per hectacre of arable land—about 2.13—is just about a quarter that of Haiti (by comparison, it is 1.62 in the USA; needless to say, agriculture in the USA is several times as productive per capita).

Both Haiti and Madagascar have both suffered such extreme environmental degradation that they now import the main food staple, rice (under terms of trade I would not care to imagine!). Before beginning this post, I had conceived the hope that Madagascar's experience with deforestation would point the way to some hopeful prospects; alas, my research suggests that there are very few, if any encouraging cases in deforestation. The obvious example of an affluent, post-arboreal society is, of course, Europe and swathes of the USA, where industrial use of charcoal as an energy source gave way to fossil fuels. This digression suggests that while the proximate cause of misery in Haiti is foreign meddling in its politics, the 2nd order source seems to be the destruction of arable lands by deforestation. And the 3rd order source seems to be the total lack of leverage the environmental community has on politics.

NOTES: 1 "4th World" is a play on Nehru's phrase "3rd World." Originally intended to mean ex-colonies that rejected affiliation in the Cold War, "3rd World" now refers to any country which is poor. "4th World" means any country which is so poor its pretensions of sovereignty are a joke. The terms "proletariat" refer to a category of people who are economically powerless; a rural proletariat has no land, no capital, and no other property the state is bound to respect; he can work for wages, but accumulation is virtually impossible. Even property not associated with production—a house, a car, a bicycle or a shopping cart—is not his. When such a person moves to the city, he becomes a drifter who can move between crime, vagabondage, and legitimate paid labor. This latter is known as a lumpenproletariat.

Per capita GDP: gross domestic product. India has wide variance in provinces, with Bihar (the poorest large state) weighing in at 20% of Punjab (the richest; I believe for Punjap the PPP per capita GDP is $4800 or so in 2003—roughly comparable to the Philippines). PPP stands for "purchasing power parities," a statistic comparing the relative purchasing power of two currencies. The Eurozone is a rare case of a region where PPP for different counties using the same currency is known; there, the variation is substantial also.

SOURCE MATERIAL: Haiti Action (thanks to Prometheus 6); Haiti Reborn (radical pro-Aristide movement); Haiti Progress (English; subscription required); Partners in Health Haiti page. This site shows satellite images of the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Observe the desertification present on the border (NASA). See also this site with travel photos from Haiti (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6). For information on deforestation around the world I am indebted to Prof. Tom Tietenberg of Colby College, Maine. His page on Sustainable Development Case Studies is a rare case of a bountiful resource that will not be depleted by frequent use. An even bigger one is the American University's Trade and Environmental Database (TED); however, both lack information about Haiti. Also included are some links regular readers might find surprising: the IMF, exponent of the "Washington Consensus"; US Aid, a department which traditionally was independent of State (but which has since become subordinate to US strategic policy); and the US State Department, which I allege to have orchestrated Aristide's downfall. In recent weeks I've had harsh things to say about their policies toward Haiti, and yet the people who work for these bureaux on the ground are the most rigorus source of information we have. "Haiti: Staff-Monitored Program" (PDF) for the International Monetary Fund (IMF); "Through the Eye of a Needle: an Africa Debt Report" (PDF), Jubilee 2000 US Aid page on Haiti; esp. "Haitian Urban Sanitation Project" (PDF), by Lonna Shafritz, and Peter Gottert, 1996. With (dis)respect to the main page at US Aid, notice the rhetorical methods used to conceal the way they've tightened the screws on Haiti: $850 million in bilateral aid between 1995-2003 (averaging $106.3 million annually), $71 million in 2003, $52 million in 2004 "for programs including health, democracy and governance, education, and economic growth." Economic growth involves pressures to abide by the "Washington Consensus", not FDI; "democracy and governance" includes activities of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The NED does not mention Haiti in its list of grants, but the aptly-named International Republican Institute (IRI) does; it mentions that US Aid funds its opaque program to "build transparent institutions in Haiti." Well, thanks, US Aid: Americans like me do indeed benefit from the research, but the IRI-managed component of that $51 million appeared to have cost the Haitian treasury $300 million!