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Haiti Reforestation - Mauby

As part of the Reforestation Programme that UCT seeks to establish Nurseries that will nurture Mulberry tree, Mauby Tree and Fruit Tress that will be planted as part of the Ecological Re-forestation.

There are various reasons for the deforestation of Haiti:

• The need for fuel.
• The need to earn a living.
• Ignorance.
• Lack of motivation to reform.
• Haiti has no fuel except wood. People cook with charcoal. This requires massive amounts of wood to provide fuel for 6 million people. Thus the demand on wood as a crop is the immediate cause of the denuding of the mountains of Haiti.
• The immediate motivation of much of the cutting is economic. Peasants are hungry. They have little available work. But wood is in constant demand as charcoal, or to sell to others to make charcoal. Peasant wood-cutters who do understand the soil erosion problem will argue that they have no alternative. They either cut and sell wood or they starve. Mainly they are right. Haiti suffers massive unemployment and most peasants have inadequate access to farm lands.
• Because of the problems of illiteracy and lack of education detailed above, Haitian wood cutters do not really understand the extent of damage their cutting does. These uneducated peasants have little sense of history. In their generation Haiti has always looked denuded like it does today. Thus to convince them that they are contributing to Haiti's misery by cutting the few trees which any one of them cuts, is not a very convincing argument. When compared with the alternatives of hunger or even starvation facing the wood sellers, the argument fundamentally makes no sense.
• There is little motivation for wood cutters to replant more trees. Mainly they do not own the land. They cut here or there as sharecroppers or renters, then move on to other lands. The land owners are often city people or more wealthy village folks and they do not keep a close watch on their lands. Were they to replant, it is likely that the neighbors' animals would eat the seedling trees since there is little forage left in Haiti. The land tenure system--the way land is owned and used in Haiti--provides little motivation to anyone to replant the trees. Of course, it is in the interest of the nation as a whole to replant trees. But, no individuals who own, share-crop or rent lands are personally motivated to do this costly and troublesome, and non-economic work.