"Chache lavi, detwi lavi" say the Haitians in their Creole dialect: "Searching for life, destroys the essence of life" (Maternowska n.p.). This is the terrible irony of life in Haiti, where cash-crop agricultural production has led to rampant deforestation, which, in turn, has ruined the agricultural possibilities for the poor, who, in desperation, cut down more trees to make charcoal as a cash crop. And so on: deforestation in Haiti has created a cycle of ecological-economic destruction.
Political and economic power are often linked, but in Haiti the two have been almost indistinguishable - to the detriment of the environment and the majority of the population (Wallich 36). Due to the ravages of a political-economic elite visited upon the land, deforestation in the past half century has denuded Haiti's once-dense forests to the point that they now cover only two percent of the land (Garelik 61). With two-thirds of the farmlands sloping more than twenty degrees, and a population density of over 270 per square kilometer, erosion is severe. Water shortages are pandemic on the island. Arable land has declined by two-fifths since 1950 and per capita grain production has been halved (Maternowska n.p.). Repression and gross maldistribution of the land have been the major caused for this rapid decline in the ecological health of the Haitian nation.
More than 1.3 million Haitians - or one-in-five of the populace - have left their homelands (Maternowska n.p.). The American media prints only the saga of the boat refugees, some 180,000 of whom have attempted to cross the treacherous Caribbean in unsafe water craft for haven in the United States. The real story of dislocation caused by deforestation and its ecological-economic holocaust is even more desperate: the majority of refugees from the farmlands simply flee to the overcrowded, water-short city slums of Haiti, where unemployment is high, reaching seventy percent in 1993...