Hurricane destroys dream to reforest Haiti
Winds of up to 225 km/h wiped out 70 per cent of one man’s stately forest
BASSE GUINAUDEE, HAITI— For nearly three decades, Ericq Pierre lovingly grew majestic mahogany and cedar trees, creating a lush canopy in his childhood hamlet, the place where his parents eked out a living from the earth.
But then hurricane Matthew tore through the rare patch of green in this heavily deforested nation, wiping out as much as 70 per cent of Pierre’s forest with 225-km/h winds.
“This is destruction, pure destruction,” an emotional Pierre, 71, said standing atop a rocky cliff, surveying the desiccated limbs and exposed roots littering the ground. “When you have 25-year-old mahogany trees, it is not something that can be built back in a year.”
The now-toppled trees were supposed to help Pierre, a retired agriculture specialist at the Inter-American Development Bank, fulfil a vision to give back to his homeland. The part-time Aventura, Fla., resident and respected Haitian technocrat began nursing plants in Saincrit, located between the villages of Sassier and Duranton on the outskirts of Jérémie, as his way of saving Haiti.
Now, he joins the tens of thousands of farmers, homeowners, investors and other dreamers who fell victim to Matthew’s wrath. In this remote southwestern corner of Haiti, no one was spared.
Gone are the agricultural fields that provided a livelihood for small farmers in the still-inaccessible remote inlands.
Gone, too, is the terracotta-red covering of the centuries-old Cathedrale St-Louis Roi de France in Jérémie, the capital of the Grand’ Anse region, where many of the properties are held by members of the Haitian diaspora like Pierre.
“Can you imagine one day visiting Central Park and there are no trees? Can you imagine the disappearance of the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C.?” asked Simon Desras, Haiti’s current environment minister. “This storm has not only sped up deforestation, it has set us back significantly.”
In poverty-stricken Haiti, where land is everything, the people of the Grand’ Anse lived off their trees. Even as deforestation encroached with charcoal barons tapping the surrounding mountains for fuel and revenue, this isolated region remained a rare reservoir of lush vegetation and rich forests.
“I loved the trees. My daughters will tell you, ‘Dad is always with his trees,’ ” said Pierre, the father of four girls. “Now I don’t know what I’ll do.”
While Jérémie is often cited as the city of poets by intellectuals, the Grand’ Anse Department is le grenier — the breadbasket — of a starving nation. The region produces corn, coffee, cocoa and breadfruit. It also is where farmers harvest trees for food, trade and timber using treeand crop-planting techniques.
The techniques had helped create 17-per-cent tree cover in Haiti, with almost half of it in Grand’ Anse, said environmentalist Jean Vilmond Hilaire, who recently carried out a study on the storm’s ecological impact on behalf of the Haiti Audubon Society.
The storm, he said, destroyed between 8 and10 per cent of the trees in Grand’ Anse.
Pierre, a trained agronomist, knows all too well about Haiti’s losing battle with deforestation. He also believes the recent hurricanes are linked to climate change and will likely become more frequent. Fewer trees mean more erosion and landslides.
The Grand’ Anse needs a development plan, he said. “This is a department with a lot of potential. Agriculture can flourish again.”
Pierre’s forest sits on six hectares that his father, Benoît Pierre, worked as a farmer, transforming sugar cane to alcohol.
“He used it for the education of his kids,” Pierre, one of seven children, said proudly. “The trees were everything.” Mother Nature has taken more from Pierre than his trees in recent years. His sister, Madeleine Pierre, was killed in Haiti’s catastrophic 2010 earthquake when her home in the capital city of Port-au-Prince collapsed, killing her and her 25-yearold son.
Pierre planted his first tree, a mahogany, on May 2, 1989, a year after his father died. Over the years, he planted 2,699 more, along with 1,000 cedars, all without using an ounce of fertilizer.
He did so not for the timber, which can fetch as much as $912 for one mahogany tree, but to keep the land in the family and to show the world that Haiti can be green.
“These were precious trees,” he said. “I knew nobody was going to cut them for charcoal and they were long term.”
Stopping midway up the cliff, the sound of dry leaves being crushed under his feet, he pointed out the spot where he was born and then the storm-damaged concrete house in the distance that he had helped his father build.
He wondered what to do next. “I will not complain. But at my age, I am not inspired to start planting again.”
Pierre spent 33 years at the InterAmerican Development Bank, eventually becoming a board member representing Haiti before retiring in 2013. One of Haiti’s most respected political personalities, he was nominated twice for prime minister, falling victim to politics both times. He is known as much for his proud Jérémie roots as his outspokenness on what ails Haiti and how to fix it.
“A lot of people are really thinking of returning, and are buying land to take their retirement here,” Pierre said about Jérémie’s diaspora in Miami and Boston. “This is a dream, to come back. But the problem of the Grand’ Anse is its isolation.”
Before Matthew, the region was struggling to catch up with the rest of Haiti, a country plagued by poverty, a depressed economy and vulnerability to natural disasters exacerbated by human-caused deforestation.
Its main city of Jérémie generally had only six hours of electricity a day. Still, proud Jérémiens like Pierre and François Chavenet, a former president of the chamber of the commerce, believed — and invested.
There was a plan to rehabilitate the city’s French-colonial wood-frame homes with their balconies and arched verandas, and the19th-century coffee warehouses.
“With the aftermath of Matthew, everything is back in the drawers,” Chavenet said. “Now, with the impact of Matthew on the whole environment . . . everything (we were planning) is like science fiction.”