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The life
systems of the planet are in crisis. The climate
is warming. Oceans are rising. Deserts are
spreading. Wars for dwindling supplies of oil
and water are flaring. Some 90% of the ocean’s
large fish – tuna, sharks, swordfish and cod --
have disappeared in the past 50 years. According
to some expert estimates, about 10,000 species
of plants and animals are becoming extinct every
year – an average of 27 a day.
In Haiti alone,
biodiversity is under huge assault as we are
rapidly losing many species of frogs, bees,
fish, flowers, and trees every year.
For example, of the 50
frog species on our island, two-thirds -- 30
species -- live only in Haiti and do not occur
in the neighboring Dominican Republic, according
to Dr. Blair Hedges, a biology professor at Penn
State University and a leader of “species rescue
missions” in Haiti and other Caribbean countries.
“Haiti is on the brink of
an era of mass extinctions similar to the time
when dinosaurs and many other species suddenly
disappeared from the Earth,” wrote Barbara
Kennedy on Penn State’s science website in 2010
about Dr. Hedges’ work.
This week, in the midst
of this bleak tableau, comes Earth Day, which
has been observed worldwide since April 22,
1970.
“Happy #EarthDay!”
tweeted the US Embassy in Haiti, in both English
and Kreyòl, on Apr. 22. “ Today we're
celebrating greener cities & cleaner energy.”
The irony of this Tweet,
which treats the day as a celebration rather
than an alarm, could not be greater. This same
embassy, hand in hand with the Martelly regime,
is championing investment priorities and
policies which devastate Haiti’s natural
environment, and promise to devastate it even
more, all while wrapping themselves in the words
and images of being “green” and
“pro-environment.”
If ever there was an
example of how capitalism has savaged the
natural environment, it is Haiti. When
Christopher Columbus landed on our island in
1492, he saw mountains covered with beautiful
forests of pine, oak, and mahogany, that
reminded him of verdant Spain, and hence he
renamed the island Hispaniola in honor of Queen
Isabella and King Ferdinand, the Spanish
sponsors of his voyage.
However, the European
colonists immediately began to rape this
paradise. After killing through massacres,
disease, and slave labor in gold mines the
Arawak population of over three million in a
mere 15 years, the Europeans, particularly the
French, began to clear-cut the forests to fuel
the first great capitalist enterprise on the
island: sugar mills.
Two centuries later,
capitalism continues to stoke this deforestation
by punishing the descendants of the slaves who
worked in the sugar mills. Haiti’s peasantry has
been pushed off the land by capitalist-imposed
neoliberal policies – agricultural dumping and
lowering of tariff walls – and forced to flee to
the cities. The ruling groups provide no
infrastructure for this influx – housing, water
systems, sanitation systems, roads – not even
electricity or gas. So the millions of uprooted
peasants who have fled to Haiti’s cities over
the past 40 years must rely on charbon,
which requires twice as much wood per energy
unit output as fresh wood used in the
countryside.
The deforestation
caused by this IMF-dictated urbanization, which
is also killing our frogs, is then blamed on the
peasants. About 98% of the forests Columbus saw
are now gone.
And what is the
Martelly regime doing? Accelerating this rape of
the land. On the southern island of Ile à Vache,
for example, the government unilaterally cut
down the island’s one forest, which used to
provide the population with livelihoods
harvesting crabs and honey, to put in an
airport. They are now going to uproot peasants
from food producing land in order to put in
hotels, golf courses, and casinos, all without
the population’s input or participation.
In Haiti’s North, we see
a similar crime with the Caracol Industrial
Park, for which authorities bulldozed some of
Haiti’s most fertile farmland, destroyed a
virgin mangrove forest, and destroyed precious
coral reefs. A 2009 study for the Organization
of American States and the Inter-American
Biodiversity Information Network (IABIN) put
the “value of ecosystem services” of the
mangroves and coral reefs in Caracol bay at US$
109 million per year.
Now the Caracol Park,
which pays its workers pennies an hour, is sure
to spawn another Cité Soleil, complete with
canals of open sewage, mountains of smoking
garbage, and dirty oil and smoke from nearby
power plants fouling the slum next door.
Finally, there is
gold-mining, which both President Martelly and
Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe are
enthusiastically encouraging (and investing
in?), despite the Senate’s attempts to block
their moves. The Spanish removed most of the big
veins of gold five centuries ago. What remains
is mostly gold dust, whose extraction requires
an extremely destructive and toxic process.
Mountain-tops, already denuded of trees, are
removed and millions of tons of rocks are
“washed” with the deadly agent cyanide, which
then poisons streams and groundwater, rendering
agriculture and even life nearby unviable.
As we have detailed
in past issues of Haïti Liberté,
multinational companies like Newmont Mining,
after causing massive ecological damage in
countries like Peru and Ghana, have been
practically chased out of those nations and are
now alighting in Haiti. With gold prices at
about $1,600 an ounce, they estimate that Haiti
has some $20 billion in gold dust in its
mountains. They pretend, as they did elsewhere,
that they will generate revenue and jobs for
Haiti. But in reality, after taking out the
precious minerals, they will leave the land
defiled and polluted, and the population just as
poor but now unable even to practice agriculture
due to the poisons they have left behind. Only a
handful of local cronies, like Martelly and
Lamothe, will get a cut of the riches extracted.
So on this Earth Day,
let us remember that we, the Haitian people, are
not just fighting against exploitation,
oppression, and injustice and for
self-determination, equality, and human dignity.
We are fighting for the survival of the human
species on this planet, starting in Haiti.
“The economic order
imposed on the world after World War II has led
humanity to an unsustainable situation,”
declared Fidel Castro in a Sep. 21, 2009 speech
entitled “Humanity is an Endangered Species.”
Humanity is facing “a really imminent danger and
its effects are already visible.” Fidel gives us
a mere 60 to 80 years to avoid mass extinction.
So
don’t be fooled by the happy face the U.S.
Embassy and the Martelly regime are putting on
Haiti’s environmental destruction. Let us all
join in the struggle against the agents of
unbridled and destructive capitalism in Haiti
today – principally Martelly and MINUSTAH – to
build a new sustainable future, where our
children will have unpoisoned land, water, and
air in this little corner of the world which our
ancestors bequeathed to us. |
