'Black gold' fuels loss of lush woods

By Tim Collie
South Florida Sun-Sentinel

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BOMBARDOPOLIS, Haiti — The men in this town hunt their trees in packs.

Fanning out in groups of four or five with axes, picks and crowbars, they may bring down a mango tree, a vital fruit producer, or a gayoc, an extremely rare hardwood tree once prized for the medicinal quality of its resin.

When a tree cannot be found, men turn on the stumps of timber long gone and dig the wood out of the ground.

They then dig a pit and set the wood — trees or stumps — ablaze. The burning pile is covered with mud, grass and leaves in a mound. Joining white tendrils of smoke from other mounds, the resulting haze wafts over denuded mountainsides that look like scar tissue on the once-verdant landscape.

A week passes, and the men known as charbonniers dig up the "black gold" — charcoal — the product that fuels this poor nation's cities while devouring what's left of its countryside.

Sold by charbonniers to urban residents — for use in home cooking, bakeries and dry cleaners — charcoal accounts for 85 percent of Haiti's energy consumption.

Electricity has never penetrated the rural interior, where half the country's 8 million people live. Oil prices have soared the past two years, making the dwindling forests the only fuel option.

But with every downed tree, Haiti's natural legacy is going up in smoke.

"We're not fools; we know that this is destroying the land, but charcoal is what keeps us alive," said Liberus Mesadieu, 34, a farmer. "This area used to be dense with trees, but we uprooted them all for the wood."

The practice is not only destroying once-lush forests. The dearth of wood for homes has led to mining of rock and sand from mountains to make cement, which worsens erosion problems.

In Port-au-Prince, at least 7,900 acres have been mined to build small homes in the expanding slums, according to the United Nations.

The economics of charcoal production are so favorable that even when conventional crop harvests are good, they pale in comparison with the money a farmer can make burning trees.

To raise lima beans during a single harvest on three acres, Mesadieu must work with three other farmers and buy the seed for the equivalent of about $15. A good harvest yields 60 pounds of beans, earning $28. The profit: $13, or $3.25 for each partner. But in a single week, one charcoal pit yields at least three bags, earning $11 in total.

The impact on local economies is similar to that of coca in Colombia, where food crops are forsaken for the environmentally damaging practices that provide the key ingredient in cocaine.

The United States, other governments and international charities have sponsored reforestation projects in Haiti for decades. But the multimillion-dollar efforts are overwhelmed by Haiti's political instability and staggering poverty.

Environmental experts date the charcoal boom to the early 1960s, when world coffee prices fell so low that Haiti could no longer compete in the coffee market.

The country was in the early years of the Duvalier dictatorship, which ruled brutally for three decades. Haitian farmers began ripping up their coffee plants to replace them with crops that would fetch a better price.

In the village of Figuiers, Fabius Augustin, 79, recalls the day an entrepreneur named Thomas showed up to tell farmers about the charcoal industry in the 1960s. Thomas taught them how to make charcoal and set up a system of middlemen to bring the product to markets six hours away.

"Everybody here overnight went crazy," said Augustin, a minister regarded as a village elder. "They began chopping down trees everywhere, and nobody paid much attention to planting new ones. There was shade all over here. It was a dark, thick jungle. But look at it now: It's a desert."

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