A Dying Land Struggles for Redemption

JEAN-RABEL, Haiti — In an eerie silence, heavy with heat and dust, the goats and chickens are dying.

Weak whimpers come from a naked baby girl. To comfort her, Micheline Melidor pats her stomach, cruelly bloated to a semblance of fat by hunger.

There's nothing to eat here today. Two days ago, the Melidor family finished chewing the last gristle and bones from a scraggly goat that had died of hunger.

It's the "seshres," the dryness, says the patriarch of the family, 60-year-old Seleusse Melidor. "No rain. No crops. No trees left to chop down for charcoal."

He points to the parched earth, bleached gray by lack of moisture. Amid the dried stalks of Palma Christi trees and shriveled peanut plants, the yellow flowers of a weed mock him.

But it's more than drought. This land is dying.

When Christopher Columbus saw the northwestern corner of Haiti in 1492, he declared the vista of verdant forests and mountains "maravilloso."

Nearly 500 years later, French ecologist Jacques-Yves Cousteau described the region as "beyond salvation."

Some areas are a surreal moonscape of denuded mountains ravaged by ravines. Others are exotic with 15-foot-tall cactus and yellow-bark thorn trees, all painted gray by dust.

"In 10 to 15 years it will be a complete desert if we don't take things in hand now," said Renaud Voltaire, a hydraulic engineer who is the Ministry of Environment's officer in charge of northwestern Haiti.

What happened to this area of Haiti, so remote that some villages can be reached only by foot or donkey?

It's a real-life horror story about how humans can destroy their environment. As if to distance themselves from the nightmare, Creole-speaking Haitians call the area, in English, "The Far West."

Most Haitians are descendants of African slaves brought here in the late 1600s by French colonizers who destroyed tens of thousands of acres of virgin forest to plant the cane that made Haiti the world's largest sugar producer. More wood was cut to fuel the sugar mills. Entire forests were shipped to Europe to make furniture of mahogany and dyes from campeachy.

When rebellious slaves defeated Napoleon's army and Haiti became the world's first black republic in 1804, great plantations were divided among the slaves turned peasant farmers.