The truth behind Haiti’s disappearing forests

When Haiti makes international headlines, it isn’t usually about its trees.

Last year, gang violence killed over 5,600 people in the Caribbean island nation. Over 1 million people – a tenth of its population – have now been displaced from their homes.

A UN expert has even warned that “Haiti’s survival is at stake” as gangs tighten their control over the capital, Port-au-Prince.

But while the international media has focused on the spiraling violence, another crisis has gripped the country for much of its existence: deforestation.

While disappearing forests may sound trivial compared with Haiti’s other challenges, it’s a far-reaching issue deeply rooted in the same colonial history that has led it into its current humanitarian crisis.

The roots of deforestation in Haiti

Haiti, a country occupying the western part of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, was once almost completely covered in forests.

According to Global Forest Watch, these forests currently cover just a third of the country’s land area, and over a third of its primary forests have been lost since 2002.

When there are fewer tree roots in the ground, the soil is less capable of retaining moisture. This looser soil is more easily eroded by wind and rain, which can trigger mudslides.

This is especially true in Haiti, a mountainous country where much of the soil sits on highly sloped ground.

As the topsoil erodes and dries up, it becomes less fertile, with less moisture and fewer nutrients available for crops.

As a result, more forests are cut down to make room for crops. The soil is depleted of nutrients and eventually becomes eroded, resulting in yet more deforestation for farming.

This vicious cycle has been devastating for a country where agriculture employs nearly half of the workforce and contributes almost a fifth of GDP.

A major source of deforestation in Haiti today is the harvesting of wood fuel and charcoal. This industry is a lifeline for many Haitians due to high unemployment and the scarcity of other sources of fuel.

The border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic is visible even from space – such is the extent of deforestation on the Haitian side, whereas the Dominican government has long banned charcoal harvesting and subsidized propane gas as a cooking fuel.

With less topsoil and trees to retain moisture, less water seeps into the ground to recharge groundwater aquifers. A 2016 study noted that rainfall recharges less groundwater in Haiti than it used to when the country had more forest cover.

This impending water shortage is compounded by a severe lack of water treatment plants in Haiti: only 58 percent of the population had access to safe drinking water as of 2020.

Slavery, freedom and debt

Hispaniola was traditionally home to the Taíno people, who called the island Ayiti – meaning ‘land of the high mountains.’

But that all changed when Spanish colonizers arrived in 1492. Within decades, most of the Taíno population had died out due to disease and enslavement, and the Spanish declared them extinct around 1565.

In the 17th century, the French began to settle the western part of the island, founding a colony they called Saint-Domingue. Since most of the Indigenous population had died out by then, they imported large numbers of enslaved Africans to work on monoculture plantations of sugar, coffee, indigo and cotton.

“The French government, in that time, treated Haiti as an extractivist colony, intending to extract as many resources as they could from it, and that obviously included deforestation,” says Caitlyn Eberle, a research manager at the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS).

The French razed large tracts of forests to make room for these plantations, as well as to supply the wood needed to cook and refine sugar. This system made the colony highly profitable, and Saint-Domingue came to be known as the ‘Pearl of the Antilles’ as it fed Europe’s coffee and sugar addiction.

Then, in 1789, the French Revolution struck. Inspired by the new notion that all men were created equal, the slaves of Saint-Domingue revolted and prevailed, achieving independence from France in 1804.

This made Haiti the world’s first country to free itself from slavery through an uprising – albeit at a price.

French warships returned in 1825 and forced Haiti to pay 150 million French francs in compensation. In other words, the Haitians had to pay their former masters to secure their freedom.

This debt was to be paid in five annual installations of 30 million francs each – an amount six times greater than the country’s entire income at the time.

Haiti was forced to borrow money from French bankers to make its payments. This entrapped the young country in a cycle of debt, poverty and foreign interference.

According to a New York Times investigation, debt and interest repayments ultimately amounted to 112 million francs, worth around USD 560 million as of 2022.

Without those repayments, Haiti could have been USD 115 billion richer today – more than six times its current GDP.

Instead, it was unable to build wealth and invest in its own development. This led to governance problems, political instability and economic stagnation.

By 1911, USD 2.53 out of every USD 3 collected in coffee taxes – its most important revenue source – was used to repay France.

Debt also became a direct driver of deforestation. Haiti drastically increased logging to generate the revenues it needed to make repayments, becoming one of the world’s leading exporters of mahogany.

Autocrats and occupiers

Like in many other countries, Haiti’s environmental woes cannot be separated from socioeconomic inequality and political upheaval.

Even after independence, Haiti retained some of the stark divisions that had been established between slaves and planter elites under French colonial rule.

For instance, the valleys were used to grow sugar and the mountains for coffee, often for export, while peasants were left to grow their food on marginal hillsides.

The debt-saddled country grappled with instability throughout the first century of its independence. Between 1845 and 1915, it saw 22 different governments, 17 of which were deposed in coups or revolutions.

In 1914, American soldiers walked into Haiti’s national bank, seized USD 500,000 in gold reserves – worth nearly USD 16 million today – and handed them over to a U.S. bank for ‘safekeeping.’

The following year, the U.S. invaded Haiti and occupied it for the next 19 years. During this period, it took full control over the country’s finances and funneled its wealth to Wall Street, leaving its people in dire poverty.

Haiti’s resources continued to be plundered under François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, who was elected president in 1957 but quickly turned into an autocrat. He ordered the clearing of forests along the border with the Dominican Republic to make them easier to police.

Duvalier died in 1971, handing over power to his son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, or ‘Baby Doc,’ who would rule until 1986. Aside from murdering tens of thousands of Haitians, the Duvaliers drained government coffers, embezzling up to 80 percent of the development aid it received.

Baby Doc and his cronies are believed to have stolen around half a billion dollars from the Haitian public treasury during his 15-year presidency. Transparency International ranked him as the sixth most corrupt world leader of the late 20th century.

All of this meant the government was perpetually underfunded and lacked the capacity to enforce regulations and codes or respond to natural disasters.

And so, Haiti’s landscapes continued to degrade.

The vicious cycle of degradation and poverty

Farmers responded by expanding their farms to make up for low crop yields on depleted soils. Roughly half of Haiti’s total land is used for agriculture, but only a sixth is actually suitable for it.

“It creates this cycle of forever looking for more fertile soils, degrading them, causing them to become infertile, and having to look more,” says Eberle.

By the 1990s, Haiti was importing large amounts of rice from the U.S., which further impoverished rural Haitians as they couldn’t compete with these cheap imports and food donations from the international community.

And as the country couldn’t afford to import enough fuel to support all of its citizens, many Haitians turned to charcoal – made by chopping down more trees.

Meanwhile, rural poverty has also driven mass migration to cities, which lack the housing and jobs to support them. As of 2015, the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area had grown to house 2.6 million people – roughly a quarter of the Haitian population – with haphazard urban planning and weak construction standards.

It was just outside the overcrowded capital that a devastating magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck in 2010, killing between 85,000 and 316,000 people and rendering more than a million people homeless. This made it the second deadliest earthquake of the 21st century.

When another earthquake shook Haiti in 2021, it triggered landslides that destroyed roads and ruined crop harvests, as well as claiming another 2,200 lives. Degraded soils had already pushed subsistence farmers onto steep terrain, making them more vulnerable to disasters.

The country has struggled to recover from these disasters. The 2021 quake caused around USD 1.5 billion in damage and economic losses – roughly 10 percent of its GDP. It came just a month after President Jovenel Moïse had been assassinated, sending Haiti deeper into its current spiral of political chaos and insecurity.

While experts are hesitant to draw a direct connection between environmental degradation and Haiti’s current crisis, they believe deforestation has exacerbated poverty, which has in turn worsened political instability and gang violence.

“It’s not a leap if you put poverty in the mix,” says Lora Iannotti, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, founder and director of the E3 Nutrition Lab and director of planetary health at the Center for the Environment.

“As people get poorer, they get more desperate, then they fall into these gangs. There’s unemployment. All of that has exacerbated the violence in the country.”

Can Haiti regrow its forests?

Many projects have worked to reforest Haiti and reduce its reliance on charcoal by proposing alternative energy sources, such as by making briquettes from agricultural waste or creating biofuels.

But the roots of the problem go deeper, especially as rural Haitians remain mired in poverty. Simply banning wood fuel would be deeply unjust and likely ineffective without offering affordable alternatives and more employment opportunities.

Eberle says many soil conservation and reforestation projects in Haiti have faltered as they failed to engage with locals and consider their needs, such as which tree species to plant or the fact that many farmers lack formal land tenure. She recommends that projects work with charcoal makers and farmers to design solutions to deforestation.

In 2021, a team of researchers found that many restoration projects had failed because of a lack of follow-up and participation by local residents in deciding which trees to plant.

While nearly all of their interviewees cut trees for charcoal, most were willing to switch to cleaner cookstoves and stop using charcoal if the government paid at least half the cost of doing so up front.

Mathurin François, a researcher at the Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz and Yuan Ze University and a co-author of the study, believes the Haitian government should offer financing for sustainable energy sources.

“This includes developing supportive policies, providing subsidies or micro-financing for low-income households, and investing in infrastructure to ensure reliable access to alternatives such as biogas and solar energy,” he says.

Iannotti’s E3 Nutrition Lab is setting up a project to source plants native to local Haitian farmers, such as breadfruit trees, to incentivize farmers to plant more trees.

Taíno practices can also be a source of inspiration. Their innovations include the use of orchard gardens and conuco mounds – plots of land with rows of soil mounds filled with plant residues to promote soil aeration and prevent erosion – where tubers were planted.

Experts have stressed that the key to successfully restoring landscapes will be supporting Haitian-led organizations and partnering with Haitian government institutions, rather than for international organizations to design and implement projects from the top down.

After all, even while the international media tends to portray Haitians as helpless victims of colonialism, Iannotti believes they have the skills and motivation to restore their forests and return their country’s landscapes to good health.

“I wouldn’t keep working there for almost three and a half decades if I didn’t think there was hope,” she says.

“Haiti has a very positive, beautiful culture in many ways, so there is definitely room for hope.”