Aerial view of the Martissant neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti,
As the world laments yet another crisis in Haiti, it is hard to remain hopeful for a country that has endured calamitous natural disasters and pernicious colonial interventions. As the first independent nation to emerge from resettled African slaves in 1804, Haiti held much promise at its inception. In fact, the Haitians ended up controlling all of Hispaniola from 1822 to 1844 to also end slavery on the Spanish part of the island. The nascent Haitian state was beset by marginalization from its neighbors, particularly the United States. The American government did not even recognize Haiti until 1861 for fear that the slave rebellion against the French colonial masters that created the country might inspire similar upheaval in the Southern plantations. During the Cold War, Western nations supported despotic elites to serve their own interests in the region but in recent years, there has been a more genuine commitment to helping Haiti climb its way out of poverty. Haiti is now the poorest country in the Western hemisphere has been struck by natural misfortunes and malevolent foreign intervention for decades.
A decade ago, I was invited to Haiti to speak at a conference organized by the World Bank to consider a resurrection of the country’s mineral industry. The discovery of mineral deposits with an estimated worth at current prices of around $20 billion had brought some cautious optimism in some quarters of the country. There was much anxiety and anticipation over the prospect of minerals providing domestic revenue generation rather than perpetual dependence on aid. Haiti’s only major experience with modern mining was a bauxite mine run by Reynolds Corporation in the Miragoane region, dating back to 1941. From then up to 1982, the country exported 13.3 million tons of bauxite from Haiti to its alumina refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas. Haitian bauxite accounted for almost one-fifth of Reynolds’s bauxite acquisition in that period, and Reynolds was given access to 150,000 hectares, expelling thousands of Haitian families.
Currently, the largest private service sector investment in Haiti thus far is the Royal Caribbean’s Labadee Cruise Ship resort, which I had an opportunity to visit a few years earlier on a family vacation. There are important ecological factors which should be considered before mining proceeds, and funding resources are available to Haiti through mechanisms such as the Critical Ecosystems Fund which has supported some grants in the Northern region of Haiti where mining is planned. Minerals can provide a revenue cushion to countries when there is a slump in other sectors of the economy. Diversification of revenue sources for the government is of course essential. No doubt the COVID pandemic showed the vulnerabilities of tourism in terms of revenue reliability, as have numerous hurricanes and natural disasters over the years. This vulnerability exists for both countries on the island of Hispaniola — Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Yet their development paths have diverged remarkably. The Dominican Republic is one of the region’s largest gold producers and also has a flourishing tourism economy.
While attending a seminar at a NASA event in Washington some twenty years ago, I remember being shown a satellite image of the island of Hispaniola. The speaker asked everyone, can you tell where the border is between Haiti and the Dominican Republic? Everyone nodded in unison for you could see a dramatic difference in land cover from the satellite image – coincident with where the border lay. The Haitian side showed far less vegetation in the border area. Pulitzer prize-winning author and ecologist Jared Diamond dedicated a chapter of his book Collapse to why Dominicans protected their forests while Haitians degraded theirs. The border photo appeared in Al Gore’s 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”
Subsequently there have been revisionists accounts claiming that “one of the most repeated facts about Haiti is a lie.” The underlying accusation being that the deforestation difference is overplayed and a reflection of white prejudice against the poor Haitians. However, there is now ample evidence from the field to show that there is indeed distinctly higher deforestation on the Haitian side. A study in 2018 published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, using multiple methods and focusing on primary forests, calculated that such high biodiversity regions in Haiti declined from 4.4% of total land area in 1988 to 0.32% in 2016. Nevertheless, in a remarkable show of adaptive capacity, Haitians have managed to find a way to use the carefully managed woodlots known as rakbwa alongside reforestation, in which trees are grown, culled and sold for construction or charcoal, have played a role in sustaining the country’s tree cover.
Haiti deserves immediate attention by the development community as a recipient of investment rather than handouts. Security first needs to be established and a political solution to dealing with anarchic gangs is of course the first priority. However, soon after some semblance of governance can be secured there is a need to revisit various ways of helping the country harness its resource wealth. Although there are risks to investors and communities from mismanaged extractive industries, the status quo is also untenable. Haitians have shown remarkable resilience in the face of massive earthquakes, hurricanes, and a relentless tide of external interventions. They must not be relegated to perpetual underdevelopment. A close coupling between security and serious industrial investment in Haiti is desperately needed.
