Foundation Seguin Bamboo Advocates
On 2 recent visits through the mountaintop village of Seguin, I passed through a patch of Haiti's dwindling pine forest. According to a long time resident of Seguin this area is one of the country's 3 main watersheds, the othertwo being Marmelade and Macaya in the North and the South respectively. But neither of these other 2 locations show the blatant scars of deforestation as much as the pine forest at Seguin nor are they closest to the Port-au-Prince consumer market for wood, bakeries, charcoal, furniture, etc and therefore as vulnerable to total depletion. The forest floor of Seguin is often visibly charred and the base of the trees as high up as 4 to 5 feet have the black scars from the intentionally lit fires and the fresh contrasting white pine wounds of machetes and axes chopping at the burnt bases of the trees. Although the forest is technically owned by the government people live on the land, farm the land and unfortunately often destroy the land without regard.
Many of Haiti's problems can not be solved separately. For example you can't send hungry children to school and expect them to learn as well you can't have a well fed population with no roads to bring produce to market at affordable prices. And the environmental problem is no different. You can't tell people to stop destroying the forest to feed their family unless you provide environmental education, enforcement and most importantly an economic alternative. And with the government burdened with what seem like insurmountable problems in the overpopulated capital of Port-au-Prince attention to what's left of Haiti's natural resources seems tertiary at best and left to a few dedicated environmental groups with little resources.
Foundation Seguin http://www.fondationseguin.org/index.html is one such NGO struggling to save the forest and the watershed, an ecosystem that manages the favorable conditions of water flow. Foundation Seguin over the past two years, with funding from the Taiwanese government has been working with the local community on environmental education, reforestation and preservation efforts and in due time economic alternatives to the current benefits of the pine wood. Their most visible step so far has been to cover much of the deforested plain of Seguin with bamboo. Bamboo, although known to grow in diverse
climates around the world and grows easily in Haiti still seems out of place along the plateau among parched
corn rows, hillings for tubers, and the pumice like rock formations. But you can tell as you walk for 2 hours along the hard red dirt plain to the bluff of La Parc National Visite, that the foundations members are slowly understanding or accepting and even taking a chance with bamboo. A good distance walk from the hub of activity for Foundation Seguin, sprigs of bamboo appear randomly. It's hope but not enough to outpace the rate of burning and cutting of the remaining pine forest.
