In Countryside, Stricken Haiti Seeks Both Food and Rebirth

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Today, his main worries are when his bean, corn and plantain crops will come in. &ldquo;I will never go back to Port-au-Prince,&rdquo; said Mr. Laurore, 32, a former shopkeeper who was sifting soil to plant a tomato garden, referring to the capital. &ldquo;It left a strong pain inside. Here the work is hard, but you live in total peace.&rdquo; His <a href="http://www.louisvuittonoutletsaleuk.co.uk"><strong>Louis Vuitton Sale</strong></a> work, on a 15-acre cooperative farm in Papaye, represents a small but promising success for an ambitious program being promoted by aid workers, government officials and international donors: saving the country by developing the countryside. When the earthquake leveled Port-au-Prince on Jan. 12, 2010, planners and visionaries here and abroad looked past the rubble and saw an opportunity to fix the structural problems that have kept Haiti stuck in poverty and instability. An idea that won early support was to shrink the overcrowded, underemployed, violence-ridden capital and revive the desiccated, disused farmland that had long been unable to feed the country. &ldquo;Decentralization is a critical cornerstone supporting my vision for a new Haiti,&rdquo; President Michel Martelly told potential investors last month. &ldquo;We want to strengthen and empower our rural communities and create new ones.&rdquo; But the vision has run up against Haitian reality: myriad economic and infrastructure deficiencies, the lack of credible opportunity in rural areas and the fading of international interest and funds. Reviving rural Haiti would wean the country off an overreliance on imported food while creating jobs in the countryside, helping to discourage mass migration to urban sinkholes like Port-au-Prince. Before the quake, nearly a quarter of the population lived in the capital, where two-thirds of the labor force had no formal jobs and overcrowding was considered a major contributor to the quake&rsquo;s estimated death toll of 300,000. Tens of thousands of people fled Port-au-Prince for rural areas immediately after the quake, but most have since returned, American and Haitian government officials said, finding little opportunity and food to be scarce. &ldquo;We need to reverse the trend of people in rural areas moving to the city,&rdquo; <a href="http://www.louisvuittonukhandbagsuk.com"><strong>Louis Vuitton</strong></a> said Ari Toubo Ibrahim, the Haiti representative for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. The organization says it believes that, with enough training and support, about a tenth of the 600,000 people still in earthquake camps could ultimately move to the countryside. New factories are also part of the plan. A South Korean-run industrial park in the north, partly financed by the United States, is expected to open next year, providing at least 20,000 jobs. But experts say agriculture is the nation&rsquo;s biggest need. Farming has declined to 25 percent of the economy today from 40 percent a decade ago, making Haiti more dependent on imported food. Today, the government says, 52 percent of the food Haitians eat comes from abroad, compared with 20 percent a few decades ago. The decline in farming dates primarily to the mid-1980s, when the government encouraged urbanization, and it worsened under a trade embargo during political turmoil in the 1990s. When trade restrictions loosened, the market was flooded with cheap, foreign staples like American rice, Dominican poultry and milk, in powdered form, from as far away as Europe. A series of storms in 2008 further wiped out farms, and riots over the soaring cost of food, owing to fluctuations in the world market, led lawmakers to oust the prime minister. Recently, though, there have been signs of a potential turnaround. This month, the World Bank approved <a href="http://www.buylouisvuittonoutletonline.com"><strong>louis vuitton outlet</strong></a> 50 million for agriculture projects. &ldquo;When agriculture grows, gross domestic product grows,&rdquo; said Diego Arias, an agriculture economist who analyzes Haiti at the World Bank. Signature Haitian products like mangoes, coffee and cocoa are getting a burst of overseas attention, and BioTek, a Florida company, is awaiting approval from the new government on a long-awaited public-private plan to revive Haiti&rsquo;s last remaining sugar mill, in L&eacute;og&acirc;ne, one of the areas hit hardest by the quake. Haitian specialty coffee is in demand in restaurants in New York, Miami and other American cities, and the Inter-American Development Bank, Nestl&eacute; and Colombia&rsquo;s National Federation of Coffee Growers have announced a 3 million effort to help 10,000 coffee farmers replant trees on denuded hills and increase production for both home consumption and export.