Haiti Reforestation Act Of 2009

Floor Speech

Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, in December 2008, Senator Bingaman, Congressman Meek, and I visited Haiti. We went to see the public health, economic, environmental, and political situation in that impoverished Caribbean nation.

We traveled for hours into rural Haiti to the town of Cange to observe the incredible work being done by Partners in Health providing AIDS treatment and teaching mothers with newborns how to purify water.

We visited a school in Cite de Solei--a teeming slum in the capital Port au Prince--where Father Hagan and the organization Hands Together is providing schooling and meals for some of Haiti's most vulnerable children.

Unfortunately, despite these programs and the efforts of U.N. peacekeeping forces to bring some measure of security, the living conditions for average Haitians remain desperate: It is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with nearly 80 percent of its population out of work; one-half of its 8.2 million people live in extreme poverty; Haiti's infant mortality rate is the highest in our hemisphere; 1 in 10 children dies before the age of 5 due to malnutrition; the HIV/AIDS situation in Haiti is among the most frightening in the world; the average life expectancy of a citizen of Haiti is 61 years, the lowest in the region.

To add to these already desperate conditions, Haiti has been devastated in recent years by tropical storms and hurricanes. In 2004, Hurricane Jeanne struck Haiti, killing nearly 3,000 residents, and displacing over 200,000 more.

Last year, the island of Hispaniola, which Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic, was hit by four major storms. These storms caused massive flooding and landslides that cut off land routes and hampered the delivery of aid to its desperate citizens. Nearly 800 Haitians lost their lives and as many as 1 million were left homeless.

The world quickly responded to these catastrophes with millions of dollars worth of emergency food aid and disaster assistance. The United States alone provided $29 million in aid. This assistance helped Haiti cope with these immediate challenges.

But one of the underlying causes of this devastation--and contributor to Haiti's larger challenge with poverty and disease--is the deforestation of the country's once plentiful tropical forests.

This satellite image provided by NASA shows the stark difference between the amount of forest cover in Haiti and the Dominican Republic--countries that share the same island.

The black line shows the border between the two nations. When you look at the lush green of the Dominican Republic and compare it to the stark desolation on Haiti's side of the border, it is easy to see why Haiti is so much more vulnerable than the Dominican Republic to the devastating effects of soil erosion, landslides, and flooding.

It was not always that way. In fact, 85 years ago Haiti's tropical forest covered 60 percent of the country. Today less than 2 percent of those forests remain. In the past 5 years, the deforestation rate has accelerated by more than 20 percent.

Some 30 million trees are cut down every year in Haiti. This staggering level of deforestation happens because 60 percent of the population of Haiti relies on charcoal produced from cutting down trees for cooking fuel and two-thirds rely on inefficient, small-scale subsistence farming for survival.

While understandable, this deforestation has had terrible, unintended consequences. The soil erosion that has resulted from cutting down all of these trees has had the perverse effect of substantially reducing Haiti's already scarce agricultural land and leaving what remains less productive.

This soil erosion also makes the island more vulnerable to floods and mudslides like the ones that devastated the country last year. The reality of this effect is that far more Haitians than Dominicans lost their lives and their homes during last year's storms.

Haiti's tropical forests, if protected and re-grown, would fight the destructive effects of soil erosion. Saving old and growing new tropical forests would help protect Haiti's freshwater sources from contaminants, safeguard Haiti's remaining irrigable land, and save lives during hurricane season. Helping Haiti deal with its deforestation is something we can help do.

Today, Senator Brownback joins me in introducing the Haiti Reforestation Act of 2009 in an effort to attack this deforestation. The bill aims to end within 5 years deforestation in Haiti and restore within 30 years the extent of tropical forest cover in existence in Haiti in 1990.

While it is important to start putting trees in the ground, this bill is about more than just planting trees. Our government has tried that approach in the past and has failed miserably.

This bill brings the expertise of the both the US AID and the International Programs Office of the US Department of Agriculture's Forest Service to help Haiti manage in a measurable, verifiable, and reportable way its conservation and reforestation efforts. It does this in three ways.

First, the bill empowers these agencies to work with the Haitian Government to develop Haiti-appropriate forest-management ideas that can be implemented in an incremental way.

Second, the bill seeks to bring to Haiti market-based reforestation projects that have been successful in other regions of the world. These projects are successful because they share certain characteristics. They: secure the cooperation and engagement of local communities and organizations; provide incentives to protect trees through sustainable, yet income-generating growth; and provide hands-on management and oversight of replanting efforts.

Conservation groups such as Planting Empowerment, which is doing just this type of work in Panama, provide a model of success and this bill will encourage such groups to bring their efforts to Haiti.

Third, the bill expands the ability of conservation groups to work with the Haitian Government and international creditors to trade Haiti's international debt for revenue in what are known as debt-for-nature swaps.

Groups such as Conservation International, World Wildlife Fund, and The Nature Conversancy have successfully used this mechanism globally to save other tropical forests--this bill will encourage such groups to bring their efforts to Haiti.

Preservation of what remains of Haiti's tropical forest, and helping re-grow some of what has been lost, has numerous benefits for all of us, not just for Haiti. Tropical forests: play a critical role as carbon sinks to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; harbor a major portion of the Earth's biological and terrestrial resources; and provide habitats for an estimated 10 to 30 million plant and animal species, including species essential to medical research and agricultural productivity.

But attacking the desperate effect of deforestation in Haiti is the main purpose of this bill. As Haiti's Prime Minister, Miche 2le Pierre-Louis, recently said:

The whole country is facing an ecological disaster. We cannot keep going on like this. We are going to disappear one day. There will not be 400, 500 or 1,000 deaths [from hurricanes]. There are going to be a million deaths.

We must act to ensure that that day never comes. I urge my colleagues to support the Haiti Reforestation Act of 2009.

Source