Haiti is a nation of farmers. Though only about a third of the mountainous country is suitable for farming and the countryside is heavily deforested and losing topsoil, somewhere between 66 and 75% of Haitians are engaged in agriculture.

Marginal land and periodic crop damaging droughts and floods combined with ever-rising food prices and the lowest per capita income in the Western Hemisphere means that hunger for the people of Haiti was part of everyday life even before the earthquake.

In mid-2008, Haitians rioted to protest food prices that jumped nearly 40% in a few months. Yet, at one time, Haiti was an important, and self-sufficient, rice producer. Today, Haiti imports the majority of its rice, making it (at the time this study was written) the fourth largest market for American rice. For such a tiny country, that’s a pretty big achievement.

How did this come to pass? Hunger in Haiti is at least partially a result of stipulations by the World Bank and IMF that Haiti open its economy to cheap US food imports in exchange for loan guarantees, and focus on producing other products for export.

The other problem is Haiti’s own government. Haiti can’t compete with heavily subsidized US rice while Haitian farmers receive almost no investment from their government. According to this article, the United Nations recommends that the Haitian government invest much more in food production, but the government had earmarked only 6.95 percent of its 2009-2010 budget for agriculture.

So where does this situation leave Haiti in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake?

In a word, screwed – unless both International and American aid organizations focus on rebuilding Haitian agriculture in a sustainable, ecological way. Tom Vilsack, Head of the USDA, said on the Rachel Maddow Show on January 14th that his agency, along with USAID, is mobilizing to help Haiti with emergency humanitarian food supplies (around 14,000 metric tons).

He indicated the need for long-term support for Haiti and the rebuilding of the country’s agricultural and non-agricultural infrastructure. Then he mentioned he was working with American food companies like ADM, Cargill and Walmart in the immediate aftermath and that later there would be people on the ground helping the farmers plant their crops.

Uh oh. I truly believe that Vilsack means well, but corporations like Cargill and ADM have a pretty checkered past when it comes to “helping” developing countries build their agricultural capacity.

Usually such efforts lead to environmentally and economically disastrous mono cropping, making small farmers dependent on the company’s seeds and chemicals and driving them ever deeper into debt and misery.

Currently, Haiti is a nation of low-tech human and animal powered farming. It could be the perfect laboratory, much like Cuba was, for developing an ecological agricultural system capable of feeding the people of Haiti. Think about it: unlike our own firmly entrenched system, Haiti is not currently dependent on fossil fuels for fertilizers, pesticides, or power. Since fossil fuels aren’t going to be around forever, I hope some of the progressive people at the USDA and USAID prevail and help Haiti to develop agriculture appropriate to its needs, not the needs of Cargill and ADM.

In the meantime, what can you do to help (if you haven’t already)? Many sites have published lists of where and how to donate. I don’t want to duplicate their work. One of my other favorites is Paul Farmer’s organization in Haiti, Partners in Health. They’ve been on the ground there for years and are a trusted organization with a great track record.

Also check out Grassroots Online and Haiti Action.

I’ll be participating in the bake sales this coming weekend in the San Francisco Bay Area. And for other food focused folk, the New York Times Diners Journal has published a list of ways the food community is coming together to help Haiti.

Image: Lucas the Experience

This is the latest installment in Vanessa Barrington’s weekly column, The Green Plate, on the environmental, social, and political issues related to what and how we eat.

The post Haiti’s Future: Food Insecurity and Agricultural Capacity in the Aftermath appeared first on EcoSalon.

Tired of hearing about global warming? I don’t think you’re alone. According to a Pew survey taken this fall, fewer Americans (35%) see global warming as a very serious problem (down from 44% in April 2008). Only 57% think there is solid evidence of warming (71% did in April 2008).

My hunch is that people are feeling fatigue from the daily dire environmental news and the fact that all the proposals on the table for CO2 emission reductions are nowhere near where we need to be to begin to halt (let alone reverse) environmental catastrophe. The U.N.-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says developed countries would have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to avoid runaway climate change. Lots of people think that binding agreements for those targets are unlikely.

The climate disaster we’re told is coming is just too much to think about, perhaps. It’s much easier to convince ourselves that it’s really not as bad as we think, hence those numbers in the Pew survey. (Add to that the immediate pressures of a recession and it’s even less of a surprise.)

But here’s another major reason we should stop burning dinosaurs:

This reason is even less disputed than global warming, and it is more rapidly approaching: Ocean Acidification. Scientists have only begun to uncover the full implications of ocean acidification for the past five years or so, and it’s only been in the news with any prominence this year. Most people still don’t know about it.

The oceans of the world act like a giant, watery carbon sponge, soaking up about one-fourth of all the carbon dioxide emitted by our fossil-fuel burning. As reported by The Guardian, that’s something like six million tons a day.

The carbon in the oceans causes the pH of the water to drop and the normally alkaline ocean becomes less so – in short, it becomes more acidic. Studies show that the pH of the world’s ocean has dropped about 0.1 pH units over the past several decades. If emissions continue at their present rate, scientists estimate that the pH will drop another 0.3 to 0.5 pH units by the year 2100.

What happens when the ocean pH decreases? It makes it more difficult for animals with hard outer shells like mollusks, corals, sea urchins and other tinier organisms to form their skeletal structures. It may also change the way these organisms breathe and reproduce. The chemical changes in sea water that accompany acidification can prevent their shells from forming and extremely altered water can actually eat away at already-formed shells.

This is a devastating situation for the entire food web. And I’m not just talking about oyster and scallop shortages. Higher predators like whales and salmon eat tiny shelled creatures called pteropods. If the pteropods can’t survive acidification, we can add starvation to the list of troubles that our fish stocks face, including overfishing, destructive fishing methods and good old-fashioned pollution.

All right, so it’s so long, fish – setting aside the ocean’s place in our ecosystem for a minute and thinking of it only as a source of food. We’ll still survive, right? We can just eat other things, but a great many people will not be so lucky. The very places where famine is already a problem are the places where people depend most heavily on seafood for their protein needs.

“Small island nations, already threatened by climate change via sea level rise, often depend entirely on seafood for their protein,” says Sarah Cooley, a Postdoctoral Investigator at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

According to some sources, more than 1.5 billion people depend on fish for 20 percent of their average per capita intake of animal protein. Nearly 3.0 billion additional people depend on seafood for 15 percent their protein. In developing nations such as Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Ghana, people depend on fish for as much as 50 percent of total animal protein. These are the places that are already poised to be the most affected by the rising sea levels, drought and extreme weather patterns caused by climate change, so it’s likely that fish could become an even more important part of diets in these places as agricultural crop yields fall even further.

“Usually, the most vulnerable human communities are the ones that contributed least to climate change,” says Cooley. “This is true for ocean acidification also. Populations in tropical developing nations will swell in the next 50 years, but at the same time, ocean acidification plus global temperature rise will likely alter the coral reef ecosystems that provide subsistence fishermen with their dinners. Where will these people find their protein? This doesn’t even include the fact that as countries become wealthier, they eat more protein.”

Studies that predict increases in hunger due to overfishing do not even take into account the likely effects of ocean acidification because scientists are still determining how the problem will affect entire marine food chains. Other studies warn of devastating effects.

For the audio-visual learners among us, this 20 minute video narrated by Sigourney Weaver explains the whole process very well.

If the news alone weren’t troubling enough, you should also know that it’s impossible to reverse the existing acidification.

We must stop emitting so much CO2 now to avoid further damage.

The effects of acidification are already being seen. Knowing all we have at stake, it makes me sick to watch some of our lawmakers in action. Resisting climate change legislation over the worry that it will hurt coal state economies is completely irrelevant when we’re talking about the collapse of an entire ecosystem, possibly in our own lifetimes.

What can you do about it?

Pressure companies like Toyota to stop lobbying against clean energy and support those companies, like Apple Computers, that quit The Chamber of Commerce in protest of its retrograde climate legislation policies. When the final bill comes up for a vote, pressure your representatives to do the right thing. It may seem hopeless, but hopeless is not an option.

Image: Wonderlane

The post Riding the Wave of a 100 Year Problem: Ocean Acidification appeared first on EcoSalon.