One island, two very different stories

As Richard Kim at The Nation explained last week, history has not been kind to Haiti. More to the point, Euros were decidedly unkind to the country's self-liberated slaves.

The reparations ex-slaves were forced to pay France handicapped Haitians in their (to borrow a phrase from other slave-holders' Declaration of Independence) pursuit of happiness.

Of course, that's not all of the puzzle. It goes only part-way to answering the question of Why is Haiti so poor?

Jared Diamond's Collapse has a chapter exploring the divergent development paths of Haiti and its island neighbour, the Dominican Republic.

The DR isn't rich, but it's considerably better off than Haiti: US$8,200 per capita GDP compared to Haiti's US$1,300 in 2008.

The DR wasn't always richer. Haiti was the more prosperous part of Hispaniola back when Haiti achieved independence in 1804. That was largely because pre-revolution Haiti was a high priority for France while the DR was a low priority for Spain in that period.

The environmental downside to that Haitian prosperity and its attendant population growth was that deforestation and over-use of soil was much greater in Haiti, which has both a smaller land area and a drier climate to sustain its bigger population. Natural resources were inevitably depleted by a hungry and increasingly crowded society.

The Dominicans were taking a lot out of their ecology, too. The two countries of Hispaniola were heading toward big eco-troubles as the 20th Century began, though the DR was lucky enough to have a more forgiving ecology.

And then development in the DR took a turn, or a few turns, for the better.

Rafael Trujillo, president of the DR for all but four years between 1930 and 1952, was a murderous thug. But he also created the DR's first national park and pursued economic modernization for the country.

A subsequent president named Balaguer, who was in office for all but 12 years between 1960 and 1996, had some big-time environmental policies, notably in forest conservation. He was a thug like Trujillo, but he was an environmentalist.

By contrast, the Duvalier family that ruled Haiti with an iron fist from 1957 to 1986 cared not one whit about the environment. Deforestation and other types of environmental degradation continued.

The Duvaliers also did virtually nothing to modernize Haiti's economy. They were content to loot it as is.

The results of these very different historical paths is quite evident when you compare the two Hispaniola economies and natural landscapes.

Diamond writes of a stark contrast visible from the sky: "a darker and greener landscape east of the [Haiti-DR border] ... [and] a paler and browner landscape west of the line (the Haitian side). On the ground, one can stand on the border at many places, face east, and look into pine forest, then turn around, face west and see nothing except fields almost devoid of trees."

Writing several years before the great quake, Diamond wasn't optimistic about Haiti's prospects: "Already the poorest and one of the most overcrowded countries in the New World, Haiti is nevertheless continuing to become even poorer and more crowded, with a population growth rate of nearly 3% per year."