ecoyear

Listening to the news in my car, I felt a very deep sense of grief today. Half of me just screams that I want to go help. I am healthy, I am a physician, I speak French. The other half of course feels that I can't put myself at risk because I have three little kids, still.

So I started Googling around today. How to help Haiti? For some reason, the idea of just sending money was unappealing. There is a crucial overwhelmingly enormous short-term problem - water, food, medicine, sanitation. And there is a long-term problem that dwarfs it. The island cannot support much life at all, and certainly not 9 million.

The basic question in our minds should be: why is this happening to Haiti? Why were they already eating mud cookies last year? Why was their underfive mortality the worst in the Americas (7%) until recently, while on the same island, in the Dominican Republic, this mortality is less than half?

It became clear to me last year, that our country's policy of dumping cheap subsidized corn (subsidized with our taxes, you know) on poor Third World countries has the effect of destroying their local agriculture. The fact is that it works the same here in the US - family farms continue to die because they cannot compete with industrial farms. We are not only accustomed, but to an extent dependent on cheap "food" prices. The first shock upon arriving at a farmers' market, is how expensive everything is.

So you can imagine that a Third World country doesn't stand any sort of chance when it comes to subsidizing their own agriculture to compete with American imports. The resultant utter dependence on food aid from rich countries is inevitable. As is the disappearance of a viable economy of any sort.

So people pile up in Port-au-Prince, lacking the ability to feed and shelter themselves. Any sort of natural disaster would then reach unimaginable proportions. People carry the wounded in wheelbarrows, trying to reach non-existent medical care. Bodies pile up at now-useless rubble hospitals. One NPR correspondent saw children sleeping in the courtyards of these hospitals, near the dead bodies of their relatives. There is no place to go from here.

Well this site offers a poignant, short, timely way to tie loose ends. Of course, business-as-usual international politics had everything to do with this crisis. USAID was a key player.

So I think what I can do to help is to support Haitian agriculture. I'm donating to Heifer International. Whoever survives in that country will have to depend on raising their own food. Animals provide valuable nutrition for people and for the soil. In the Heifer model, they are prized for their ongoing contributions - eggs, milk, offspring that must be donated to neighbors - and not as meat. Feeding the animals themselves is an issue, but one that Heifer is quite familiar with.

There also appears to be permaculture training in Haiti, but some of it is very new. I hope they are working with Heifer International.

I'm still very sad, and horrified. There is not even an estimated number of casualties. A half a million, is a possibility I have heard. Too numerous to count, is probably more correct. What about thirst, starvation, and disease in the weeks to come?

It is difficult not to see the parallels between this island nation and the Earth as a whole. They deforested 98% of their island. We are well on our way to that statistic. They lost their ability to grow food through dependence on oil-based agriculture. So have we. The utter lack of resiliency in that model is now showing as the unbelievable impact of this "natural" disaster. So, I worry.