CHURCHVILLE, VA—In a normal year, Haiti must start now preparing for the spring planting season, which ends in May.  The spring crop usually produces 60 percent of the country’s food.  Unfortunately, many families have had to eat or share the seeds they were saving for the next crop. Any improved seed varieties brought in now as aid are all too likely to be hijacked for immediate consumption by the portside mobs and thugs. Almost no chemical fertilizer is available, and Haiti has neither trucks nor usable roads to get it to the farms.

 

Most Haitians are underfed in their good years, with about 60 percent of kids under five suffering anemia and other diseases of malnutrition. Many of the kids will go blind or die due to severe Vitamin A deficiency, because they get few livestock calories. In hurricane years, the people suffer even more. In 2008, for example, the country suffered three hurricanes and a tropical storm. And now the massive earthquake. Food supplies are at urgent risk.

 

Over the years, poor Haitians who couldn’t afford to burn kerosene turned their local trees into charcoal.. Now most of the forest is gone, and soil erosion ravages the steep slopes. Mudslides overrun roads and irrigation systems.

 

The Haitians grow root crops like potatoes and sweet potatoes because they produce more food calories per acre. But the root crops, too, aggravate the already-serious soil erosion. Beans and corn are other major staples. The once-subsidized rice industry collapsed. Could it now be revived?

 

Agriculture provides one-fourth of the country’s economic output most years, and perhaps 70 percent of the jobs. Of course, there would be lots of jobs today in the island’s rebuilding—if anyone had the money to hire workers.

 

Most of Haiti’s grain, more than a million tons per year, has been imported. Now there is no money to buy more grain. The World Food Program is asking for $279 million in food aid funding, but has been promised only $60 million so far.

 

Ten thousand fishermen ply the waters around Haiti, catching mostly crab, scampi, and shrimp—but their decrepit boats don’t dare venture far out, and fishermen from other countries are competing with big diesel boats, fancy nets, and electronic fish finders.

 

Where does Haiti build for the future? Half of its economic output has disappeared in the past 20 years as a defrocked Catholic priest named Aristede preached revolution from the President’s chair and whatever capital Haiti had fled the country. Eventually, the U.S. Marines spent years trying to maintain order in the streets, but no real political settlement has yet been reached. Radicals still preach about a “New World Order,” but there’s no longer a Soviet Union to provide guns—or food.  

 

The in-bond manufacturing sector is now largely gone, because foreign capital and foreign managers don’t dare risk Haiti’s combination of political unrest and corruption. In fact, there are few potential avenues for growing jobs and incomes in Haiti, at least as long as the thugs prevent civil governance. The risks are too high for outside capital and managers to take on.

 

The World Bank wrote a plaintive report saying that remittances from Haitians in other countries are now the only prop for the economy (about $1.87 billion in 2009, equal to 35 percent of Haiti’s own economic output). And that report was written in 2005, before the latest set of storms and the earthquake.

 

The farmers could grow truck crops for export, but lack the roads to reach the ports; and even then they’d still many sea-miles from markets. Kenya grows cut flowers for air-freight to Europe on a space-available basis. But few airliners fly from Haiti to the affluent countries. Tourism? The few “good” hotels were flattened by the quake, many with their visitors inside.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

CHURCHVILLE, VA—The earthquake in Haiti has caused more than 100,000 deaths and destroyed the homes of 1.5 million people. It’s a devastating blow to Haiti—but we don’t know how to prevent earthquakes. All we can do is help Haiti rebuild.

 

On the other hand, we do know how to prevent 500,000 kids from going blind every year—and even dying—due to severe Vitamin A deficiency (VAD). But we’re not preventing the blindness or the deaths. Instead, we’re accepting the tragedy of millions of blind kids, plus the deaths of hundreds of thousands of pregnant women who die from needless birth complications, also due to VAD. The Vitamin A problem is far bigger than the Haitian earthquake, and it keeps on going, year after year.  

 

We started trying to cure Vitamin A deficiency 20 years ago, after a Swiss government researcher bioengineered “golden rice.” The new rice contained a gene from the daffodil that codes for beta-carotene.  The human body can then make Vitamin A out of the beta carotene. Kids in rich countries get most of their Vitamin A from meat, milk and eggs, but poor-country kids live mainly on such plant foods as rice, cassava and sweet potatoes.  None provide much bio-available Vitamin A.

 

But Greenpeace and its eco-allies claimed—without evidence—that such genetic engineering is a “danger to the planet.” 

 

Even after Syngenta developed a corn-based “golden rice II” with vastly more beta carotene—and offered it free to the Third World—Greenpeace still said no.

 

Only now, after 20 years of blockade and delay, are we finally seeing the dramatic benefits of growing Vitamin A crops in the local fields. In the Mukono District of Uganda, they’re growing bio-fortified sweet potatoes. Here, about 25 percent of the children used to be wan and sickly, prone to severe diarrhea, pneumonia, eye inflammations and blindness. Most of the kids are now healthy and vigorous. Pregnant women are thriving, along with their babies.

 

The difference? Orange-colored sweet potatoes, supplied by Uganda’s national agricultural research organization. They’re rich in beta-carotene, and they produce high yields because they resist local crop diseases. The germ plasm for the new sweet potatoes originated at HarvestPlus—Norman Borlaug’s international farm research organization that saved a billion people from starving in the Green Revolution of the 1960s.  

 

“A danger to the planet,” of course is what Greenpeace has called virtually every recent advance in global food production. At the same time, they claim the earth cannot sustainably feed the people already here. The European Union, to its shame, has backed up Greenpeace with threats to boycott the farm exports of any country which allows biotech plantings. In India, rice farmers protested plantings of the new rice, for fear the EU’s ban on biotech foods would block their exports of high-value basmati rice.

 

HarvestPlus finally decided to breed around the Greenpeace blockade. It took more than a decade of laborious test plots and back-crossing, but now cross-bred beta-carotene is being planted in farmers’ fields—and the Mukono mothers say their kids have become remarkably healthier. All it cost was 20 more years, 10 million more blindings, and millions of maternal deaths.  

 

HarvestPlus notes that much of the Third World’s population is caught in a health-poverty trap. Blind and ill family members and orphans need extra care from the able-bodied family members or from societies resources. They never get ahead. Instead, struggling people and their large families keep slashing-and-burning more subsistence crops and hunting endangered animals with cheap AK-47s.

 

Not even Greenpeace should want a poverty-stricken world full of blind children.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net