Motivation for the future: in Haiti a participatory development program is helping communities find new hope in their battle against a grueling crisis.

• Author: Pressoir, Jean-Cyril

When the price of imported rice, Haiti's main staple, doubled in the early months of 2008, it ignited a crisis that ultimately led to the dismissal of the government of Prime Minister Jacques-Edouard Alexis.

"We are paying for twenty years of bad choices and bad political decisions," said President Rene Preval in a national television address on April 9, the third day of widespread demonstrations and riots. He was referring to the intensive imports of foreign food staples, mainly rice, that began in the late 1980s and which are now seen as responsible for crippling local agriculture.

Reminding Haitians that the food crisis is global, he urged them to fight to become agriculturally self-sufficient once again.

The population of Cite Soleil is arguably the most vulnerable to the crisis. It is Haiti's largest, poorest, and most notorious slum, a vast ensemble of ramshackle huts and mud houses where former farmers and their families have ended up--the final stop in their desperate journey to what was supposed to have been a better life in the nation's capital.

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Cite Soleil would hardly seem like the right place to try and revive the nation's food production, but with the help of a participatory development program implemented by the Pan American Development Foundation (PADF), Cite Soleil native Johnny Jeudi believes it can be done.

Jeudi, 36, lives with his wife and three children in "Norway," a district of the ghetto that is caught between the ocean and a sewage canal. For six years now he has been the president of the Cite Soleil fishermen's association (OPECS), an organization he helped create in the mid-1990s when local fishermen decided to join forces after one of them died at sea during a storm.

Under Jeudi's tenure, the association's activities had to come to a halt on several occasions, as street gangs made life in the slum increasingly difficult. "The gangs wouldn't allow us to hold meetings. Although we were never political, they still feared any group that could assemble that many people."

"We kept the organization alive by contributing five or ten gourdes each (ten or twenty US cents) just so we would stay united." And that they did. Out of the estimated 3,000 fishermen living in Cite Soleil, OPECS now has over 500 registered members.

Today, the association has its new office in a recently finished fish market built with the help of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). The building's main feature is a cold room that Jeudi and his peers are eager to start using, though it still lacks power. The fishermen fought hard just to keep their organization alive; now they want to develop activities that matter the most: catching fish!

Along with over 180 other grassroots organizations from the slums of Cite Soleil and Belair, OPECS is participating in PRODEPPAP, the urban pilot program of a World Bank funded participatory development program of the Haitian government, implemented by the PADF.

The organizations submit local development projects, which are then selected by a community assembly called a COPRODEP that decides which ones get funding One of the first projects chosen in Cite Soleil was OPEC's plan to modernize fishing, which received a grant of US$18,000. With this funding, Jeudi's organization was able to purchase a freezer and a generator and complete work on the cold room; they also bought fishing equipment, including nets, hooks, lines, and most importantly, two motor engines and four small boats.

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Fishermen who don't own their own boats or nets are already able to go out to sea using the organization's equipment. And with new techniques for catching fish, Jeudi hopes that he and his colleagues will soon bring in hundreds of pounds of fish every week. Already, supermarkets and restaurants in the city have contacted the association to buy large quantities of fresh fish on a regular basis.

Far from Cite Soleil, the plains area around the city of Les Cayes in the southern part of the country has traditionally been one of the most productive agricultural regions of Haiti. Its intricate network of irrigation canals was begun over 200 years ago by French colonialists. For decades however, little has been done to boost the area's agricultural production.

Months after the riots first erupted in Les Cayes to protest rising food costs and President Preval promised he would initiate the rebuilding of the country's national agricultural production, small farmers deep in Haiti's south have seen little or no change. Many today claim they don't trust government programs any more.

However, several of the projects selected in the participatory development program (PRODEP) aim directly at helping small Haitian farmers increase their income and improve their lives, by giving them the tools and resources to...