Spring is the time when farmers in Haiti plant about sixty percent of their crops.doc

Spring is the time when farmers in Haiti plant about sixty percent of their crops. But this spring is a struggle with disaster.The January twelfth earthquake flattened much of Haitis capital and surrounding areas. It left more than two hundred thousand people dead and about a million homeless.International recovery plans include helping Haiti expand food production. But many farmers lost their tools in the quake. Landslides buried equipment.And now seasonal rains do not make the situation any easier. The rains continue through May and June.Many farmers need money for seeds and fertilizer. Sabine Wilke of the aid group CARE says many also lack the money to hire help to prepare the land.SABINE WILKE: For the planting, they also need local labor. And since they do not have enough money to hire people, the work will simply not be done.The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization says it has delivered tools and seeds to thousands of families in the earthquake area.The quake was centered near Port-au-Prince. An estimated six hundred thousand people left for the countryside. Experts say it will be difficult to feed them. Food prices are high, and many people fled the capital with only the clothes they were wearing.Gerald Murray at the University of Florida is an expert on Haiti. Professor Murray says many rural families have taken in relatives and friends who lost homes and jobs. There may be enough to eat for a while, he says, but before too long there may be hunger.Farming is about sixty percent of Haitis economy. But most food comes from imports.Before the earthquake, the Haitian government and private groups were working to improve agriculture.Deforestation has traditionally been a major problem for farmers. Few trees remain to protect soil from floods, droughts and severe storms.In the sixteen hundreds Haitis French colonizers cleared forests to plant sugar cane. In the nineteen fifties, forests were cut down for wood and other products.Poor technology and poor roads also reduced agricultural production. So did animal and plant diseases. Farmers moved to cities to do other work.Professor Murray says the average farm in Haiti measures about one or one and a half hectares. And the fields are commonly divided between level ground and a mountainside.Monsignor Bobby Benson began the Matthew 25 Ministry in 1998 after meeting an AIDS patient in the United States.It is based near Ghanas eastern city of Koforidua in a region with one of the countrys highest HIV infection rates. In the years since, Bensons center has helped hundreds of patients and is currently home to 70 people with HIV/AIDS.Word goes round, they are referred to this house by the hospitals and laboratories, said Benson. Once a person is infected many a times the victim does not know where to go to, so they say go to Matthew 25 House.The man known locally as Father Bobby says the center also helps children orphaned by the disease.A number of children have been left behind by HIV/AIDS patients so we take care of them, added Benson. We have 98 children we are supporting in the house for the past 10 years. Two are finishing university and polytechnic this year.Benson says AIDS patients who are still living on their own receive food from the center. Those who can no longer support themselves move in.We try to provide accommodation for those who cannot afford, we pay their medical bills, we pay their transport anytime they come to this house because most of them are not working, explained Monsignor Benson.A 35-year-old mother of two who does not want her name used in this story says she tried to commit suicide when she learned that her husband died of AIDS and left her HIV positive.After trying to poison herself, she says a nurse brought her to the Matthew 25 House. Eight years after testing positive, she is still alive. She says sometimes you leave home with a heavy heart, but when you get to Matthew 25 everything comes back to life in the support you get from counseling and from Father Bobby.But she has still not disclosed her HIV status to her family because she says when people know you are HIV positive they do not want to come near you for fear that they too might become infected. She has not even told her sister because she is afraid her sister might reject her daughter if she knew.Benson says prejudices against people with HIV/AIDS have frustrated efforts to supplement the donations that keep the center running. They have tried selling charcoal and sewing school uniforms.We also produce palm oil, but again we do not get market, said Benson. Once people know it is produced by Matthew 25 they would not buy our oil. We have some in the warehouse right now. We also do funeral undertaking so we have two hearse services which the public comes to access. Most of our clients have learned how to produce tie-and-dye batik. But again we are not into production on a high scale because unless we get a market, or an organization says, Produce so much for us, then we do it.Benson says despite progress in lowering the countrys HIV infection rate, Ghanian society has still not learned to accept that HIV-positive people can lead normal lives.What baffles me is that we buy all kinds of food items from the roadside. We do not know who is producing them. Somebody may be HIV positive, but we do not know, and we buy the food and enjoy it, noted Benson. But as soon as you get to know a person is HIV positive you are afraid of the person. It is a pity the public is afraid of HIV, as if a person with HIV is the worse person under the planet. But they are human as we are. As for the stigma, it is still there. You will be surprised this very house we are sitting here is highly stigmatized, but we do not have a problem. We are still doing what we are doing.When confronted with that stigma, Benson takes comfort in the Bible passage of Matthew 25 itself, in which the Lord says: Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.Our planet is warming.Average global temperatures have climbed about one degree Celsius since the last century, and at an accelerated rate in recent decades.And scientists believe the global warming trend is responsible for an increased severity of droughts, floods, and storms across the globe, and slowly rising ocean levels.The serious consequences of earths changing climate are the subject of three new documentary films, funded in part by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Sun Come UpElders among the Carteret, pictured here at a relocation meeting on Piul Island, hold memories of happier days but now must seek shelter elsewhere. Sinking islandSun Come Up is the story of the Carteret Islands off the coast of Papua New Guinea, where filmmaker Jennifer Redfearn says Islanders have had no choice but to move to higher ground.We documented some of the destruction that is happening from rising sea levels, more frequent storm surges, from the lack of fresh water sources and how the sea has contaminated some of their gardening land.Ursula Rakova grew up on the islands. In those times the sea wasnt as cruel as it is today, she says. By 2015 her homeland is expected to be under water. She now heads the relocation effort for 3,000 people.Among them is Carteret elder John Sailik who laments the fate of the island chain. When I was a little boy my very special thing was fishing with my spear on the wave. Ill be losing the wave and losing this happiness of the island. Ill be missing the sound of waves at night and Ill be listening to it no more.Sun Come Up debuted at the 2010 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina. Redfearn says the Carteret islanders are among the worlds first climate refugees.The International Organization for Migration predicts the number of people displaced by rising ocean levels will grow to 200 million by 2050.Redfearn hopes her film helps raise awareness to reverse that trend. I want it to move people. I want it to either make them angry, make them sad, make them frustrated, and I want to take that anger and that frustration and that sadness and turn that into action. Alex StonehillSprings are drying out from the drought in Southern Ethiopia forcing pastoralists to push their cattle long distances for scarce resources. First victims of climate changeWater Wars was produced by the Seattle-based Common Language Project.The film takes a closer look at water scarcity in Southern Ethiopia and the drought that has left farms there without any irrigation supply. Herders are forced to shepherd their animals longer distances for water.Neighbors compete for the same scarce resource, says Jon Sawyer, director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the group that brought Water Wars to the 2010 Environmental Film Festival in Washington.Were really looking at how pastoralists are among the first victims of global climate change, and what thats doing to their way of life and the possibility of conflict as a result, he says.Water Wars joins the pastoralists in a stark landscape of dead grasses, arid plants and dust. Experts predict droughts will get worse with climate change, and that poor countries like Ethiopia will be hardest hit. Shidhulai Swanirvar SangsthaFlooding closes many schools in Bangladesh, but not for these children on solar-powered school boats built by Mohammed Rezwan, founder of the non-profit Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha. Solar-powered school boatsThe third film, Easy Like Water documents the water crisis in Bangladesh.The small South Asian nation of 150 million people on the coast of the Bay of Bengal has been facing increasingly intense floods and storms.We learn about this growing crisis from architect Mohammed Rezwan, who has built a