Valley of Hope

Atop a flag-decked stand at Canneau one day last week, President Paul Magloire cocked his aluminum safety helmet at a rakish angle and pushed a plunger to explode 50 lbs. of dynamite, the first blast in the construction of Haiti's $21 million Little TVA in the Artibonite Valley (TIME, Jan. 12).* A small boy in the crowd of 2,000, expecting something downright atomic, heard the muffled whoom and muttered, "Pas bon [no good]."

In the island valley are 106,000 peasants, many of whom must still be convinced that President Magloire's favorite project is bon. Within 40 months, Haiti will have one of the world's highest buttress dams wedged in Peligre Canyon, 225 ft. high and 1,075 ft. wide, backing up some 328 million cubic meters of water. This water will flow 60 miles to the smaller intake dam at Canneau, where it will be diverted into canals to irrigate 80,000 acres of their land. Yet many black farmers cannot understand the need for the project. Used to primitive subsistence-level farming, they fear any experiment as a possible short cut to starvation; accustomed to being victimized by landowners and loan sharks, they deeply distrust any help offered with seemingly altruistic motives. Their attitude has always been: "If a farm agent knows some better way of farming, why isn't he busy making money at it instead of telling us about it?"

To persuade such skeptics, President Magloire plans to rely mainly on the gros negres, the natural leaders of the rural communities, such as Dorneirl Romeus, 23, one of the first sharecroppers to lease five acres at Bois Dehors, the valley's pilot irrigation project. Dorneirl netted $211 on his first bumper rice crop; before, he lived all year on a near-starvation diet and ended up with $10 cash. Now farmers who know him are eager for the completion of the Artibonite project, so that they can follow his example. Reclaiming, leveling and watering the entire 80,000 acres will require at least nine years, Haitian agronomists estimate. But by that time, they hope to have the valley sown with such diverse crops as cereals, vegetables, peanuts, kenaf, tobacco and cotton. Like Dorneirl, other Haitian farmers will be able to rebuild their wattle & daub huts, buy new clothes and send their children to school for the first time.

* Jointly financed by the U.S. Export-Import Bank ($14 million) and the Haitian government.

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