In a normal year, Haiti would now start preparing for the spring planting season, which ends in May. The spring crop usually produces 60% of the country's food.

Unfortunately, the earthquake that hit has forced many families 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% of kids under age five suffering from 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 calories from livestock-based foods.

In hurricane years, the people suffer even more. In 2008, for example, the country suffered three hurricanes and a tropical storm; now, the massive earthquake. Food supplies are urgently at 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 is ravaging the steep slopes. Mudslides are overrunning roads and irrigation systems.

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

In most years, agriculture provides one-fourth of the country's economic output and perhaps 70% 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 1 million tons per year -- is imported. Now, there is no money to buy more grain. The U.N. 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 they don't dare venture out far in their decrepit boats, and they are up against fishermen from other countries who have 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 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 getting involved in 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.

World Bank wrote a plaintive report saying the only prop for the economy now is remittances from Haitians in other countries -- about $1.87 billion in 2009, which is equal to 35% 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 be 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? Don't count on that. The few "good" hotels were flattened by the quake, many with their visitors inside.

Source: Feedstuffs magazine