A few hours inland from the Haitian capital city of Port-au-Prince, a black rural cultivator named Nesmère controls a three-acre plot of land. Like other rural Haitians, and like thousands of other small-scale farmers throughout the islands of the Caribbean Sea, Nesmère produces a combination of cash and subsistence crops. The beans, yams, corn, breadfruit, guava, and citrus are for Nesmère, his wife, and their three children. The coffee that he cultivates in the shade of the breadfruit and citrus trees finds its way into an international commodity flow through a complex local marketing system (Grove 1981; Girault 1985).

Nesmère, his family, and his neighbors are, of course, vitally dependent on their immediate physical environment for life and livelihood. So when Hurricane Allen ravaged the southwestern peninsula of Haiti in 1980, rural Haitians went even hungrier than usual, and some survived only because of food relief supplies from the United States. But weather hazards, including hurricanes and droughts, are only ephemeral events. The fundamental ecological problem in Haiti is its soil erosion. Too many people for too little arable land has pushed Haitian subsistence cultivation onto ever-steeper hillsides, creating an all-too-familiar vicious circle in which the land's capacity to produce is continuously undermined by the necessity to cultivate marginal slopes.