SAN JOSE DE OCOA, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC — Something has been disturbing Dominican pilots as they fly around their island. They cannot see the border anymore.
For decades the border that divides the Dominican two-thirds of the island and the Haitian one-third has been clearly distinguishable from the air. Suddenly the green treetops stop and you know you are in wretchedly poor and deforested Haiti.
But now there are not that many treetops left in the Dominican Republic. There is no longer a green side and a brown side of the island. And Dominicans are beginning to wonder if the erosion, hunger and poverty of Haiti are expanding eastward as the clearing of precious trees spreads out of control.
Foreign advisers have been warning Dominicans of this for years. ``They should take Dominicans, 100 at a time, over to Haiti to look. Just to give them a scare,`` said a foreign diplomat in Santo Domingo.
The conservative government of Joaquin Balaguer, which took office in July, 1986, seems worried and at last willing to do something about it. ``The government has become absolutely aware that this situation cannot continue,`` said Bruno Guandalini, representative of the United Nations Development Program in the Dominican Republic.
Foreign specialists hope that this fall the Dominican Republic will get its first effective national reforestation campaign.
The Balaguer government has promised to create a streamlined government department for reforestation. In response to this the UN is proposing a $16 million-a-year reforestation program. ``This is a beginning,`` said Guandalini. ``But we will need much more in the future.``
The situation has been allowed to deteriorate yearly, and government programs seem inadequate to reverse the problem. A longstanding law making it illegal to cut a tree without a permit has never been enforced. In 1973 the UN estimated that only 16 percent of the Dominican Republic was covered with forest, down from 80 percent in 1920.
A satellite survey in 1979 showed further deterioration, to about 14 percent covered. It is thought to be even less now.
In Haiti less than 4 percent of the land has forest cover. Pressures on land are far greater there. Although Haiti has little more than half as much territory as the Dominican Republic, it has the same population and has twice as much land under cultivation.
Dominican land has not reached the pitiful state of Haiti, where rural families often cannot eat every day because of the poor productivity. Still, the Dominican peasant is far from prosperous, and food production barely keeps up with population growth.
In this mountainous area of the Cordillera Central, peasants clear trees off slopes to plant their food, mainly corn and beans. Without trees to hold the topsoil, the yield lessens every year and the peasant diet becomes poorer. The poor state of nutrition was illustrated by a local parish priest, Rev. Luis Quinn, who found when serving milk to 8-year-old children that many could not even identify the unknown white liquid.
The 160 inhabitants of the tiny village of Derrumbado, near San Jose de Ocoa, feel the effects of deforestation. They say 200 rivers have vanished from the region. The ones that remain are small trickles until it rains. Then they become ferocious floods, washing away the richest topsoil from their mountain slopes. Their fields produce less each year.
Since the best bottom land was already taken by wealthy landowners and the state, these poor farmers carved out fields by burning trees off the mountain slopes. From their bald peaks, they can see the white smoke of other fields being created. But without trees these fields will not remain fertile for long.
Luis Emilio Feliz, 55, one of the larger landholders in Derrumbado, rents out his land as a tree nursery. ``We care about trees because we care about water,`` he said, surveying the still green slopes with dirt-colored scars of erosion. ``Before, people didn`t understand the danger because there were so many trees.``
His nursery has produced more than 2 million trees since 1982. But the international organizations that have funded this and other projects say it will not be enough. ``We couldn`t do a thing in the past because of the institutional structure,`` said the UN`s Guandalini.
Reforestation responsibilities were spread over several ministries and were largely controlled by the army.
In recent years the Dominican government has been planting about 800,000 trees a year, but that is thought to be far fewer than the number destroyed. Millions of trees are chopped down every year just to make charcoal for cooking.
The priorities of the new UN program are replanting watershed areas and nurseries for fuel wood. But they see the real challenge as being educating more peasants such as Emilio Feliz to the value of trees.
``The real problem is how to involve the peasants,`` said Guandalini.
``They are the worst enemy of the forest because they feel that they get nothing from it.``
Emilio Feliz knows the importance of trees. He calls them ``our survival.``