BH: When Columbus first arrived, the island of Hispaniola was completely forested. In fact most parts of the world were forested, aside from the major deserts like the Sahara and so forth. So now it's roughly 10%, depending on how you classify complete forest and incomplete forest. People might disagree about the details. There's roughly 10% of the original Caribbean forest that's left. So that's a lot of forest that's disappeared. Much of the lowland forest was cut along time ago, hundreds of years ago, you know when the mahogany wood was being harvested out of the Caribbean. But that's been exhausted for many years. And now they're cutting the last remaining patches on the most remote pieces of land in the Caribbean, which is typical around the world. The last remaining forest is the area where humans have the most difficuty to reach. Not only scientists, but the local people, the local population.
(Interview with Dr. S. Blair Hedges, Department of Biology; The Pennsylvania State University; University Park, PA, http://www.earthsky.com/2002/esmi020310.html)

“The remarkable extent of deforestation and land degradation in Haiti began with colonial clearing for plantations and accelerated after independence with industrial logging of state lands to pay foreign debts (Pierre-Louis 1989). Developers cleared large tracts of forest for coffee and other agricultural plantations. Then industrial logging for export became an important economic activity throughout the colonialperiod. Early Haitian governments also encouraged logging to gain hard currency to pay off the wartime indemnity to France.”
(POLICY LESSONS FROM HISTORY AND NATURAL RESOURCE PROJECTS IN RURAL HAITI, T. Anderson White, Department of Forest Resources, 115 Green Hall, University of Minnesota, 1530 North Cleveland Avenue, St. Paul, MN USA 55108; Tel: (612) 624-1224; Fax: (612) 625-5212Working Paper No. 17, 58 Pages, November 1994, http://www.wisc.edu/epat/.forest/.pol-haiti/.entire.html)

HUMAN HISTORY IN THE UPPER LA HOTTE MOUNTAINS
In spite of the isolation caused by the mountainous landscape, the southern peninsula has played an important role in the history of Haiti. Thirteen years after the revolution began in 1791, the decimated economy and population of French St. Domingue became divided into a northern kingdom and a southern republic. In the north, under the rule of the generals Toussaint Louverture (1796- 1803) and later Jean Jacques Dessalines (1804-06) there was an attempt to resurrect the plantation economy using forced labor. The resistance of the ex-slaves ultimately frustrated them. In the south, Alexandre Petion took another path and began to redistribute the abandoned plantation land in parcels (from15-80 acres) to former members of the army, government employees and political allies. By the end of Jean-Pierre Boyer's (who succeeded Petion) presidency in 1843, Haiti had been united into one nation, forced labor had ended a second time and nearly 500,000 acres of land had been distributed to smallholders. Whether it was Petion who "decided the agrarian future of Haiti" (Lacerte 1978:46) or if the ex-slaves redistributed the land themselves in the vacuum of post-revolutionary Haiti (Murray 1977, Lundahl 1979), the transformation was profound. In one generation Haiti became a subsistence-based peasantry that produced coffee and other export crops on their household plots. The new peasantry brought their lowland agricultural techniques (slash and burn) and their crops up into the steep mountains. Each generation divided up the family inheritance so that today's average land holding is less than 1.5 ha.
The expanding peasantry was historically dependent on imported food items and consumer goods (dried fish, flour, soap, clothing) so they combined subsistence agriculture with the production of export crops to raise cash. The peasantry underwrote the national economy by generating surplus and foreign exchange for the ruling classes, the state and the army. Through customs duties and taxes on exports of mahogany, logwood, coffee, cotton and cacao, the peasantry paid off the 19th century indemnity to France (150 million francs) for its recognition of Haiti's sovereignty. While the south had undergone a revolution in agricultural production from 1804-1843, the environment had begun to change even before the rebellion of 1791. Sugar on the lowland plains had made the French colony of Saint Domingue the most successful of Europe's slave colonies in the Caribbean but a major shift in production to coffee in the second half of the 18th century initiated changes in settlement patterns. In contrast to the gang-labor used on sugar plantations, coffee production was managed by smaller groups of slaves in the highlands. The rapid expansion of coffee in Saint Domingue up until 1791 was a significant spatial and productive shift in society and economy (Trouillot 1985). The legacy of both crops remains; sugar is an important crop in the Cayes plain below La Hotte, while coffee is still grown in the mountains and sold asa cash crop. Coffee in the upper elevations of La Hotte did not arrive until relatively late in the history of the colony. In 1781, large plantations of coffee were expanding in two locations below 1000 meters in the laHotte range (Street 1960). By the end of the century, the entire southern peninsula had been ceded to coffee plantations, but the crop had not been planted and most of the land was still in forest at the start of the revolution. It was the expansion of peasant production of food crops in thelate 20th century that pushed farming higher up the slopes. (Street 1960). State lands at the highest elevations were deforested for charcoal and construction materials, and gardens of black beans, an important source of protein in the Haitian diet.
The lowland sugar mills, essential oil factories (transforming vetiver and lemon grass) and alcohol distilleries all consumed wood from the La Hotte mountains for fuel. In general, forest resource extraction (even charcoal production) is a secondary cause of deforestation in La Hotte. The main force has been the need for land by an expanding peasantry. Over the 21 years between the US Army aerial photos of La Hotte in 1957 and 1978, the forest was cut by hand, then burned and farmed for a couple of seasons and then fallowed. This process was repeated fewer than ten times before an estimated 85% of the Macaya forest disappeared (Cohen 1984).
(Monaghan, http://136.142.158.105/2000PDF/Monaghan.PDF)