But until recently, this 60-year-old Haitian farmer lacked a reliable means of irrigating his crops.

Senatous’ land is divided among several plots in a narrow valley known as Charrette, not far from the coastal town of Saint-Marc on Haiti’s western shore. The floor of the valley forms a green ribbon between the dusty yellow slopes of the area’s denuded hills. Nearly every square meter of this lush corridor is planted with tomatoes, beans, rice, bananas and papayas. Dozens of huge mango trees provide shade and yet another marketable crop.

Washing clothes in the canal.

The vegetation is thickest along the sides of a concrete irrigation canal that winds like an artery through the valley. Clear water runs briskly down the gently sloping conduit, which is 60 cm wide and 40 cm deep. Local women wash and rinse their laundry in the current and then spread clothes on the canal’s retaining walls to dry. At regular intervals metal sluice gates allow farmers to divert water toward their fields.

Straddling the canal next to a grove of papaya trees, Senatous recently showed a group of visitors how he pulls up a sluice gate and jams it into the open position with a twig. He then pointed toward a network of earthen troughs that quickly filled with water and distributed it throughout the grove.

Upstream vs. downstream. The bucolic scene is deceptive, however. Despite the evident health of Senatous’ fields, he and his neighbors constantly worry about water. Speaking through an interpreter, Senatous told a visitor that he has lived and farmed in the valley his entire life, and that water has become scarcer every year. Until recently, he irrigated his crops by tapping into an earthen canal that was built during the colonial era, but the canal had problems.

“I had to cut sluices and make dikes by hand to divert water,” said Senatous. “It took too much time.” Moreover, the porous walls of the canal absorbed and leaked a large percentage of the water, so that the volume reaching Senatous’ portion of the valley was often meager. People further downstream sometimes received no water at all.

In the mid-1990s a development committee made up of farmers from the Charrette valley approached the government for help in building a new concrete canal that would prevent filtration and allow for precise control of water flow and usage. A few years later the government obtained aid financing from Italy to construct a small channel on the stream that fed the old canal. The Italians also paid to build several hundred meters of new concrete canal leading from the dam, but not enough to reach the downstream communities with the most serious water problems. As a result, the committee approached the Fonds d’Assistance Economique et Sociale (FAES) a government agency that undertakes infrastructure projects with high social impact. In early 2003, FAES used funds from an earlier IDB irrigation project to build an additional 600 meters of concrete canal. According to Ducarmel François, the FAES director for social projects, his agency provided 90 percent of the US$1,934,000 gourdes (around US$50,000) required to build the extension, and local residents provided the balance.

The canal's concrete walls serve as sidewalks and gathering places.

“The new canal has many advantages,” said Robert Méat, secretary general of the development committee. “The water flows much more rapidly and so it reaches much further downstream.” Cleaning and maintaining the canal—an arduous chore during the raining season, when it tends to clog up with garbage and vegetation—is much easier now, he explained. The metal sluice gates save time for farmers and diminish water waste. As a result, crop yields have increased for families in the lower stretches of the valley.

Cecifi Yacinte, a local woman who has lived in Charrette since 1976, likes the fact that water in the concrete canal is much better suited to washing laundry. “When we had the earth canal the water used to always be muddy, so you couldn’t rinse the clothes well,” she told a group of visitors.

Benito Senatous is also pleased with the new canal, which has made it possible for him to produce consistent crops of bananas, papayas and tomatoes that he sells at markets in Saint-Marc. Nevertheless, he still worries about water supplies. “The canal works very well,” he said, “but people upstream are still using too much water and they don’t respect the irrigation schedule.”

The management challenge. According to rules drawn up by the development committee, each family along the canal is permitted to flood their fields with water for two hours per week. There is no official way to enforce this rule, however, and several local farmers expressed suspicions that their upstream neighbors were using more water than they are entitled to.

According to François, these problems underscore the difficulty of getting farmers who have never paid for water to cooperate in conserving the resource and maintaining infrastructure improvements built with donated funds. “You need to work together and do a better job if you want to keep it from filling up with silt,” François told several members of the committee during a recent visit, after inspecting the canal’s intake dam.

The committee members explained that maintenance typically falls off during the dry season but picks up when it rains. “We clean the canal once a week at that time of the year,” said Méat.

Part of the local resistance to working on maintenance crews can also be explained by the long list of chores that already take up people’s time. The Charrette valley has no electricity or running water service. Water from the irrigation canal is not considered safe to drink, so most families send women or children on one-hour walks to collect water from a mountain spring. The dirt road leading to Saint-Marc is in such poor condition that farmers must set aside many hours each week just to transport their crops to market.

Senatous tends a banana field.

Despite these difficulties, the 6,000 people who live along the irrigation canal in Charrette are clearly better off than many of their compatriots in poorer parts of Haiti. The members of the local development committee said they were committed to improving maintenance and enforcing water use rules, and they told François that they want the government to extend the concrete canal for an additional 2,000 meters downstream.

François promised that FAES would study the possibility of extending the canal, but only if people in Charrette proved capable of maintaining the existing structure and of working out water use conflicts among themselves.

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