Port-au-Prince.– The desperate poverty in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation, isn't just a matter of economics. It's also a matter of the environment. Haiti is trapped in a classic downward spiral.

Desperately poor people have stripped the mountainous land of its trees to use for cooking fuel. Rains then wash away the unprotected soil, destroying potential farmland and leaving people even poorer.

But several emerging programs hope to pull Haiti out of the predicament by planting trees too valued for their fruit to be destroyed, finding better crops to preserve the soil, and exploiting a new and plentiful source for fuel: garbage.

The fate of Haiti's trees is evident in almost any market in the capital, Port-au-Prince. In the charcoal sellers' corner, vendors –mostly women– scoop fragments of carbonized tree branches into bags.

Mimi, a charcoal seller for six years, says a medium sack goes for the equivalent of around $12, enough for a small family to cook its food for about 10 days. Other fuels, such as propane, have to be imported and are too expensive for most Haitians.

Many of the trees used to make the charcoal that Mimi sells were not much bigger than broomsticks. They were cut before they could become useful for shade or fruit, or to hold the soil. They were cut because many people in rural Haiti have nothing else to sell.

Many reforestation efforts in Haiti have ultimately failed. International organizations have underwritten the planting of hundreds of thousands of trees, only to see them cut down as soon as they are big enough to burn.