FAO asks public to donate fruit trees for Haiti school yards

A UN agency unveiled an initiative on Friday asking people to donate fruit trees, which would be planted in school yards across quake-hit Haiti in order to lend a hand to children there.

The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)'s program "Fruit Trees for Haiti" aims to provide teachers with a hands-on education tool for children in Haiti, which suffers the worst rates of deforestation in the world, the agency said in a statement.

Fruit trees were chosen also because, once fully grown, they will also help improve local children's nutrition.

The agency's director-general, Jacques Diouf, who is on a three- day mission to Haiti to raise awareness about the need for international support to agriculture in the Caribbean country, planned to launch the initiative with a symbolic tree-planting at a school in a town outside of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital.

The town, which is called Croix des Bouquets and untouched by the deadly earthquake that hit Haiti on Jan. 12 and killed more than 200,000 people, is now playing host to tens of thousands of refugees from the capital.

The FAO said that just a 5-dollar donation is enough to buy an avocado or mango tree and also covers fertilizer and other inputs as well as educational material.

The FAO believed that the initiative is built on the organization's experience in rolling out school gardens in developing countries. Buildings surrounded by trees are also better protected from the flooding that can occur in the Haitian rainy season.

Source: Xinhua