by Jim Lobe (OneWorld News)

A sharp rise in tensions between the owners of a large orange plantation in northern Haiti and workers who have tried to organize a union has caused widespread insecurity in the area, according to a British-based solidarity group.

The union, Batay Ouvriye, says that local police, landowners, and the processing company, Produits Agricole Guacimal, are trying to eliminate the union's organizers and members from among the workers at the St. Raphael plantation, which produces orange extract, mainly for European beverage and liquor companies.

Two workers have been imprisoned without trial over the past month, while another was arrested just last week, according to the British-based Haiti Support Group, which charged in a press release last week that both the local authorities and the courts have sided with the company despite provisions in the Haitian constitution that guarantee the right of all workers to join a union.

The arrests mark the latest in the long-running dispute between Batay Ouvriye and Guacimal at St. Raphael, located about 30 miles south of Cap-Haitien. Guacimal is run by Nonce Zephir, a powerful businessman who, with his brother, Daniel, runs the tree plantation and a processing plant in the village of Madeline in northern Haiti.

The St. Raphael workers, who grow, harvest, and process the oranges, began organizing two years ago in hopes of negotiating improvements in pay and work conditions. According to the Multinational Monitor, the company pays less than the minimum wage (US$1.50 a day) to its harvesters and processors, while working conditions are described as "primitive."

But Nonce Zephir refused to recognize the union's existence, claiming that the fruit-pickers on the plantation are casual laborers and do not have the right to organize.

Last May, unionized workers occupied the orange plantation to stop what they said was an increasingly violent anti-union campaign by Zephir. Reportedly at his behest, the entire executive committee of the local union was jailed by authorities in June, according to the Haiti Support Group.

At the same time, the Support Group and other international union and solidarity organizers launched a campaign to press Remy Cointreau, the Paris- based beverages corporation which reportedly owned a minority interest in Guacimal and bought extract from it, to use its influence to bring the Haitian company to the negotiating table.

Despite having insisted that it was urging the two Zephir brothers to do precisely that, Remy Cointreau's international director, Olivier Charriaud, informed Batay Ouvriye last January that it had decided to stop buying extract from Guacimal.

The announcement itself has generated confusion among the parties involved. Nonce Zephir told a reporter from the British newspaper The Observer in February that he had not been informed of any changes in the Guacimal's relationship with Remy Cointreau. Nor was it clear whether the French company would sell its shares in Guacimal, described only last year by Remy Cointreau's chief executive officer, Dominique Herard Dubreuil, as a "minority, although significant" holding. The company did not respond to an email query sent to it for clarification by OneWorld.

Meanwhile, workers have reportedly grown increasingly angry with Guacimal both for its failure to recognize the union and its efforts to prevent those associated with the union from cultivating plots of land between the orange trees, an accepted practice in the area.

Workers began cutting down orange trees to protest the company's actions early last month.

Shortly after, the department delegate of President Jean Bertrand Aristide visited the plantation and declared his opposition to tree-cutting. His apparent backing for Guacimal was taken as a green light for a new crackdown against the union, according to the Support Group.