Olgo Fernandez of the Office for Border Development announced that the Bi-national Artibonite Watershed Management Project would begin on 15 December and is programmed to last seven years. Forty per cent of the project will be implemented on the Dominican side of the border and 60% on the Haitian side. The initiative is being financed through donations from the governments of Canada and Italy and the United Nations. The Canadian International Development Agency has approved a sum of 10 million Canadian dollars for the project whose goal is to help reduce poverty in the border zones in the Artibonite watershed between Haiti and the DR, to help protect the environment, to make sound use of natural resources and to help reduce tensions on the island of Hispaniola by strengthening bi-national dialogue.
The project includes the installation of 24 nurseries with the capacity to produce 400,000 fruit- and wood-producing trees per year.