Strategic Plan for Agricultural and Rural Development of the Grand'Anse Department
- The plan's opening judgment is that the department's prevailing agricultural growth model is counterproductive: under demographic pressure, strong urbanization and low productivity it leads to the collapse of land productivity and accelerating degradation of natural resources, with the old ecological balances that maintained soil fertility broken in many situations under the combined effect of land pressure and climate change.
- Agriculture is defended as a social priority as much as an economic one. About 60 percent of the department's population is rural, and the plan argues that farming absorbs the people without the cultural and social capital to enter other sectors, while also tying the peasant to the land in a way that shapes identity.
- State presence is quantified, and it is thin: the ministry has 3 supervisory or agronomist staff in the department and 7 field agents across the communal agricultural offices, roughly one technician for one to three communes. Staff turnover is attributed to the pay gap with NGOs, which draws agents away as soon as an opening appears.
- The department's marginality in national planning is explained by a single number: Grand'Anse holds only 3 percent of the plain lands that national policy treats as priority, which is why it is not considered a national stake despite being identified as a food-producing region.
- Production is sharply seasonal, and the plan gives the split: the main harvest runs October to January and delivers 70 to 80 percent of output, the second runs April to July for 20 to 30 percent. Any marketing or transport intervention has to be built around that concentration.
- The proposed comparative advantage is ecological rather than volumetric. With agroforestry already occupying about 45 percent of the surface according to the Rural Development Program report, the plan argues for building an equation between the ecological and landscape quality of Grand'Anse and the quality of its products, through agro-ecology or organic farming, on condition that the landscape is preserved.
- The recommendations are organized in three blocks: dynamizing production through proximity services (technical assistance, credit, seeds and planting material, experimentation, diffusion and demonstration); structuring the agricultural and rural economy (a food transport plan for Grand'Anse, better marketing arrangements, diversification of activities); and the territorial organization of agricultural and rural development.
- The plan is a municipal product, not a ministry one. It was produced by the mayors' association with a named drafting and steering committee and four field enumerators, and the Conseil général des Côtes-d'Armor is credited with the financial and operational support, including secondment of an agent, that made it possible.
- One caution on the stored text: it contains passages on the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area, urban land prices and the national distribution of health and education services, carrying footnote artifacts, that read as material from another source rather than from this plan. Figures drawn from those passages should not be attributed to AMAGA without checking the PDF.
Produced by the Association des Maires de la Grand'Anse and dated January 2011, this is the strategic plan for agricultural and rural development of the Grand'Anse department. Its drafting and steering committee is named in full: Guims Germain as study lead, Gilles Maréchal and Lambian Pierre as technical advisers, and four field enumerators. The authorship matters: this is a plan produced by the department's elected mayors collectively rather than by the ministry or a donor, which makes it one of the few documents in the corpus articulating an agricultural strategy from local government upward, and a useful counterpoint to the MARNDR-authored Grand'Anse material of the same period.
How to cite
Association des Maires de la Grand'Anse (AMAGA), 2011, Strategic Plan for Agricultural and Rural Development of the Grand'Anse Department, https://agripubhaiti.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/GrandAnse-Rapport-du-travail-sur-l-elaboration-du-plan-Agricole-version-validee-Grand-Anse-ND-adds-Repaired.docx