Arrêté declaring 2000 the Year of Solidarity with the Peasant Masses

Le Moniteur, 155e année, No. 5, Monday 17 January 2000, carrying an arrêté of President René Préval.

The preamble is the substance. It cites the decree of 8 January 1968 amending the law of 5 March 1937 to protect rural populations more effectively; the decree of 14 July 1989 authorising a systematic survey of all available cultivable land in the private domain of the State for distribution to needy peasant families; the decree of 29 April 1995 organising the Institut National de la Réforme Agraire; and the arrêté of 23 October 1996 authorising INARA to take provisional possession of any disputed stretch of land in the Republic. It states that at the dawn of the third millennium the condition of the Haitian peasant, most often neglected by the public authorities, embodies every threat weighing on a nation whose human development index is among the lowest on the planet, and that the aim is to lift the peasant out of deprivation and poverty by changing the structure of community life towards a solidarity lived at national scale.

The issue also carries a company authorisation and a customs franchise. The instrument matters as a statement of agrarian policy at a specific moment, and for the chain of land-reform instruments its preamble assembles: the corpus holds the INARA organisation decree and the land tenure diagnostics that followed.