A Comprehensive and Strategic Study of Haiti's Agricultural and Rural Sector and the Public Investment Required for its Development
- Agriculture's share of GDP fell from 30 percent in 2001 to 23 percent in 2014, while 57.8 percent of the workforce was still in agriculture in 2014.
- Close to one million farms, nearly 800,000 of them under 1.3 ha.
- Land productivity fell from 900 to 600 constant 2005 US dollars per hectare between 1996 and 2013.
- In the early 1960s food imports and exports were of similar size; by 2011 imports were almost 50 times exports in value.
- 5 percent of Haitians were below the poverty line, 74.9 percent in rural areas, and the 2012 income Gini was 60.8.
- Recommends opening a process to revise the 1987 Constitution and aligning with the CARICOM tariff policy.
A 648-page study directed by Geert van Vliet, Gaël Pressoir, Jacques Marzin and Thierry Giordano, with a team from CIRAD, Université Quisqueya and other institutions, and a steering group from the IDB and MARNDR. It opens with an executive summary and runs in four parts: agriculture in its economic and environmental context; the diversity of farms and value chains, including land tenure from the 2010 agricultural census; investment in innovation, rural finance, higher education, rural infrastructure, a review of the IDB portfolio and public and private financial flows; and governance, with three scenarios for the sector. The executive summary reports that agriculture's share of GDP fell from 30 percent in 2001 to 23 percent in 2014, that close to one million farms exist, nearly 800,000 under 1.3 ha, and that by 2011 food imports were almost 50 times exports in value. It names the 1987 Constitution as a main cause of weak public service delivery.
How to cite
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), 2016, A Comprehensive and Strategic Study of Haiti's Agricultural and Rural Sector and the Public Investment Required for its Development, accessed via HaitiDocs, https://www.haitidocs.org/doc/iadb-2016-etude-exhaustive-secteur-agricole-rural