A Food Sovereignty Assessment: Massabielle, Haiti
- Access to sufficient, good-quality land is limited, with 41 percent of participants reporting difficulty accessing land.
- Households are large (an average of 5.6 children and 8.8 members) and overwhelmingly local (97 percent of participants were born in the North department).
- The study argues that food sovereignty assessments capture social, political, environmental and gender dimensions of the local food system that conventional food-security assessments miss.
This report presents a Food Sovereignty Assessment (FSA) carried out in the summer of 2024 in Massabielle, a remote village on the bank of the Limbé river in the Limbé commune of Haiti's North department. Using a community-engaged assessment tool, it documents the resources, vulnerabilities and aspirations of the local food system across demographics, land and resource access, community food security, food and power, environment, health, gender, and food culture, and closes with residents' visions for the future. The authors situate the work as a case study demonstrating how food sovereignty assessments surface local experience and community-proposed solutions that mainstream food-security assessments, focused on caloric sufficiency and dietary diversity, tend to overlook. It is a research output of the Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire et de valorisation des savoirs sur Haïti (CRIVASH), published via the Institut Culturel Karl Lévêque (ICKL).
How to cite
Carleton University; Institut Culturel Karl Lévêque (ICKL), 2025, A Food Sovereignty Assessment: Massabielle, Haiti, https://www.icklhaiti.org/2025/11/05/crivash-a-food-sovereignty-assessment-massabielle-haiti-2025/