Agricultural Sector Growth Investment Plan, Annex 12: Access to Land and Security of Tenure
Summary: Annex 12 to Haiti's agricultural sector growth investment plan, under the agricultural services and institutional support component. It treats access to land and security of tenure: the context and the case for intervening, against the ministry's 2010-2025 agricultural development policy. Land tenure is the constraint most Haitian agricultural investment eventually runs into, and this is the plan's own treatment of it.
Key Findings
- Sets the land constraint in national arithmetic: Haiti covers 27,750 square kilometers but only 29 percent is arable land, and on IMF estimates from 2006 only 49 percent of that was under cultivation.
- Records a population of about 9 million in 2005 growing at 1.69 percent a year over 2000 to 2005, with about 60 percent still living in rural areas and 21 percent in Port-au-Prince as of 12 January 2010.
- Registers the earthquake's reversal of that distribution, with about half a million people leaving the capital for rural areas, mainly the Artibonite, Centre and Grand'Anse departments, which is what puts new pressure on land tenure.
- Identifies extremely small parcel size as the defining characteristic of Haitian agricultural land, so tenure insecurity operates on holdings that are already fragmented.
- Structures the intervention in stages, with tenure reform as the second step rather than the first, and sets out the objective, approach and elements before it.
- Seeks synergies with the other United Nations initiatives on urban areas and post-earthquake resettlement, so rural tenure work is coordinated with where displaced people actually went.
How to cite
Ministry of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Rural Development (MARNDR), 2010, Agricultural Sector Growth Investment Plan, Annex 12: Access to Land and Security of Tenure, http://agriculture.gouv.ht/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/annexe_11.pdf