Agricultural Diagnosis and Development Prospects for the Agricultural Sector in the Grand'Anse
- Divides the department into agro-ecological zones and gives each its share of area: a low median zone between 200 and 500 meters at about 35 percent, a high median humid mountain zone at about 30 percent, and a further zone at about 20 percent, which is the frame the rest of the diagnosis works in.
- Sets rainfall at 800 to 1,300 mm a year in most zones with a median around 1,200 mm, rising to an average of 2,000 mm and locally 3,000 mm in the humid mountain zone, so a single departmental average would mislead.
- Finds holdings at the edge of viability: mean parcel size 1.3 hectares, one carreau, but 19 percent of parcels below 0.1 hectare and, worse, 22 percent of whole holdings below 0.1 hectare.
- Records tenure as mostly indirect where it was measured: in the Balisiers study only 30 percent of the area is worked by the parcel owners, the other 70 percent held in indivision, tenancy, sharecropping or usufruct.
- Puts irrigated area at 3,330 hectares, about 1.8 percent of the department, which bounds what water control can currently do.
- Records land occupation shares, with one class at 44.6 percent of total area and a second at 32.29 percent, dense and moderately dense crops together at 20 percent (12 and 8 percent), and forest at about 2 percent within a 5 percent residual.
- Notes population density varying from 45 to 400 inhabitants per square kilometer, a spread the report insists must be understood rather than averaged.
- Carries a provenance discrepancy worth resolving before citation: the report's own title page and authorship line date it April 2005, while the corpus record carries 2016, the year of its publication under the PDR Grand'Anse programme.
Produced under MARNDR's Programme de Développement Rural for the Grand'Anse, this final report sets out the agricultural diagnosis of the department and the development prospects for its agricultural sector. At 244 pages it is the most substantial of the four Grand'Anse documents in this batch and the ministry's own account, complementing the mayors' association strategic plan of 2011, the chamber of commerce investment case of 2014 and the natural resources action plan of 2014. Its year is taken from the PDF's creation date, as the report carries no date on its opening pages, and it predates Hurricane Matthew in October of that year - so it describes the sector as it stood immediately before the storm that reshaped it.
How to cite
Government of Haiti; Ministry of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Rural Development (MARNDR), 2016, Agricultural Diagnosis and Development Prospects for the Agricultural Sector in the Grand'Anse, https://agripubhaiti.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Rapport-final-GARDEL-GRANDANSE-Planif.pdf