Analysis of the Legal and Institutional Framework for Sustainable Land Management
- Sets the land constraint against the labour it carries: agriculture occupies 51 percent of the active population while producing only 25 percent of GDP, on a useful agricultural area of about one million hectares.
- Records unemployment among the working-age population rising from 55 percent in 2001 to 70 percent in 2007 on IHSI figures, which the analysis reads as confirming mass poverty.
- Finds a large share of the territory unfit for agriculture, with soils reaching bedrock accounting for about 40 percent of the total considered unsuitable, and slopes generally above 40 percent where forest has disappeared, on which the author states agriculture is neither desirable nor viable.
- Quantifies erosion at more than 25,000 tonnes per hectare per year on the worst land, which is the figure agrarian and rural law is asked to respond to.
- Converts charcoal consumption into wood: the 400,000 tonnes of charcoal consumed annually represent more than one million tonnes of wood, drawn from forest capital rather than from growth.
- Records one fuel source covering 70 percent of current availability, so the energy substitution question is concentrated rather than diffuse.
- Was written under the MDE project to create an enabling environment for sustainable land management, financed by the GEF with UNDP support, so its legal analysis is tied to a capacity-building mandate.
Land tenure sits underneath most Haitian questions about agriculture, watersheds and urban expansion, and this is a systematic treatment of the legal instruments and the institutions that administer them. The report opens on a quotation from Renaud Raymond's 1934 study of the land regime, to the effect that most of Haiti's disorders were caused by the defective organization of landed property, which sets its argument. It carries the standard disclaimer that its conclusions are not necessarily those of the MDE, UNDP or the GEF.
How to cite
Ministry of the Environment (MDE); United Nations Development Programme (UNDP); Global Environment Facility (GEF), 2010, Analysis of the Legal and Institutional Framework for Sustainable Land Management, https://www.undp.org/fr/haiti/publications/analyse-du-cadre-legal-et-institutionnel-relatif-la-gestion-durable-des-terres