Aligned National Action Programme to Combat Desertification

Haiti ratified the UN Convention to Combat Desertification and prepared a national action program in 2009 with UNDP and GTZ support. This document aligns that program with the ten-year strategic framework adopted at the Convention's eighth Conference of the Parties in Madrid in 2007, taking account of the limits of implementation since 2009 and of newer national priorities. It follows the fourth national desertification report of June 2014, was drafted by the firm Agroconsult Haïti SA, which also produced that report, and was validated by the watershed management sub-committee bringing together the ministries of environment, agriculture, planning and external cooperation, economy and finance, and interior.

The physical setting is the argument. Haiti is roughly 80 percent mountainous with steep relief: only 21 percent of land has a slope under 10 percent, more than half exceeds 40 percent, and a quarter of the territory is plain. Every recognized form of land degradation is present, including erosion, soil salinization, loss of fertility, forest dieback, forest fires and pasture degradation, and of these the document identifies erosion as the gravest. Water erosion is estimated to cost the country about 37 million tonnes of soil a year, an average near 15 tonnes per hectare per year nationally, with the worst-affected zones found in every department. Socio-economic framing is drawn from the period's data: GDP growth above 3 percent from 2011 to 2013 after a contraction of 5.4 percent in the 2010 earthquake year, agriculture's contribution declining as disasters hit the sector, roughly 77 percent of the population below the poverty line on less than USD 2 a day and more than half below USD 1, over 77 percent of the 140 communes carrying a basic-services deficit, and about 51 percent of the rural population with access to drinking water.

The alignment itself is organized around the Convention's operational objectives rather than by rewriting the program's substance: the intervention areas are unchanged, and existing activities, results and indicators are mapped onto advocacy and education, an enabling policy framework, science and technology and knowledge, capacity building, and financing and technology transfer, with activities often assigned to several objectives at once. The Convention's strategic objectives it works towards are improving affected populations' living conditions, improving ecosystem condition, generating general benefits from effective implementation, and mobilizing resources through partnerships between national and international actors. The document also treats the Ministry of Environment's own budget capacity as an operational constraint, proposing a strategic orientation council, training of staff on budget legislation and procedures and on public procurement, establishment of the procurement commission within the ministry, and reinforcement of its programming, monitoring and evaluation unit. Target regions are identified by degradation level and strategic importance, with the Centre, Artibonite and Nord-Ouest axis around Boucan Carré, Lascahobas, Maïssade and Thomassique, the Chaîne des Cahos and the Ennery basins singled out in relation to the Artibonite and Estère watersheds and the country's largest irrigation system. Rural livelihood zone profiles covering populations of three to four million each are used to link degradation to how people live.