Environmental Diagnosis of the Nippes Department
- Quantifies mineral reserves precisely enough to be actionable: a pure calcium carbonate deposit at Paillant with reserves evaluated at 140,000,000 tonnes over 1.3 square kilometers, and a deposit at Desruisseaux near Miragoâne with reserves estimated at 20,000,000 tonnes over 1.5 square kilometers.
- Records forest cover at under 3 percent of the department's area, against about 40 percent in savanna with other plant species and 10 percent in various agroforestry systems.
- Records mangroves covering under 1 percent of the total area, concentrated on the coasts of Baradères, Petite-Rivière-de-Nippes and Anse-à-Veau, which is where the department's coastal protection sits.
- Finds dense and moderately dense agricultural crops occupying more than 40 percent of the department, so cultivation rather than pasture is the dominant land use.
- Identifies beekeeping as an economic activity resting on the department's melliferous resources, with about a hundred professional beekeepers concentrated in Baradères, Petit-Trou-de-Nippes, Anse-à-Veau and Petite-Rivière-de-Nippes.
- Records the population at 271,859 in 2005 with 83 percent rural and an average density of 214 inhabitants per square kilometer.
- Notes guava adapting to the 400 to 700 metre altitude band, which ties a specific crop opportunity to a mapped zone.
Prepared by GEOConsultants for the Ministry of the Environment under the Programme de Renforcement Institutionnel pour la Gestion de l'Environnement (PRIGE), an MDE-IDB project financed by loan 1668 SF/HA, and dated October 2008. It sets out the context and approach, then the physical situation of the Nippes department and its resources: geography and administration, relief and climate, and the department's natural resource potential beginning with water. Note the publisher: despite sitting in an agricultural library this is an environment ministry document, not a MARNDR one, and it is the environmental counterpart to the MARNDR-IFAD agro-economic study of the same department two years later.
How to cite
Government of Haiti; Ministry of the Environment (MDE); Inter-American Development Bank (IDB); GEOConsultants, 2008, Environmental Diagnosis of the Nippes Department, https://agripubhaiti.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Diagnostic_NIPPESFinal101008.doc