In-Depth Food Security Assessment in the Context of Drought (Household Economy Approach)
- The deficit is measured in calories, not in perceptions. On average 73.67 percent of very poor and poor households across the 19 communes surveyed show a shortfall of about 798 kilocalories per person per day, which is 38 percent of the 2,100 kilocalorie daily reference.
- The burden is concentrated in one socio-economic category. Very poor households make up 90.2 percent of the severely affected population, 841,699 people, against 9.8 percent for the poor category.
- The average survival deficit is 38 percent and the average livelihood protection deficit 13.33 percent, with survival deficits across zones running between 34 and 40 percent. Those are the two thresholds that separate a household that cannot eat from one that can eat only by selling what it needs to earn a living.
- Labor income collapsed as a share of household income, which is what turns a drought into a purchasing-power crisis. For very poor households, wage labor fell from 62 percent of income in the reference year to 37 percent at the time of the analysis, with self-employment down from 15 to 11 percent and petty trade up from 14 to 21 percent. Total income fell about 24 percent, and combined with higher prices this contracted purchases by 30 percentage points.
- These households buy most of what they eat, so price movements pass straight through: purchases are 63 percent of very poor household consumption, while own production, about 27 percent of food consumed in the reference year, fell 16 percentage points with the harvest.
- Local staples inflated faster than imported ones, which is the opposite of the usual assumption. Milled maize rose 20 to 50 percent and beans 80 to 130 percent, against 5 to 10 percent for imported rice and 13 to 39 percent for wheat flour, the latter two attributed to exchange-rate depreciation.
- Harvest losses of 60 to 90 percent are reported on average, in zones that the assessment says supply about 60 percent of national demand for agricultural products, which is why it treats the shock as national in effect rather than local.
- At zone level the picture is worse than the averages. In one zone about 70 percent of households face a survival deficit of 42 percent and a livelihood protection deficit of 18 percent, with at least 20 percent of households in a food emergency phase; in HT01 the very poor, 45 to 55 percent of the zone's population, record a survival deficit of 44 percent and a livelihood protection deficit of 18 percent.
- The assessment covers the six livelihood zones classified in IPC phase 3 as of March 2016, including Nord tubers and horticulture (HT02), Central Plateau maize and tubers (HT03) and the Ouest market-gardening and bean zone, using the Household Economy Approach with the LIAS analysis spreadsheet, funded by ECHO and coordinated with CNSA. Note that the per-zone tables interleave in the extracted text, so zone-specific figures should be read from the PDF.
Produced by Oxfam's Haiti office in 2016 with the support of ECHO and the Coordination Nationale de la Sécurité Alimentaire, this is an in-depth food security assessment in the context of drought, built on the Household Economy Approach. The HEA method matters here: rather than counting affected people, it models household income and expenditure by wealth group and then tests scenarios to establish whether households can cover survival and livelihoods needs - which is what allows a drought to be quantified as a deficit rather than described as a hardship. Its scenario analysis is the analytical core. It complements the FEWS NET urban baseline for Port-au-Prince held in this batch, which applies the same family of methods to a city.
How to cite
Oxfam; ECHO; National Food Security Coordination (CNSA), 2016, In-Depth Food Security Assessment in the Context of Drought (Household Economy Approach), https://agripubhaiti.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Secheresse-Impacts-Version_finale_Rapport_HEA___Analyse_de_resultats___Scenarios__OXFAM.docVFF.pdf