Agrarian Diagnosis of the Baptiste Area, Plateau Central
- Reaches the conclusion an agrarian diagnosis exists to reach: agricultural income for a two-worker family is about 12,600 gourdes a year, far below the survival threshold the study computes at some 22,900 gourdes per worker per year, so farming in this zone does not cover incompressible needs on its own.
- Places extreme poverty at about 38,300 gourdes per worker per year for Haiti and computes two higher thresholds at 44,400 and 55,640, against sharecropper holdings returning about 38,000 gourdes a year, which is why off-farm income and migration are structural here rather than incidental.
- Documents credit at rates that make accumulation impossible: cash loans reaching 10 percent a month, 10 percent for a one-week loan and 25 to 30 percent a month over several months, with petty trade goods bought on credit at 10 percent a week or 10 percent a day, against CODES lending at 2.5 percent a month but only to existing savers.
- Finds the land charge taking 40 percent of income in Haiti against 30 percent in the Dominican Republic, while sharecropping still supplies the cereals for 32 percent of meals.
- Traces the zone's present structure to specific past decisions rather than to gradual change: the 1948 agrarian colony under Dumarsais Estimé, the coffee trade framed by the Code du café under the Duvaliers, the US-required total slaughter of Creole pigs in the early 1980s, and the 1995 cut in sugar tariffs from 50 to 3 percent.
- Reads altitude as the organizing variable of the farming system, with the hard limestone outcrop at about 1,120 meters separating where oranges and pigeon pea grow from the higher slopes, and late varieties yielding at ten months, or twelve above 1,340 meters.
- Records the Dominican Republic as a working part of the local economy, with a gourde-peso rate near parity during the fieldwork, seasonal swings driven by labor transfers between December and February, and a border crossing costing 2,000 gourdes a person and described as dangerous.
Célia Pasquetti conducted this agrarian diagnosis of the Baptiste area during a placement from March to October 2007, as part of a Master 2 in agricultural development at Montpellier SupAgro and the Institut National Agronomique de Paris-Grignon (AgroParisTech). Her field supervisor was Arnauld Finet of Agronomes et Vétérinaires Sans Frontières and her academic tutor Sophie Devienne. The diagnostic agraire method it applies studies a small region and privileges the relations between producers and existing organizations, producing a systematic account of how farming in the zone is organized. It is one of two detailed agrarian studies of the Baptiste-Savanette area in this collection and the corpus's most granular treatment of that part of the Centre department.
How to cite
Montpellier SupAgro; AgroParisTech; Agronomes et Vétérinaires Sans Frontières (AVSF), 2007, Agrarian Diagnosis of the Baptiste Area, Plateau Central, https://agripubhaiti.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Diagnostic-Agraire-de-Baptiste.pdf