Agro-Socio-Economic Diagnosis of the Commune of Saint-Michel-de-l'Attalaye
- Finds a commune losing people rather than growing into its land: annual population growth averaged 1.6 percent between 1982 and 2003, and net change for 2003 to 2009 is estimated at between minus 2,500 and minus 700 inhabitants, with 80 percent of the population rural.
- Maps remittance geography that is regional before it is North American: intra-national transfers make up close to 68 percent, and among foreign origins Chile leads at 12.21 percent, ahead of the Dominican Republic at 7.64 percent, the United States at 6.10 percent, Brazil at 5.34 percent and Canada at 0.76 percent.
- Records tenure that is more secure than expected, with 77.25 percent of parcels held by gift, purchase or definitive partition on an average of 3.36 parcels per household, the median household holding all its parcels securely.
- Finds women heavily under-represented as heads of holding in the sample at 14.37 percent, well below the 26.31 percent in the agricultural census, which the study flags as a sampling question rather than a change on the ground.
- Shows agricultural training almost absent: only 12.21 percent of the producers surveyed had attended a training seminar, against a census figure of more than 99 percent of Saint-Michel farmers with no agricultural training at all.
- Reports drought, not storms, as the loss farmers describe, with reported seasonal losses of 60 to 90 percent in one zone and 30 to 50 percent in another, and notes that the old planting calendar no longer predicts the rains.
Produced in July 2021 under lot 2 of the PMDN II project on designing a research, training and agricultural extension program for climate change adaptation at Saint-Michel-de-l'Attalaye, coordinated by Bénédique Paul (CHIBAS/UniQ), Sandrine Fréguin-Gresh and Jacques Marzin (CIRAD) and Gaël Pressoir (CHIBAS), with contributions from a wider team. Its methodology is set out in unusual detail: secondary data to situate the commune, transect and plot-level observation to establish the geomorphological and biophysical organization of the territory, and open and semi-structured interviews with resource persons to frame the study. At 167 pages it is among the most thorough commune-level diagnoses in the corpus, and it pairs with the Saint-Raphaël diagnosis produced under the same program.
How to cite
Government of Haiti; Ministry of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Rural Development (MARNDR); CHIBAS - Université Quisqueya (UniQ); CIRAD, 2021, Agro-Socio-Economic Diagnosis of the Commune of Saint-Michel-de-l'Attalaye, https://agripubhaiti.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Diagnostic-FIANL-2021-07-02_Rapport_Diagnostic_PMDN_complet-1.pdf