Legal and Institutional Environment of Agricultural Credit and Insurance in Haiti
- Finds less than 1 percent of total credit allocated to the economy by Haiti's private banking system went to agricultural activity, despite the financial system's growth.
- Estimates agricultural credit distributed by the BCA at between 15 and 20 million gourdes, far below the need.
- Puts rural credit supply from non-cooperative microfinance institutions at about 90 million gourdes a year, roughly 20 percent of those institutions' portfolios.
- Tracks the agricultural credit line from 1.8 million gourdes in 2005, so the trend rather than a single year is on the record.
- A study of the legal and institutional framework by agro-jurist Jean-Marie Bourjolly for SYFAAH, which is why it treats credit as a legal problem as much as a financial one.
Prepared by agro-jurist Jean-Marie Binette under the SYFAAH project with MARNDR and Canadian financing through CIDA, and dated February 2013. Its value is that it treats agricultural credit as a legal question and starts from the legal definition of an agricultural loan, then works outward to the systems that actually operate. Chapter one covers the principal agricultural credit systems, and its treatment of informal credit is unusually specific: pawnbrokers and lenders on word, commodity speculators, the itinerant traders known as Madan Sara, community banks and credit mutuals, and rotating savings arrangements (tontines, sabotage, sol). It then turns to the state's own experiences with agricultural credit. Because it documents the legal and institutional framework rather than a value chain, it stands apart from the SYFAAH chain diagnostics, and it is directly relevant to identifying the instruments governing Haiti's financial sector.
How to cite
SYFAAH; Ministry of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Rural Development (MARNDR); Canadian Government, 2013, Legal and Institutional Environment of Agricultural Credit and Insurance in Haiti, https://agripubhaiti.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Pascal_Lundy_Etude-cadre-legal-SYFAAH-version-finale-fevrier-2013.pdf