A common explanation one hears from educated Haitians and NGO workers alike for increasing rural poverty is land fragmention. As the argument goes, growing population has meant that heirs to Haitian farms have found themselves with increasingly smaller parcels of land. The evidence is, of course, growing population. The population of Haiti in 1950 was 3.2 million; in 1970 it was 4.7 million; in 1990 it was 7 million; in 2010 it was 9.8 million; and today it is believed to be about 11 million. Thus, even accounting for the fact that 50% of the population is urban today–vs. only 10% in 1950–there are still twice as many people in rural areas today as there were in 1950. Yet, if we look at changing landholdings per household both nationally and locally, there is no supporting evidence for the land fragmentation model. Specifically, Moral (1961) used the 1951 Haitian census to estimate that the average rural peasant land holding was 1 hectare. The 1970 census found an average of 1.4 hectare per household, an average increase in land holding of 40% and exactly what we found in a 2018 Grand Anse survey conducted for the Suisse NGO HEKS-EPER. The ECVH surveys of 2001 (a national survey of living conditions in Haiti) found an average of 1.8 hectares per rural household, an increase over the earlier surveys just mentioned and a median of 1 hectare, exactly the same as what Moral found for 1951. The distribution of lands in the ECVH was almost identical to that seen in 2018 Grand Anse survey mentioned above.
[Regarding distribution, somewhat different than the 2018 Grand Anse survey is the 1970 census, which reported 33 percent of households had 0 to 1 Carreaux; 26% 1 to 2 Carreaux and 14% had more than 5 Carreaux (IHS 1973, in Lundahl 1979 :51)].
WORKS CITED
FAFO 2001 Enquête Sur Les Conditions De Vie En Haïti ECVH – 2001 Volume II
FAFO 2003 Enquête Sur Les Conditions De Vie En Haïti ECVH – 2001 Volume I
Lundahl, Mats. 1983. The Haitian economy: Man, land, and markets. New York: St. Martin’s.
____ 1979. Peasants and Poverty : a study of Haïti. — London, Croom Helm,
Paul Moral, L’évolution de la structure agraire d’Haïti de 1804 à nos jours (Thèse de 3eme cycle, Paris, 1966)
Socio-Dig. 2018. HEKS-EPER Baseline, Value Chains, & Notab Information Network for Grand Anse.
