Right to Livelihoods in Haiti

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Table 4: Biggest Reason For Eggs Losses
Reason Count Percent
Animals/predators 50 55%
Cannot find them 11 12%
Stolen 5 5%
Other 25 27%
Table 5: Animals that Eat Eggs (n=50)
Type of Predator Count Percent
Mongoose 21 42%
Dog 13 26%
Cat 9 18%
Rat 4 8%
Chicken hawk 3 6%
Table 6 Explanation for "other reasons"
respondent loses eggs (n=25)
Number of
Explanation
Respondents
Heat/sun spoils them 8
Hen doesn't care for them 4
Cold spoils them 2
Noise of thunder 2
Disease 1
Dust spoils them 1
They break 1
They wash away in storms 1
We do not put them in a coup 1
I don't lose any 4
The Fundamental Tenet of Survival in Rural Haiti: Low Cost & Low Risk
Constraints to egg production at the level of rural household has to do with the strategies that farmers
utilize to survive. Few if any households in rural Haiti depend on a single production strategy. Rather, they
depend on an array of productive endeavors (agriculture, livestock rearing, fishing, charcoal production,
fruit trees, artisanship). Technology is alarmingly simple. The tools used in performing agriculture
strategies are, for the vast bulk of the population, no more complex than picks, hoes, and machetes.
Animals are free ranged in dry areas but in humid areas where agriculture is more common they are
tethered to bushes with rope. One seldom sees barbed wire; rather, gardens, homesteads, and the rare
corral are enclosed with wooden stick barricades or living fences made of fast growing and malicious
vegetation such a dagger-like sisal, cacti, and poison oak (katoch, kandelab, pit, pigwen and bawonet).
Fishing technology is largely rowboats, bamboo fishing traps, and string nets. With the exception of the
South, tractors are rare. Only in a few regions do farmers use ox as traction to plow fields. There are few
pumps; farmers with gardens plots near to springs and rivers sometimes manually haul buckets of water
to irrigate crops, particularly vegetables in cool highland areas. The use of chemical or processed fertilizers
and pesticides is almost entirely confined to highland vegetable gardens and, to a lesser degree, beans
(also considered a cash crop). The most important crops in the region are highly drought resistance,
intercropped and offer the advantage of providing year round harvests.xxii At least another 16 fruits trees
add to the adaptability and subsistence security of the strategy. When all fails due to drought on
catastrophic hurricane, crops fail and livestock dies, many rural households turn to charcoal production
for sale in the city, the single most important economic backstop in times of crisis. In summary, the
strategy described is emphatically focused on risk avoidance and long-term survival within a regional
economy; it is just as emphatically not focused on entrepreneurialism, maximizing profits, and short term
exploitation of distant economies.
Relations of Production and Gender
In the harsh environmental and economic conditions described above people in the region organize labor
around the household. With only the rarest exception, everyone living in rural Haiti belongs to a
multimember household. Mutual efforts of household members are what make the integrated livelihood
strategies described above possible: garden plots tend to be scattered across multiple ecological zones