Post Earthquake Jacmel (Haiti) Report and EMMA

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were not impacted directly by the earthquake. The UN, whose various organizations operate
much like NGOs (for example the World Food Program that took over CARE International‘s
Northwest and Artibonite activity zones) reportedly gave all local employees US$2,500. Other
activities to be discussed shortly are increased motorcycle taxi traffic and increased sales of
phone cards. In effect, for many, the earthquake has been a boon.
In summary, NGOs have tried in recent years to fulfill many of the functions that should
have been, but were not, filled by the Haitian State. But this is not sufficient to have completely
offset economic crisis; nor to change more than 200 years of adaptation. As will be seen below,
the absence of State and any effective social security system, has meant that people must assure
this social security themselves. For the rural areas, the need to maintain a degree of selfsufficiency
in the face of impending crop failure, pestilence, and uncertain market opportunities
means that most people living there have no choice but to devote much of their time and
resources to a type of subsistence oriented livelihood. This does not mean that people in the
Southeast are subsistence producers for as will be seen shortly, the market plays a major role in
the regional economy. But the strategies are definitively subsistence oriented and they have not
only served the peasants well during past crises, they have served the entire country well, for it is
the rural semi-subsistence survival strategies and regional marketing systems that have assured
survival through the dozens of hurricanes and political and military crises that have afflicted the
region for over three-hundred years. For this reason, the other income strategies and urban
livelihood strategies will be discussed in greater detail later in the report for in general they
represent the incursion of a different economy and a different system, one that is not as
entrenched in most of Haiti and certainly not historically as dependable, a fact that leads to
misunderstandings and frustrations among aid workers who tend to arrive in the country with the
impression that Haitians depend more on the World economy than on the traditional farming
strategies and the country‘s own internal marketing system.
3. Principal Regional Livelihood Strategies
3.1. Farming, Fishing, and Charcoal
The principal income-generating and subsistence activities in the area are agriculture
(including tree crops), livestock raising, petty commerce, charcoal production, and fishing. The
tools and strategies used in these endeavors are no more complex than picks, hoes, machetes,
rowboats, bamboo fishing traps, and string nets. People in the region do not use cows or horse
traction to plow fields—as they do in Haiti‘s Central Plateau. 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; 2% of arable land is canal irrigated. Only
one in ten (or fewer) fishing boats are equipped with motors. 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), that dependably yield profits.
While not all farmers engage in the commercial-oriented agriculture mentioned above,
virtually all rural households have members engaged in the cultivation of semi-subsistence
gardens and livestock rearing. Semi-subsistence gardens are part of a household safety net, and
are adapted principally to minimizing risk in the face of drought, hurricane, and unpredictable