Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Haiti: The Society and Its Environment
lent. An estimated 53 percent of the population of Port-au-
Prince has access to safe water. Growing levels of air pollution
in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area also pose a threat; the
problem has been exacerbated by a dramatic increase in automobile
imports since the mid-1990s.
Population
Demographic Profile
According to census-based projections, the estimated population
of Haiti in 1998 was about 7.6 million with an average
density of 282 people per square kilometer. Since 1985 Haiti's
annual rate of population growth has been estimated to be
around 2.2 percent. Life expectancy in the late 1990s was sixtyone
years compared to an average of sixty-nine years in the
Latin America region. The crude birthrate in the mid-1990s
was estimated to be 44.5 per 1,000 and the crude death rate
12.2 per 1,000. Haiti's population pyramid shows 40 percent of
the total population to be less than fifteen years of age (see fig.
12). Sex distribution data indicate a predominance of females
because of higher male mortality and emigration rates.
Haiti has conducted only a few censuses throughout its history.
At the time of independence in 1804, Haiti had a total
population estimated to be well under 500,000, increasing to
780,000 in 1850 and to 1.6 million by 1900. A survey in 1918-19
reported 1.9 million people. In 1950 Haiti's first formal census
indicated a total population of 3.1 million. In 1971 the second
census estimated a population of 4.2 million, a figure that rose
to 5.1 million in the country's third and most recent national
census (1982). Critics have argued that Haiti's censuses are
inadequate and tend to undercount the population. The country's
census information is clearly out of date. Old geographic
definitions of urban areas, for example, do not reflect the territorial
expansion of urbanization in the 1980s and 1990s (see
table 15, Appendix).
Port-au-Prince and other cities, including Cap-Haitien,
Saint-Marc, Gonaives, and Les Cayes, report significant expansion
in the 1990s (see table 16, Appendix). Assuming a redefined
metropolitan area, an unprecedented 41 percent of the
population may now be living in urban areas — primarily Portau-Prince
and its urbanized environs—and only 59 percent in
rural areas. Despite rapid urbanization, Haiti still has one of
the lowest urban-to-rural population ratios in the region. The
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