Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Cleaning drinkers at a
chicken farm
Courtesy Inter-American
Development Bank
and the refusal of parliament to ratify foreign loans prevented
the IDB from disbursing any loans. The only silver lining in
Hurricane Georges was that the reconstruction drive in its
wake was expected to stimulate the island's construction sector.
Land Tenure
During the colonial period, runaway slaves, or maroons
(marrons), had already established themselves as independent
agriculturists in remote areas. After 1804 ex-slaves expanded
this pattern and laid informal claim to unoccupied land as
small peasant farmers. The newly independent Haitian state
formally confiscated French colonial holdings and asserted
state ownership of all unclaimed lands. Early rulers of Haiti distributed
land to thousands of newly independent citizens, exsoldiers,
and former officers in the revolutionary army.
Because of these early patterns of land reform and dispersion,
landholdings in Haiti today are significantly more egalitarian
than elsewhere in the Latin American region.
National census data on land distribution in 1950 and 1971
are unreliable and out of date. USAID has played a key role in
generating more current information, including the Agricultural
Development Support survey of 1,307,000 parcels (1988),
a national survey of 5,000 households under the Interim Food
Security Information System (1995), and a national baseline
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