JUST LAND GOVERNANCE IN HAITI

The governance of land and other natural resources vital to life is a global problem with a history starting before history was written.  The abuse of land and real property rights is a problem in the both developed counties and in the least developed countries.  I have struggled with the governance of land in my own career as a "dirt" lawyer serving urban community development organizations. When my attention was turned to Haiti a few years ago, that country's historic land governance problems were at the top of the list of things I began to study.  I found that land governance problems in Haiti and in poor Cleveland neighborhoods have some interesting similarities.

Take food security, for instance.  In both rural Haiti and urban neighborhoods there are "food deserts."  Recently, people in those places have started to grow good food for themselves within a few miles of where it is consumed.   Forest Hill Church in Cleveland Heights, for instance, uses a bit of its land now to grow food crops to supplement the diets of people in their neighborhood who suffer from food insecurity part of every month.  Urban gardening programs abound in this region and operate on a commercial scale in some instances.

In our visits to Haiti in the past two years, we saw post-secondary school agronomy education, agricultural experimental and demonstration farming, and the development of small villages committed to self-sustaining food production.  Haitian agronomists are leading a renaissance of sustainable, small-scale farming in order to achieve a safe and secure food supply with high nutrition value for more of its people.  The country cannot depend on the goodness of foreign powers to be trading partners in food products.

I would like to introduce readers to an excellent article on this topic written by Kysseline Cherestal, an attorney and senior policy analyst at ActionAid USA, an international agency advocating for the land rights of poor and marginalized people around the world.  (She is the daughter of Dr. Kyss and Nicole Jean-Mary and Ralph Jean-Mary's sister.)  Read her article.

Kysseline Cherestal

We dare not avoid the part of her article, and her subsequently published report for the anniversary of the earthquake, describing the misguided "help" from the US in grabbing land from subsistence farmers without fair compensation in order to score a quick and highly visible success in putting up an industrial park.  US policy is complicit it the exploitation of landholders whose capacity to defend their rights and interests are miniscule compared to the power of politically dominant foreign companies looking for cheap production.  It is also complicit in the use of agricultural policies that favor large corporate farms to the detriment of the internal food chain in Haiti and other poor countries.  We need to pay more attention to our country's responsibility for injustice in land governance resulting from our policies even while we are acting in merciful generosity to provide earthquake relief.

A good start for anyone interested in this issue would be Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure in Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Scarcity.  This report issued in 2012 by the UN is the work product of an international study and an attempt to generate discussion of this issue because it is so largely ignored at this time.

The Haiti Law Property Group published its Haiti Land Transaction Manual in 2012 to assist post-earthquake reconstruction programs deal with the difficult land tenure and transfer processes that held stopped many important building projects because it was impossible to get a clear title to the land.  In an article earlier this month, Elizabeth Blake, a leading force in the Haiti Law Property Group and Senior Vice President of Habitat for Humanity, reported on the current success in construction in Port au Prince aided by the use of the Manual.  She also said a second manual will be published in collaboration with the Haitian government later this year.  This manual will focus on securing land rights, addressing ownership, leasehold, rent-to-own and other rights on public and private land.  This is encouraging news.

Prime Minister, Laurent Lamothe, officially launched land reform in Haiti in 2012.  The news report of this program outlined a monumental task of both technical and legislative work taking a decade to accomplish.  Without this kind of reform, though, development and agricultural improvements will proceed at a very slow pace, if at all.  Let's pray that the government can sustain its necessary leadership on this vital march toward more just land governance in Haiti.

 I have corresponded with Kysseline about this blog posting and she  urges North Americans to do three things: (1) call on the US Congress to pass the Assessing Progress in Haiti Act of 2013;   (You can send a letter from this website to Senate Majority Leader, Reid, with a copy to Senator Sherrod Brown.  http://cqrcengage.com/actionaid/app/sign-petition?2&engagementId=38938.)  (2) We should also call on the US government to respect the commitments it made by endorsing the Voluntary Guidelines in 2012;    (3) Finally, we should urge support of a Haitian community-led process for the implementation of the Guidelines in Haiti.  The Government of Haiti also endorsed the Guidelines as a member of the Committee on World Food Security.

These initiatives are now are among the best tools to uphold the land rights and food security in Haiti.  

--kjl