International Land Grabbers to Carve Up Haiti’s Rural Areas
http://www.dadychery.org/2012/05/28/land-grabbers-carve-up-haiti/

Editorial comment

The program below sounds helpful and innocent enough, doesn’t it? Until you consider that foreign corporations are decimating Cambodia’s forests like so many rapacious beetles, and agencies such as the United Nations, the Interamerican Development Bank, and the World Bank facilitated this massive land grab. Small farmers are being evicted from their lands to make way for projects such as hydroelectric plants and monoculture forests of export crops. The World Bank says it is shocked by the outcome of its well-meaning project. Some fools might believe this, but not the Cambodians who are putting their lives on the line to defend their lands. Haiti still has a little time. The IDB project below is meant to identify all of Haiti’s vulnerable land titles so that the lands may be grabbed by private companies with the government’s help. Given the experience of Cambodia, wouldn’t it better to prevent the land “mapping” in the first place than fight the land grabs after the fact?

Dady Chery, Editor
Haiti Chery

Traditionally Haitian farmers cooperatively work their lands in groups called combites (Photo credit: Jennifer Browning).

IDB grants $27 million for Haiti rural land tenure program

Report
Inter-American Development Bank

Investments to benefit some 40,000 farmers, improve efficiency and cut costs of land administration services

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) announced [on April 25, 2012] the approval of a $27 million grant for a pilot program to improve land tenure security in rural areas in northern and southern Haiti.

Agriculture is a predominant economic activity in Haiti, where approximately 60 percent of the population lives in rural areas. Landholdings average less than 1.7 hectares (about 4.2 acres) and are generally of poor quality. By some estimates, nearly two-thirds of 1.5 million rural parcels have no property title.

Land tenure informality is widely considered to hinder agricultural productivity, limiting rural incomes. According to this view, the lack of clarity in property rights blocks investments, access to credit and transfers that could lead to more efficient use of land and conservation of natural resources. However, Haiti’s land administration system, which functioned reasonably well during the first century and a half of independence, deteriorated over the past decades.

These problems are compounded by a stunted institutional capacity. Less than 5 percent of Haiti’s territory is covered by a cadastre and the national positioning network needed to make geo-reference readings is incomplete. Surveyors use outdated methods and deeds are transcribed manually, which makes it difficult to retrieve and verify information. Titling procedures are long and expensive, particularly for smallholders.

Pilot. In order to start redressing this state of affairs, the program will be carried out in two pilot areas covering the Grand Riviere du Nord watershed in the north and the Ravine du Sud and Cavaillon watersheds in the south, where Haiti’s Agriculture Ministry is carrying out several investment projects funded by the IDB and other donors. There are some 40,000 rural households in these areas, which have a variety of ecological conditions and land tenure situations.

The program will finance work to clarify private property rights and identify public lands in the two areas, leading to the registration of all parcels in a basic land registry and the identification of their owners and occupants. As a pilot project within this component, the program will finance the registration of deeds to some 1,000 parcels, in order to measure the incremental impact of formal land titling on rural productivity.

In parallel, the program will finance activities to improve the quality and efficiency of land administration services provided by various government agencies under the Finance Ministry and the National Cadastre Office as well as by other stakeholders, including surveyors, notaries, lawyers, court clerks and judges. Among other investments, it will modernize Haiti’s geodetic infrastructure in order to improve land surveying and mapping. One of the goals is to reduce the average time to register rural properties to 60 days from 300 days at present and to cut the average cost of the procedures to $150 from about $600 per parcel.

The executing agency of the program will be the Executive Secretariat of the Interministerial Committee for Territorial Planning (CIAT), a body of the Prime Minister’s Office responsible for national land use policies.

The program draws lessons from other land tenure programs financed by the IDB in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as from its extensive experience in Haitian rural development programs. In addition, the program is closely coordinated with a French-supported land tenure program focused on urban and peri-urban areas. CIAT’s Executive Secretariat is also receiving technical assistance from the World Bank.

As part of its monitoring and evaluation plan, the program will carry out randomized tests to analyze which aspects of land tenure regularization contribute more to higher productivity and better natural resource management.

Support. The IDB is Haiti’s leading multilateral donor. At present, it is financing rural development projects totaling $211 million, including grants from other sources. The projects include investments to boost agricultural yields by improving irrigation and access to better farming technologies and watershed management to reduce soil erosion and restore forests.

Since the 2010 earthquake the IDB has approved $519 million in grants for Haiti to finance investments in agriculture, education, energy, transport, water and sanitation and private sector development.

Cambodian girl killed in land row: Rights groups

By Staff
AFP via Ahram

Alleged land grab in Cambodian village results in the death of one teenager when security forces raid protest.

A Cambodian girl was shot dead on Wednesday [May 16] when security forces clashed with a village protest over an alleged land grab, rights groups said, in the latest territorial dispute to descend into violence.

Details were unclear but campaigners said the teenager was shot as hundreds of villagers involved in a long-running conflict with a private firm squared off against military officers and police in the eastern province of Kratie.

The Cambodian government has faced mounting criticism from the UN and rights groups over a string of increasingly violent land conflicts, with security forces accused of using live rounds against activists in at least four cases.

Ou Virak, president of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, who spoke to a villager who was with the victim before she passed away, said: “The bullet hit the girl in the pelvic area and she was dead before reaching hospital.”

According to locals in Kompong Domrey, security forces fired warning shots during the protest but it was not known who had fired the fatal bullet, Ou Virak added.

Cambodia is reeling from the killing of high-profile environmental activist Chhut Vuthy, who was gunned down by a military policeman last month as he tried to document illegal logging, according to a government investigation.

The United Nations human rights office in Phnom Penh confirmed the death of the teenage girl, whose name and exact age were not specified, and said it had sent a team to the Kratie area to gather information.

National police spokesman Kirt Chantharith told AFP he had no information about the fatality but said armed forces had been deployed to the area to prevent villagers “trying to control the land illegally”.

The Kompong Domrey residents have long been embroiled in a disagreement with the Casotim company, which owns a concession to produce rubber in the area, with both sides laying claim to the forest land.

Prime Minister Hun Sen last week announced a temporary suspension of land grants to companies for private development in an attempt to rein in forced evictions and rampant deforestation.

Land titles are a murky issue in Cambodia where land ownership was abolished during the 1975-1979 rule of the communist Khmer Rouge and many legal documents were lost. [And where the World Bank recently mapped the rural land ownership in advance of the current massive land grab. DC]

Sources: IDB via ReliefWeb | AFP via Ahram | Featured photo: Oxen pulling a cart of Haitian farmers, 1978 (Marie, Grand Venice stream, flicker)