3 years on, Haitians displaced by IDB project await land compensation

In late 2018, a community in northeastern Haiti reached a historic agreement with the Inter-American Development Bank and the country’s government to compensate people who had their land seized to make way for an IDB project.

The project forced people off their land with only a few days’ notice in 2011. It was meant to create much-needed jobs after a powerful 2010 earthquake, but instead, construction of the Caracol Industrial Park displaced families that had previously farmed that land. The agreement provided a ray of hope that they would be able to restore their livelihoods.

Now, three years after IDB and the Haitian government signed the binding agreement, many families still await compensation for the seizure of their land — even as the bank in November approved an additional $65 million for the park’s expansion.

Community members lost their main source of income and food security when the land was taken, and many are in more precarious economic situations than they were before the industrial park was built. They say that while the park has created jobs for some, they continue to be adversely affected by the lack of urgency with which the agreement is being implemented.

“Most of the people are doing agricultural activities. The land is everything for them,” said Wilson Menard, one of the farmers displaced by the park, speaking through an interpreter.

“The frustration has been more and more visible because people now are buying crops that they used to produce themselves before, at a very expensive price — which creates more frustration and disappointment in people from the community,” he continued. “There’s too much delay in the process, which people were not expecting after the signing of the agreement.”

The group of farmers, who have come together under the name Kolektif Peyizan Viktim Tè Chabè, filed a formal complaint to IDB’s accountability arm, the Independent Consultation and Investigation Mechanism, in January 2017, arguing that they weren’t sufficiently consulted before the nearly $200 million park was constructed. An estimated 4,000 people were impacted. They said they weren’t given enough time to move off their land and did not receive appropriate compensation for their loss of livelihood.

While the bank initially promised that families would receive replacement land after they were removed from their farms, they instead ended up receiving what legal organization Accountability Counsel — which is providing support to the farmers — called “an inferior and inadequate cash compensation package.”

The 2018 agreement is believed to be the only accountability process with a multilateral development bank that has resulted in people being given land or the opportunity to purchase it. The deal reached with IDB and the Haitian government outlined the main ways those adversely impacted by the park’s construction could restore their livelihoods: They could receive access to land for farming; access to farm equipment, for those who did have land; training to start a small business; or scholarships to support a trade education. People could also receive employment at the park, but there have been complaints over wages that some say are not high enough to sufficiently restore livelihoods.

Although Haiti has experienced many challenges since the agreement was signed — widespread political unrest, COVID-19, the assassination of the country’s president last year, fuel shortages, more earthquakes — community members say the government is more than capable of implementing it.

“The Haitian government didn’t comply with what was set in the timeline before all of this occurred in the country,” said Milostene Castin — a coordinator at Action for Reforestation and Environmental Defense, a local NGO — through an interpreter. “Partly, the pandemic has affected the process. But the delays existed even before the pandemic, because after we signed this agreement, the parties agreed upon a timeline where we decided when exactly all of the activities would be carried out.”

While some members of the community have gotten their reparations, the most coveted remedy in the agreement was access to farmland — but this has been the most delayed aspect of implementation.

The community chose 100 families to receive land based upon who was most vulnerable. But according to Megumi Tsutsui, a communities associate with Accountability Counsel, only 13 families have gotten their land so far. Surveys of the families that continue to wait show they are suffering economically, she said.

“As a result of the delays, they’re not eating as many meals as they were before. The quality of their meals has really gone down. [For] a lot of people, all they can manage to eat is rice,” Tsutsui said. “[The agreement] promised a restoration of their livelihoods. It has delivered to only some families. Now we’re seeing that the government has sort of stalled in finishing that delivery, and it stalled at a really critical moment where most vulnerable people are being left out.”

The holdup in getting land to people displaced by the park can be attributed to difficulty in determining proper land titling, according to Pierre-Michel Joassaint, the executive director of the technical implementation unit at Haiti’s Ministry of Economy and Finance — the government entity responsible for compliance with the agreement.

“The question of land in Haiti is always difficult to settle because of the quality of the cadastre. This is why throughout this process we pay particular attention to the quality of the title deeds. Certainly it is important to provide the land to the beneficiaries, but it is equally urgent to ensure that we do not give people a ‘poisonous gift’ by giving them unreliable title deeds,” Joassaint told Devex in French via email, in response to a request for comment about the delays.

“For those familiar with the problem of the land issue in Haiti, the careful verification of title deeds is a necessary step that protects the owner or operator.”

Under the terms of the agreement, families can receive either public or private land. Private land is the most in demand and requires them to find a different farmer who wishes to sell. All 13 families that have received their land have gotten public land, which is more prevalent in the area and, according to Tsutsui, easier for the government to approve. With public land, families won’t be given the title — just the rights to farm there.

“What we’ve noticed is that there’s been a lot of resistance and a lot more bureaucratic delays for people to get private land. … The majority of people in this group do want private land, and they have been able to identify private land they want to buy. The government has to approve all of these transactions, so they’re the ones who are really responsible for any delays,” Tsutsui said.

“In Haiti, there’s been a history of claiming land as public land when that might not necessarily be the case. And in this area in particular, there’s a lot of private land that’s being contested by the government as being public land,” she added.

Anyone seeking to buy private land under the agreement must identify the land and negotiate with current owners to purchase it, and all of the transactions are voluntary. Some private landholders who had reached a deal to sell their land to a beneficiary of the agreement have pulled out because the process was taking so long, Tsutsui said, leaving those buyers back at square one: identifying land they’d like to purchase.

Joassaint said “efforts have been made” to “accelerate the process” for the farmers who have found a seller. Lots are being surveyed, he said, and additional titles will be distributed “soon.”

According to Tsutsui, three people have all their documents approved but have been told by the government for two months that the land must still be surveyed.

Other pieces of the agreement are also long overdue. Farmers who elected to receive farming equipment to drill wells have been waiting over a year, Tsutsui said.

“In an area that’s facing so many of the impacts from climate change, every season they’re really feeling the lack of not being able to make their farms as productive as they can,” Tsutsui said.

IDB did not respond to a request for comment by press time about what it was doing to accelerate implementation of the agreement or whether the Haitian government would face any restrictions on the $65 million in additional funds that the bank approved for the industrial park in November.

That money is to be disbursed over five years, starting in 2022. And according to a press release, it will “establish the operational and infrastructure base necessary for the PIC [Caracol Industrial Park] to become a successful industrial park in the Caribbean, attracting investment and becoming self-sustaining.”

The press release announcing the new commitment makes no mention of the harm that farmers experienced from the original project or the agreement reached three years ago. It says the park will eventually employ 22,000 people.

Because IDB is a signatory to the agreement, it is also responsible for carrying it out, Tsutsui said.

“The bank talks a big talk about being socially and environmentally responsible,” Tsutsui said. “They have an obligation to compensate harms resulting from their activities. This was the case, where there was harm resulting from their activities. And they haven’t provided the compensation to fully restore these livelihoods, and so they have a responsibility to do that.”