The Enabling Environment for Food Security Project in Haiti is a key component of the Feed the Future initiative, aimed at improving the country’s agricultural sector. The project focuses on addressing policies, legal, institutional, and regulatory factors that affect food security. A critical aspect of this effort is the Enabling the Business of Agriculture Index (EBA), a unique tool for measuring the ease of doing agribusiness. The EBA scores, on a scale of 0-100, assess the strength of the legal and institutional environment for agribusinesses across eight topics: seed, fertilizer, machinery, finance, markets, transport, water, and ICT.
Haiti’s performance in the EBA is particularly concerning, with the country underperforming in all topic areas except enabling access to agricultural machinery. The scores highlight significant gaps in Haiti’s legal framework, including weak or absent registration and licensing systems, as well as few quality control measures. For instance, Haiti’s weak performance in fostering access to financial services reveals gaps in the legal framework supporting moveable collateral and non-bank lending. Moveable collateral limitations impede the ability of agribusinesses to borrow for their capital investment and cash flow needs.
The country’s water management framework is also inadequate, with no regulatory framework specific to water management. Best practices, such as requiring the establishment of basin/aquifer plans and corresponding institutions, are absent. Haiti’s fertilizer framework is also weak, with no regulation for registration of new fertilizer products or measures to ensure fertilizer quality. In contrast, other countries in Latin America have a much stronger regulatory regime for fertilizer, aside from also having onerous import procedures.
The regulatory framework for tractors as a proxy for all agricultural machinery is also inefficient, with streamlined import procedures but inefficient and costly registration processes. Operational safety, performance, and longevity of machinery are not legally safeguarded in Haiti. The country has adopted neither national nor international tractor standards, vendors are not required to provide ongoing maintenance service, and type approval requiring certain testing is not required of tractors before they enter the market.
Haiti’s seed system is also plagued by significant gaps in the legal framework, including no legal framework governing plant breeding rights, seed variety registration, or seed quality control. Companies can legally produce breeder and foundation seed of local public varieties, but companies are not obtaining access to germplasm preserved in national gene banks. Haiti has no quality control measures required during seed production, no framework for seed certification, and no seed bag labeling requirements. These gaps reduce private sector investment and weaken consumer confidence in the seed system.