The Garden Was Never Empty
In rural Haiti there is a phrase people reach for as praise: fanm se poto mitan. Women are the central pillar. It is meant as tribute, and it is also an accurate account of how the rural economy holds together. The trouble is that the praise lives in the culture while the work disappears from the record. The women who organize, carry, and sustain production are largely absent from the data that national and regional agricultural policy is built on. What gets counted gets funded. What goes uncounted stays outside the frame.
Part of the confusion comes from who we have learned to see. The Madan Sara, the women traders who move produce from the mountain gardens down to the urban markets, have been studied and celebrated for years. They are visible because they are on the road. Before the trader can carry anything, someone has planted and weeded it, saved the seed, tended the home garden and the livestock, and made the season's decisions about what the household will eat. That woman is harder to find in the record. When the story of women in agriculture becomes only a story about trade, the grower, the seedkeeper, the person working the soil gets written out of the productive core of the sector. That erasure has a practical cost. Extension services and technical training are designed for people recognized as farmers, so the women doing the farming are routinely passed over.
The data gap is not an accident of terrain. It is built into the tools. Most agricultural censuses are organized around a single household head or a principal farmer. Haitian agriculture runs on household labor, shared across a family and shifting with the season, so a one-head count quietly defaults to men and leaves women's work statistically invisible. A technical study from the Inter-American Development Bank puts numbers to it: women's real participation in agriculture across Latin America and the Caribbean may run two to five times higher than the official figures show. When their cultivation is filed as unpaid household labor, the count loses both the people and the true capacity of the economy they sustain.
Land follows the same pattern. Under Haiti's family land arrangements, women often hold the use rights to a plot. They decide what goes in the ground, they select the seed, they direct the season's work. What they rarely hold is a formal title in their own name, which means the state and the banks do not count them as principal farmers. The researcher Bina Agarwal has shown how much rides on this. Independent land rights give a woman bargaining power and security that income on its own cannot reach. Without her name on the paper, she stays legally peripheral to the land she keeps alive through her knowledge and her labor.
The blank space in the record has a cost, and it lands where the money moves. A CA$10 million FAO and Canada project for climate-smart agriculture, running from 2024 to 2028, covers eight Caribbean nations and leaves Haiti out. The Caribbean Network of Rural Women Producers, which builds training and trade infrastructure across the region, has no Haitian chapter. When administrative papers log women's cultivation as unpaid family labor, the women behind that labor fall outside the reach of agricultural financing, of fertilizer and other productive inputs, of technical and resilience equipment, and of the extension services and regional networks that would carry their work further. Uncounted work becomes unfunded work.
There is a better way to read this. Agriculture is a livelihood system before it is a production statistic, and the work women carry is the management of the assets that system depends on. When a woman saves and stores seed, she is protecting next season's harvest and managing the natural capital of the farm. When she decides which crops belong together, passes planting material to a neighbor, or teaches a child how to read the soil, she is building the biodiversity and the social ties that carry farming families through political and environmental shocks. Little of this shows up in the statistics, and it is among the soundest work a farming system can hold. National food security stands on it. A sector can survive without a tidy ledger. It cannot survive without its seedkeepers and its network-builders, the people who hold the productive core together.
The talk of Haitian agriculture underperforming has the story backward. The labor was always there. What stayed blank was the policy framework and the regional investment map. To fill it means naming what fanm se poto mitan has carried all along: the pillar of the household is also the one who grows the food, keeps the seed, and moves it to market. A sector cannot be strengthened while a large share of the people sustaining it sits outside the frame of analysis and support.
The garden was never empty. The records were.
