Reflection · July 17, 2026. Source links and scope clarified October 2026. · Evidence and geographic scope reviewed October 14, 2026.
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 not fully represented by the measures used to describe agricultural work and access to resources. What gets counted is easier to see in a funding proposal. What goes uncounted is easier to overlook.
Part of the confusion comes from who we have learned to see. The Madan Sara, women who move produce between growers and markets, are a vital part of Haiti’s food system. Cultivation, seedkeeping, trading, and household food work can overlap in the same person’s life. Focusing only on trade can leave the work in the garden out of view. Training and support need to recognize those multiple roles.
The data gap is partly a question of what is being measured. A statistic about a principal farm holder is not a count of everyone who plants, weeds, saves seed, or tends animals. Definitions of paid work and unpaid family labor also affect the picture. An Inter-American Development Bank report reviewing earlier regional studies describes estimates of women’s agricultural participation ranging from two to five times the figures recorded in national employment surveys. That is an older regional estimate, not a measurement of Haiti alone or a current national multiplier.
Land raises another question: working a plot, managing it, and holding secure rights to it are not the same thing. The World Bank’s Haiti gender assessment reports lower access to land and financial resources among women. Bina Agarwal’s research in South Asia shows why independent ownership and effective control can matter for bargaining power and security. That work offers a useful lens; it is not direct evidence of how every Haitian land arrangement works. A missing formal title does not by itself prove that a woman cannot be recognized as a farmer.
The blank space in the record matters when support is designed. FAO and Canada’s CA$10 million project for 2024–2028 names eight Caribbean countries for implementation. Haiti is not one of those eight, although FAO also describes wider benefits for CARICOM members. That country list alone does not tell us why countries were selected or show that Haitian women are excluded from all regional support. Networks such as the Caribbean Network of Rural Women Producers also support training and exchange. Connecting Haitian growers to resources and making their work visible remain important parts of strengthening the sector.
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 too often falls short is how policy and investment recognize that work. 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. Our way of counting has yet to do it justice.
Sources and context
Haiti gender assessment — World Bank, 2023
Gender and rural-development measurement — Inter-American Development Bank
