Assessing Good Practices at Community Level toMitigate Natural Hazard Impacts on Agriculture
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Haiti is an agro-based economy whose general livelihood systems have been seriously affected by recurrent onslaught of weather-related disasters resulting in 18,441 killed, 4,708 injured and 131,968 homeless, 6,376,536 affected and economic damages for 4.6 billion US $ over the 21st century. Particular physiographic characteristics - semiarid tropical climate, rough and mountainous terrain - and the combined interplay of environmental degradation with extreme socio-economic conditions in the form of poverty, illiteracy, inefficient land use systems and governance problems, have made the country increasingly vulnerable. In 2004 alone, a very active cyclonic year, hurricanes Ivan and Jeanne resulted in 320,852 affected, of which 2,757 killed, as well as heavy material losses. Such extensive damages combined with the vulnerability of small farmers, lessons learnt from a number of FAO emergency and rehabilitation projects and critical gaps in disaster and risk managemen t strategies eventually oriented FAO towards a more proactive approach. Within this framework, the FAO funded the regional TCP “Assistance to improve Local Agricultural Emergency Preparedness in Caribbean countries highly prone to hurricane related disasters” in Cuba, Grenada, Haiti and Jamaica to “assist governments of participating countries to support the food security of small farmers operating in the most hazard prone areas by improving institutional frameworks and technical opt ions for hurricane-related disaster preparedness, emergency response and post-emergency agricultural assistance”. The proposed approach was to use a Participatory Rural Appraisal - PRA/based qualitative research paradigm.