Agrarian prosperity in Haiti

Here is a New York Times article that challenges the narrative of Haiti's having always been an economic basketcase. The authors point to the 19th century in Haiti as a time of relative prosperity arising from the system of small, intensive subsistence farms that replaced the prior slave plantation system, and they claim that Haiti should model its future development along support to smallholder farmers. I agree with this prognosis, and it's refreshing to see validated my observations and interpretations that Haitian smallholdings are actually very productive and ecologically sound.

That said, Haiti's ecological and economic decline is a bit more complex than the NYT article would make it seem. Today Haiti is still largely comprised of smallholders providing food for autoconsumption and local markets, so we can't blame the country's crises on a move away from a subsistence peasant economy or the centralization of political power. A different article I read as part of research for a documentary film gives more nuance to the NYT's blaming of ecological degradation and poverty on 20th-century economic and political trends. This other article, by Bob Corbett, claims that Haiti's 19th-century agrarian system depended in part on each peasant's having access to large amounts of land, and thus being able to move on to virgin forest when population density or land degradation lowered production. If this is true, the 19th-century system of farming in Haiti wasn't sustainable in the long term, though it was an appropriate way to organize life at the time.

This doesn't change the fact that Haiti should keep in mind the ecologically and economically sage aspects of its long agrarian history when looking to prosper and improve life in the future.