Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Farmer preparingjute he has grown
Courtesy Inter-American Development Bank
manent work groups and contract their services out to farmers.
As with much of social life, the individual stands a better
chance if he can couch his request for work in terms of a personal
link of kinship with the prospective employer.
Families that depend on wage labor have very limited
resources at their disposal. Their diet lacks greens and protein;
eggs and meat are luxury items. Such fare as boiled plantains,
noodles, and broth often substitute for the staple beans and
rice. Keeping children in school is difficult because their labor
is needed to supplement the family's earnings.
Those with small plots of land also face very severe constraints.
Although this group has enough land to meet some of
the family's subsistence needs and even sell crops occasionally,
they also need to resort to wage labor to make ends meet. Like
the wage laborer, the smallholder has trouble leaving children
in school. Moreover, children's prospects are extremely limited.
Their parents can neither give them land nor educate
them. The daily need for food also limits farmers' ability to
work their own land. The land- and cash-poor face a double
dilemma: they cannot work their lands effectively because to
do so would mean foregoing wage labor needed to feed their
families. A variety of sharecropping arrangements supplement
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