(about 50%). Among the factors fostering food insecurity, it should be noted that, on the one hand, a mere 10% of total consumption in rural areas in 1999-2000 came from subsistence economy, and that, on the other hand, an average 52% of the country’s food availability came from imports: food imports currently made up for a quarter of total imports while they only used to represent 18.3% in 1981, and the value of the per capita food imports had sharply increased. Households being highly dependent on trade for food access issues, they had become highly exposed to price changes. Consequently, according to the comprehensive food security and vulnerability analysis (CFSVA)<sup>5</sup> that was conducted before the sharp inflation increase in 2007, 5.9% of rural households suffered from extreme levels of food insecurity while 19.1% of them were affected to a lesser extent by food insecurity.<sup>6</sup> In total, 25% of these households were in a situation of food insecurity in October 2007, that is, just before the price explosion in Haiti.

In order to cope with poverty and food insecurity, households adopt various strategies: they diversify their income sources, migrate or receive international remittances, adopt food restrictions strategies, lend money or food, sell part of the household’s assets, or renounce costly activities (education for children, etc.). In Haiti, these strategies concern differently the poor and the rich: for instance, while remittances received from international migrants represented about 18 percent of Haiti’s GDP in 2007, 72% of the richest households received emigrant remittances, as compared to only 39% for the poorest quintile.<sup>7</sup> On the other hand, food restriction strategies concerned 45% of poor rural households, who actually stated that they were used in cutting on quantities.<sup>8</sup> Food restrictions may induce early childhood malnutrition, with permanent cognitive and psychomotor consequences. Hence, malnutrition may induce direct productivity loss due to bad physical conditions, indirect productivity loss due to cognitive and education deficits, as well as loss due to increasing health care costs. For this reason, malnutrition lowers economic growth and perpetuates poverty, from mother to child (Alderman et al., 2002, Behrman et al., 2004). Other cut in expenditure such as taking children out of school can also have long-term effects on living standards.

# **3. DYNAMICS OF POVERTY BEFORE THE EARTHQUAKE**

# **3.1.Data and Asset Index**

Various indicators of well-being are generally used to measure poverty such as per capita household expenditures or per capita household income. However, in developing countries, good quality data on consumption or income prove to be hard to find in comparable surveys over time. Sahn and Stifel (2003) have listed several other problems in using household expenditures data such as measurement errors due to recall data or due to the lack of information concerning prices and deflators. Alternative measures of

> 5 This study was a joint project of the World Food Program (WFP) and the National Coordination of Food Security Unit (NCFSU).

> 6 CFSVA (2007). A score was calculated for food insecurity from data related to diet diversity on the one hand (based on the number of types of food or food groups eaten during the week previous to the survey), and to their consumption frequency expressed in number of days during the period of reference on the other hand. 7 HLCS (2001).

> 8 CFSVA (2007).

4