DARISME, JOSEPH WILKIE; PHD

                        THE GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY, 1984
 
                        SOCIAL WORK (0452)
 

                         This dissertation is a study of improved farm practice adoption among Haitian farmers in the Integrated
                         Rural Development Project of Bas-Boen, Cul-de-Sac, one of the many poverty stricken areas of rural
                         Haiti. One of the major objectives of the study was to explain adoption behavior among Bas-Boen
                         farmers. To the Rogers and Shoemaker's innovation-diffusion model were added Weber's concepts of
                         social relationships and Likert's participative approach in an effort to modestly modify the model. Seven
                         irrigation cooperatives were studied and a sample of 124 farmers were interviewed. Farmers'
                         demographic characteristics, economic resources, attitudinal factors, information sources, participation in
                         cooperative activities, and degree of power and influence exerted over cooperative organizations were
                         successively tested to determine their contribution in explaining adoption behavior. Of the twenty-six
                         variables considered in the model and later analyzed, 12 were entered into a stepwise regression
                         analysis. Attendance of agricultural demonstrations, cooperative participation, economic resources in the
                         form of poultry and interaction with cooperative members emerge as the best predictors of adoption of
                         agricultural adoption. Differential adoption rate, uneven distribution of rural development benefits,
                         asymmetrical power relations within cooperative organizations, and the jealousy pattern found in rural
                         Haiti, have given rise to open conflicts among cooperators and between cooperators and other members
                         of cooperative village communities. These problems have been found to be some of the unanticipated
                         consequences of innovation-diffusion. Cooperative institutions in the Bas-Boen project have proven
                         that community based local institutions may constitute the best channels for the introduction of new
                         agricultural technologies in the Haitian rural sector. However, the absence of human development and
                         undue reliance on the traditional rural elite by change agents are likely to reproduce the very same social
                         inequalities which modernization projects are meant to eliminate.

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