The movement seeks to empower peasants to control their own livelihood, thus decreasing dependency on multinational organizations which have flooded the Haitian agricultural market in recent decades.
[3] The Papaye Peasant Movement was established in 1973 by Jean-Baptiste Chavannes, a Catholic lay-worker turned agronomist, with the intent to collaborate with rural farmworkers in order to develop more efficient and more sustainable farming methods.
[5] During its early years, the MPP had to maintain a relatively low profile due to political and economic oppression imposed by the Duvalier regime in Haiti.
When Duvalier was forced out in 1986, the movement began to gain political traction, and played a large role in supporting Operation Lavalas, Jean-Bertrand Aristide's party.
[8] In February, 2013, MPP celebrated the inauguration of a modern corn storage and processing mill which was built with the help of two Canadian organizations: Développement et Paix and ACDI.
After the dismantlement of the Duvalier dictatorship, however, organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank urged the country to liberalize markets and undergo structural reform, leading to a rural exodus and greatly affecting the agricultural sector.
Many multinational corporations took advantage of the newly liberalized market to export goods, creating Haitian dependency on agricultural imports.
[11] MPP's agro-ecology program seeks to address the issue of dependence and food sovereignty by focusing on forms of agriculture based on environmental health.
The organization teaches innovative farming practices, including germinating seedlings inside discarded tires and using other methods so as not to exhaust the land.
Farmers focus on growing organic, indigenous crops in order to maintain biodiversity, and thus reject hybrid and GMO seed donations from multinational corporations.
MPP set up a camp for internally displaced people,[14] and in collaborations with partners such as Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC), helped refugees build eco-villages.
[16] The Seeds for Haïti campaign was launched in 2012 in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in collaboration with MPP's French partner, Frères des Hommes.
The organizations were able to raise enough money to buy 20 tons of seeds in order to support Haitian farmers who lost their supply as a result of the hurricane.