The Cocoa Value Chain in the South: Opportunities, Stakes and Challenges

Cocoa is one of the few Haitian export crops with a premium market and a concentrated production zone in the Grand Sud, which makes the state of its plantations an economic question for the whole region. This presentation opens on the destruction of old plantations, and the ambiguity there is real: Matthew destroyed trees, but an ageing stand is also a chain-wide problem independent of any storm, since cocoa yields decline with tree age and replanting is a multi-year investment few smallholders can self-finance. Setting opportunities against stakes and challenges is the standard value-chain frame, and its usefulness here is that it puts a tree-crop recovery timeline next to the credit and tree-damage papers from the same session, which are the two things that determine whether replanting actually happens.