Costs and Benefits of Agroforestry in Haiti: A Value Chain Including Environment and Health
- The paper evaluates three linked interventions for Haiti's agroforestry value chain: optimal agro-silviculture, carbon pricing infrastructure, and biogas scale-up for cooking.
- Solid fuel from wood and charcoal accounts for 70% to 95% of cooking energy used in Haiti.
- The agro-silviculture intervention would cover about 257,000 smallholder farmers on 252,000 hectares and add 9.2% of forest coverage, excluding savanna and rocky bare lands.
- The carbon-pricing intervention targets about 256,000 smallholder farmers on 251,000 hectares of savanna and rocky bare lands.
- The biogas intervention would cover about 397,000 households, representing 16% of total households and cooking energy need, and would produce an estimated 350 million cubic meters of natural gas.
- At a 5% discount rate, the reported benefit-cost ratios are 2.99 for agro-silviculture, 1.29 for carbon pricing infrastructure, and 2.18 for biogas scale-up.
This working paper by Ruolz Ariste, researcher at Université Laval and the Université du Québec en Outaouais, dated 17 February 2017, was prepared for Haïti Priorise, the Copenhagen Consensus Center's exercise ranking development interventions for Haiti by their benefit-cost ratio. Its analytical move is to extend the agroforestry value chain to include environmental and health effects rather than agricultural returns alone, which is what allows an intervention usually justified on erosion-control grounds to be compared against unrelated public spending. It is one of a small number of formal cost-benefit analyzes in the corpus and complements the charcoal and watershed material held here.
How to cite
Copenhagen Consensus Center; Université Laval; Université du Québec en Outaouais (UQO), 2017, Costs and Benefits of Agroforestry in Haiti: A Value Chain Including Environment and Health, https://agripubhaiti.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Agroforestry-Value-Chain-Final.pdf