Strategic Framework for the Development of Haiti's Coffee Sector

The strategic framework for developing Haiti's coffee sector, issued in May 2011 by MARNDR with the Institut National du Café d'Haïti and the Inter-American Development Bank. It sets a vision, objectives and an implementation plan, but its value now is the diagnosis it rests on, which states in figures how far the sector fell and why.

Coffee production reached 77 million pounds in 1789, the equivalent of 641,000 bags of 60 kg, fell to 42 percent of that by 1826, and averaged more than 500,000 bags a year in the early twentieth century with peaks of 718,064 bags in 1904 and 814,674 later. Exports were above 50 million US dollars until about 1998 and reached 90 million in the early 1990s; they now run at around 10 million. Coffee is under 3 percent of total exports against 30 percent in the early 1960s. Some 230,000 rural families are involved in the chain, 200,000 of them producing, and receive about 36 million dollars a year.

The framework is unusually direct about the state's own role: for more than a century and a half the state levied close to 30 percent tax on coffee exports, eliminated by half and then entirely in 1985. On the technical side, average national yield is under 300 kg a hectare, 85 percent of holdings are below 2 hectares, most plantations are more than 50 years old with shade cover reaching 75 percent, renewal has touched under 10 percent of them, and borer damage runs up to 40 percent. A producer currently spends 336.2 dollars a hectare against the 1,129 needed and clears a net margin of 247.5 dollars a year, while establishing a new plot costs about 2,383 dollars a hectare. The targets follow from that arithmetic: 40,000 additional hectares by the end of year five, production up more than 40 percent from year three, and the volume of quality prepared coffee up 60 percent from year three.