Identifying Potential Niches in Haitian Rural Value Chains: Synthesis, Volume 2
- Diagnoses each value chain by strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats rather than ranking them, which is what lets a niche be identified instead of a winner declared.
- Records coffee as involving more than 200,000 growers with high potential productivity gains, strong synergy effects inside the coffee garden from associated crops for consumption and sale, competitiveness on the national market and for export to the Dominican Republic, and a diversity of export niches, fair trade, organic and gourmet.
- Records cocoa production as concentrated in the Nord and Grand'Anse with parcels mostly under direct owner farming, a daily labour return of about 5 US dollars despite low yields, and cooperative structuring underway covering 20 percent of production across 11 cooperatives.
- Identifies sugar cane's opening as fuel alcohol in a context of rising oil prices, with high downstream value added, more than 100,000 direct and indirect jobs created and a competitive product in a fast-growing market.
- Names the sugar chain's weaknesses precisely: unproductive cane varieties measured in tonnes of sugar a hectare, unmechanized and labour-hungry cutting, no national phytosanitary control system with smut present, and products uncompetitive against imported sugar under the current tariff regime.
- Records the clairin chain split, 85 percent from syrup with high fuelwood consumption, aged boilers and stills and high syrup transport costs, and 15 percent from cane juice with aged mills and effluent disposal problems.
- Flags uncontrolled imports of adulterated alcohol and the absence of a national product quality control system as threats across several chains, which is a regulatory finding rather than an agronomic one.
This is the second volume of the synthesis report for the MARNDR and Inter-American Development Bank technical cooperation HA-T1008 / ATN-FC-9052, which set out to identify commercially viable niches in Haiti's rural value chains. Volume 2 covers the rural chains themselves, opening with an overall view of their relative weight and the actors involved in each. It is the synthesis over a set of chain-specific studies commissioned under the same operation, of which the livestock volume by Michel Chancy (September 2005) is also held here; reading the two together shows how the individual chain analyzes were aggregated into a single view. Its year is taken from the PDF's creation date, as the volume carries no date on its opening pages.
How to cite
Ministry of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Rural Development (MARNDR); Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), 2006, Identifying Potential Niches in Haitian Rural Value Chains: Synthesis, Volume 2, https://agripubhaiti.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/SYNTHESE-ETUDE-FILIERES-MARNDR-BID.pdf