Haiti: Sugar Cane Value Chain, Saint-Michel-de-l'Atalaye
- Sizes the cane area at Saint-Michel-de-l'Attalaye at about 6,000 carreaux on current estimates, which is the resource the whole intervention rests on.
- Sequences the intervention rather than proposing it wholesale: a first stage reaching smaller producers, then a second stage targeting the guildives to raise production capacity and modernize current techniques, both orchestrated through the departmental agricultural extension service so the state structure carries it.
- Sets the technical target as alcohol at 85 to 95 percent concentration, and benchmarks the plant against a real comparator, the Thieubert distillery in Martinique, whose annual production is 400,000 litres, with the proposed capacity able to accommodate a minimum of 50 percent more.
- Cites La Favorite's 500,000 litres a year of appellation-controlled agricultural rum as the quality end of the market being aimed at.
- Costs the installation item by item in dollars rather than as a total: fencing at about USD 350 per linear metre with a 160-metre minimum at USD 56,000, a building at USD 1,000 per square metre for 200 square metres at USD 200,000, ground treatment for parking and mill storage at USD 30,000, generator installation at USD 25,000, 15 mills of 1.5 tonnes an hour at USD 4,000 each for USD 60,000, 5 mills of 3.5 tonnes an hour at USD 6,000 each for USD 30,000, 20 trailers for mobile tanks at USD 3,000 each for USD 60,000, and workshop tools and equipment at USD 70,000.
- Puts mobile milling at the centre of the design, with mills and trailer-mounted tanks rather than a single fixed plant, which is what suits a dispersed smallholder cane area.
- Is addressed as a note to the minister, so it is a proposal seeking a decision rather than a completed feasibility study.
Addressed to Minister Wilson Laleau from the Cabinet of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry and dated 13 November 2014, this note proposes an initial intervention on the sugar cane chain around the Saint-Michel-de-l'Atalaye service micro industrial park. Building on an earlier memo of 13 September 2014, it breaks current clairin production in Haiti into three principal stages, each with its own set of operations and interconnections, beginning with cane juice extraction and the conditioning, handling and transport that follows it. The framing is industrial and practical: what support small producers would need at each stage for the chain to function. It is one of the few MCI-authored value-chain documents in the collection, most of the rest being MARNDR or donor commissioned.
How to cite
Government of Haiti; Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MCI), 2014, Haiti: Sugar Cane Value Chain, Saint-Michel-de-l'Atalaye, https://agripubhaiti.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/AVL-Haiti-les-chaines-de-valeur-de-la-Canne-A-Sucre-St-Michel-de-lAtalaye-AVL-2014-11-15.pdf