IICA plants for Haiti's environment.

• Author: Mena, Alfredo
• Position: Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture

Coffee production is unquestionably one of the most important economic activities in the countries of the inter-American system, which together produce 71 percent of the world's coffee. It is one of the most valuable sources of foreign exchange for a majority of the Latin American countries. Furthermore, the coffee industry is a leading generator of employment: it is estimated that for every small grower there are five jobs in the production and processing of this commodity.

Coffee has long been a principal export commodity of Haiti, accounting for about 50 percent of the total volume of agricultural exports. In recent years, however, this proportion has been declining: the income earned from coffee exports has dropped from 39 percent in 1981-1986 to between 20 and 30 percent. The coffee production process as a whole yields direct or indirect benefits to about 2.4 million persons. A total of 135,000 hectares are planted to the crop by 250,000 small and middle-scale growers, and the annual harvest is estimated at 35,000 metric tons, or about 250-300 kilos per hectare. In Haiti coffee is grown in areas of rugged terrain at elevations of 300 to 1,300 meters above sea level, usually in association with other plants, mainly food crops. Coffee growing also contributes to the preservation of the soil.

Coffee production has declined in Haiti owing to a combination of domestic and foreign factors. Much of the decline could be blamed on poor agricultural practices, low prices, competition with food crops, a shrinking of the areas under cultivation (1-1.6 percent less a year), microfragmentation of landholdings, and a lack of mechanisms favorable to the use of better production technology. It can also be blamed on isolation of the coffee-growing areas by the deterioration or total absence of roads and the lack of a national coffee policy. All these factors have contributed in the past to an inability to sustain, much less to increase, the level of production. To this is added the elimination of the quota system under the regulations of the International Coffee Organization. Since 1987 another factor has emerged to make the situation even more dire. This is the spreading of coffee rust (Hemileia vastatrix), a fungal disease which attacks the plants aggressively and is now plaguing all of the coffee-growing areas of the country. Unless action is taken to control this disease, it could wipe out all of the plantations, especially since the variety of...