PORT-AU-PRINCE, Mar 6 (IPS) – Haiti needs to revitalise urgently its coffee industry or the Caribbean country — a high-reputation producer of the commodity – could become a net importer by the turn of the century, a prominent local agronomist warned here.

Claude Pierre-Louis, a former Minister of Agriculture, reached this conclusion in a study commissioned by U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on possibilities for both a quantititive and qualitative improvement in Haitian agricultural production.

Collapse of the coffee industry could have a catastrophic impact on Haitian peasants, for whom it is the principal cash crop. The study said coffee exporters will be less seriously affected since many have diversified into other areas of activity.

Pierre-Louis’ report contains a catalogue of ills. Soil quality is bad. Production techniques are inadequate. Diseases like coffee bean rust have ravaged crops. Workers are in short supply.

It also underlines the vital importance of the sector.

A census of the Haitian agricultural sector by the World Bank in 1991 counted 250,000 small plantations scattered over some 135,000 hectares and producing around 35,000 tonnes of coffee annually. Cultivation of the crop, though below the sector’s real productive capacity, nevertheless represents between 70 and 80 percent of Haiti’s agricultural exports.

The USAID study emphasises that coffee exports have been in decline since 1987, with the volume of exports falling from 300,000 60-kilogram bags that year to less than 100,000 bags in 1995.

Specialists also attribute this decline to a long period of falling prices on the world coffee market, and to the growing activity of contraband networks operating from the neighbouring Dominican Republic which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti.

Coffee exports have long been the main source of hard currency for Haitian governments, which used it to pay petroleum bills and increase the Central Bank’s hard currency reserves.

If exports were to be severely curtailed, the Haitian economy could stagnate – and worsen the country’s enormous balance of payments deficit.

According to economists, in 1990, the contribution of agriculture to total exports dropped 21 percent, though it represented more than 50 percent of total commodity exports – a category that includes coffee, cocoa, vegetables, sisal, essential edible oils – in 1980.

Inventive packaging kept demand for Haitian coffee strong. The country has been unable to satisfy demand for its natural coffee (dried in the sun then the husk is removed). This variety has a high reputation in parts of Europe. Italy, the largest European importer, accounts for one third of annual Haitian exports, followed by Belgium and France.

There is another type of Haitian coffee – the washed version in which the husk is removed between two fermentation operations. That accounts for around 10 percent of Haiti’s exports. This type has conquered large markets in Japan, the U.S. and Germany.

A pilot project to revitalise coffee with technical assistance of the Interamerican Institute of Agricultural Cooperation (IICA) was set up by the government in southeast Haiti. It formed part of a campaign to introduce new high-yielding varieties more resistant to rust disease.

Financed by USAID, this project at present involves only a very small percentage of coffee cultivation areas in Haiti. But authorities are already contemplating eventually extending this project to other regions, then to all the plantations in the country.

‘’Haitians must especially not forget so easily the ‘’American cotton syndrome’’ and commit the error of adopting, without making a serious feasibility study, new varieties of coffee bean which demand cultivation techniques which could not be inserted into our typical system of subsistence polycultivation,’’ warned Pierre- Louis.

He referred to the almost irreparable disaster provoked by the introduction in the ‘70s and ‘80s of the cultivation of American cotton in place of Haitian cotton.

‘’Today Haitian cotton has practically disappeared following the adoption, under the pretext of improving yields, of reckless policies of substituting foreign varieties for local varieties.’’

There was no longer a trace of American cotton in the country. ‘’Not a trace of it can be found in Haiti anymore,’’ said the agronomist. He advocated the adoption of genetic improvement programmes for local varieties of coffee, a system found definitely better adapted to climatic conditions and the structure of agricultural landholdings in the country.

He also mentioned the constraints deriving from the inadequacy of farm credit programmes, and to the difficulties of buying fertiliser, whose price has almost tripled over the last four years and may go higher because of the almost chronic instability of Haiti’s currency, the gourde. (END/IPS/HA/TT/96)

Origin: Amsterdam/HAITI-AGRICULTURE/ ----

[c] 1996, InterPress Third World News Agency (IPS) All rights reserved

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