The Haitian Coffee Story

Published in BCE Issue No. 1, May 26, 2000

Most people do not associate Haiti with coffee. This is not all surprising considering the proliferation of coffees now available for the avid coffee drinker. It is also not surprising considering the unfortunate fact that Haiti has pretty much fallen off the radar screen of many Americans. Given a map of the world, how quickly could you identify Haiti's location? I pose this question not as a conflated challenge, but as the sad reality faced by many of the third-world coffee producing countries in the world. Unfortunately, many coffee consumers suffer naiveté when it comes to the countries of origin of their favorite brew. In the following weeks, I will be discussing several aspects of Haiti and its coffee including my first hand experiences of one of the coffee producing areas in southern Haiti. This week the focus is on a brief history and background of coffee in Haiti.

So, you may ask, what does Haiti have to do with coffee? I would say that in the present market, Haiti has very little impact; perhaps no impact at all. It was with surprise that I recently read that Haiti once garnished half of the world's coffee production. The French first planted coffee in Haiti early in the 18th century. By 1791, Haiti ruled the world as the leading coffee producer, an enterprise that required approximately 30,000 African slaves every year to be "imported" to work on the plantations. When you finally find Haiti on that map of yours, you will marvel that a country so small could have produced so much coffee. Even though consumption in the 18th C. is hardly as it is today, it is still amazing that there was any land left in Haiti for any other crops or livestock.

The story behind the demise of Haiti's coffee industry reads like a summer blockbuster movie. The slaves, mistreated, abused and over-worked did the impossible in 1793; they collectively overthrew the French and successfully became the only nation in the West where a slave revolt ended with the withdrawal of the landowners. A Haitian Priest friend of mine explained that because the slaves had little to no experience in running a country, Haiti soon fell into chaos. As in other cases where social unrest is the rule, most of the Haitian industries that had been managed by the French quickly became demised. Haitian coffee had been primarily funneled through France and now the victorious Haitians had no one to buy their precious beans. As the new leaders of the country focused their energies on establishing peace and starting along the hard road of independence, the coffee industry began to shrink. A Haitian coffee "speculator" (i.e. broker) recently told me that coffee production never fully recovered from the post-revolution slump. There are obviously many other factors associated with the depleted coffee industry but most them are rooted in the circumstances following the revolution (some of the other factors will be discussed in later articles).
Lyndon Shakespeare