Haitian Coffee - Trade in addition to Aid

Last week I was sitting around doing nothing, as I often do, when I got to thinking about whether or not Haiti grows coffee, and if so, would I be helping out the situation there if I switched all of my coffee consumption over to it. So I did a quick search on my favorite coffee supply website, the Green Beanery, and found that Haiti does indeed grow coffee. And from the description provided, it even sounded like a pretty good bean, too!

Before I go any further I do want to say that I am not suggesting that Haiti needs trade instead of aid, because nothing could be further from the truth. Right now Haiti needs a massive amount of aid to rebuild after this disaster. But in order to be self-sustaining, it will also need to engage in some amount of international trade, and it seemed to me that switching my coffee consumption to Haitian coffee would be a pretty easy way for me to help out in that area.

My next question was then to ask whether or not buying coffee would be helping, or hurting. I know all-to-well that a lot of problems are caused in the 3rd world by IMF meddling which forces farmers to grown and export cash crops, and stop growing food to feed themselves and their neighbours. I did a fair bit of googling, and what I found so far tells me that Haitian farmers keep a good mix of cash crops as well as food crops, and that this does not seem to be a problem there. Though if anyone has any information to suggest otherwise, I would love to hear it.

One thing I do know is that the beans I bought are Fair Trade, and if you read that link you will find out why this is so important. It ensures that farmers get a fair price for their crops rather than have them compete in the race-to-the-bottom of world markets. In my initial searches I dug up quite a number of articles on various activist websites, and none of them suggested that buying Haitian coffee would be a bad thing for the country and its farmers.

If you want to do a bit more reading, there are actually a few really good articles in Wikipedia. Here is an article on agriculture in Haiti, another on their economy, and of course the article on the country itself.

Please let me know what you dig up on this front!

Oh, and incidentally, I roasted some of the coffee yesterday and tried it today - it is extremely good! I tried a couple of different roasts between medium and dark, and enjoyed them all.