Why Are Haiti's Coffee Trees So Tall? | Hacker News Reader

Why Are Haiti's Coffee Trees So Tall?

reason.com

66 pointsprivong38 comments

It's odd, the article has this to say early on,

"In Haiti, you can often make as much or more through temporary aid funding than you can from productive endeavors. Which means that, even as the market for unique coffee with an interesting backstory booms, cultivating it in the country has become as much about chasing charity as it is about trying to run a viable enterprise that produces excellent coffee year after year."

Then it spends the better part of a page and a half detailing all of the issues of political instability and so on which actually are the major factors and have nothing to do with "chasing charity".

Well the site this is on is after all "reason.com - free minds and free markets".

I see, so it's just the required ideological plug, got it.

It's the Koch brothers afterall

Please don't be dismissive on HN

I'm not sure, I asked a question which turns out was in fact answered with some form of, "Because it's pushing an agenda". All he did was inform me of the nature of that agenda, while another poster informed me of the source.

Sometimes context does matter.

> Reason is an American libertarian monthly magazine published by the Reason Foundation.[1]

I don't think you should be dismissive, but you still should be aware that the magazine does promote a particular political point of view, and read their (often very good) articles aware of that context.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason_(magazine)

Understanding the political position of Reason is important to understanding their articles. For example, elsewhere in this discussion someone mentions that poor roads are a problem. This isn't something that Reason would bring up because they see businesses as strong, self-sufficient organizations only held back by government interference, and admitting how much they depend on government-created infrastructure would damage that argument.

you don't think "political instability and so on" are related to chasing charity?

If you can find the link between the two in that article, please show me.

maybe it was so obvious it didn't need linking.

Then you should have no problem showing me that link, obvious as you claim it to be.

Political instability encourages short term thinking/planning, since long term is too risky.

The fastest way to make money from coffee is aid agencies.

If there was more long term thinking then the actual coffee would be a better way to make money. If there was no aid then ??? I'm not sure - either they would abandon coffee entirely, or they would be forced to actually try to grow coffee.

If your long term thinking indicates that you need to grow the food you need to eat, that year, then how does coffee or aid enter the equation at all?

Most food is grown on a single year basis - grow that year, eat that year.

Coffee is a tree it takes many many years to grow and develop. It's quicker to "harvest" money from aid agencies.

PS. Your reply is very strange, since the answer to your question is quite obvious. Are you actually trying to get info, or are you trying to push the message you desire via questions?

I'm just hung up on the fairly large, and unsupported claim, "The fastest way to make money from coffee is aid agencies." Beyond that, to be blunt, I'm just not buying the fairly clumsy and shoehorned ideological narrative presented in the piece, especially when it explains the issues raised without actually needing to explain it in terms of abusing charity.

If you can find any links that make sense in that article, then you are probably a master detective who dresses up like a bat to put fear into the hearts of criminals. It's just a bunch of rambling nonsense gathered from National Geographic and Wikipedia with a nice clickbait title. I have to wonder if the writers at reason.com are being paid by word count given how vapid most of their articles are.

Yeah, there isn't really one in Haiti or necessarily one in general. But strongmen charging aid agencies for access to refugees has contributed to instability in some cases such as the Great Lakes refugee criss[1] which touched off the Congolese Civil War, one of the 20 deadliest human conflicts in history. If aid agencies are willing to walk away that isn't a problem, but not all of them are.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_refugee_crisis

To be honest, that seems to have been the product of a genocide which we did very little to prevent or palliate, far more than any actions by aid organizations. Quite a bit after the initial humanitarian crisis had eased, you did see the military takeover and there's little doubt that aid became problematic at that point.

The primary lesson though is that aid organizations can't handle a military without another military backing them. The UN couldn't make that happen, so the result was to promote conflict in the end.

Truly, that isn't even remotely analogues to the situation in Haiti.

A large chunk of the article (middle of second page) covers this.

The problem is that political instability makes it very hard for long-term planning & efforts. If you're unsure what the political winds will bring next year, or who might be in power and how it will affect you, why would you invest in a long-term cash crop that takes years to pay off? To make sure you can provide for your family, you'd be wiser to focus on the food-crop harvest that's just a few months away, which is exactly what Haitian farmers do.

That makes "chasing charity" desirable: if you can't risk personal effort & cost for long term goals (see above), then by all means leverage what you can out of short-term donations. Practically all the infrastructure and equipment used by farmer cooperatives and associations were plopped down by an aid agency or nongovernmental organization. ... in turn, there are few incentives to make repairs when equipment fails, or to want to achieve long-term success generally. ...the [donated] gear is much too large for the low coffee yields and production levels in the country, and built in a style more suited for Central America. These aid-built facilities wind up operating at extremely low capacities and consequently with high labor, fuel, and water requirements. Most of them are so inefficient that they can't even break even—or at least they wouldn't be able to without support from outside aid groups.

There's a great deal more explaining this. RT*A.

The theory in the article is that the political instability have encouraged the coffee farmers to concentrate on short-term gain rather than that long-term view that is required to grow a coffee plant crop. They begin outlining this idea on page two, which is arguably far too deep into the article.

Because that transition has been never-ending, an entire generation has now passed since 1986 where uncertainty about the political future is the norm. And the political bleeds into everything, including the day-to-day choices made by all Haitians, rural farmers included.

And then a little further on they finally tie it to coffee

If you're unsure what the political winds will bring next year, or who might be in power and how it will affect you, why would you invest in a long-term cash crop that takes years to pay off? To make sure you can provide for your family, you'd be wiser to focus on the food-crop harvest that's just a few months away, which is exactly what Haitian farmers do.

Later on in the article, they spend time on what the aid organizations are actually doing and how this is counter-productive if their goal is to truly help Haitian farmers become self sufficient.

I don't have any problem with the link between political instability, desperate poverty, and subsistence farming... it's not exactly a new or controversial link after all. It's really just the specific claim I quoted, which as far as I can see is then immediately abandoned.

How is it abandoned? The whole rest of the article describes how it's more profitable to request charitable aid to facilitate coffee farming than it is to actually do long-term coffee farming. The farmer first depicted doesn't want to cut down his badly-maintained coffee tree precisely because those few fruits it produces lets him legitimately say "I grow coffee, but need money/equipment donations to improve it", garnering cash or sellable equipment that he can proceed to buy food with; if he actually applied those donations to seriously improve his farming, there's no way he can get that tree to produce enough to greater return than just "chasing [and abusing] charity".

You see the point abandoned, I see the point fairly summarizing the entire article.

The author touches on a problematic issue that most developed nations tend to ignore.

Poverty and under development isn’t due to a lack of resources; it is merely the end result of a complete lack of responsible governance and institutions.

The absence of responsible governance and institutions cannot somehow be offset by directly interacting with individuals (peasants, out of work folks, women in need, etc.. ) who are basically desperate for any help right now, not long term solutions which may impact their nation as a whole.

It’s easier for NGOs to create all sorts of dependencies by handing over tools and practices to small communitities here and there and tell the world how incredibly successful they’ve been. As soon as the funds dry up or the particular NGO moves on to another project or country, all progress stops.

Fix the governance and build solid institutions that are capable of establishing and enforcing the rules of the road and the goals that need to be met and you’ll finally have a map to real and sustainable development.

This is how we (the US) fix the governance:

http://www.voltairenet.org/article159651.html

Unfortunate, but frankly no one has yet figured out how to actually solve the governance problem.

Heard of a US based startup recently, working on making perishable consumer goods in the third world more resilient in order to make up for the lack of a cold chain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_chain) in those poor countries. However the lack of a cold chain is another symptom of a deeper problem, yet applying another band-aid is so much more satisfying!

The Revolutions podcast has dedicated 19 episodes (around 10 hours) this year on the Haitian revolution, particularly the French occupied half, in which the coffee plantations feature prominently.

Of particular interest is the fact that in 1825 Haiti was forced to pay reparations to French ex-slaveholders, in the order of $40B in 2010 dollars, which they only managed to finalize in 1947.

http://www.revolutionspodcast.com/2015/12/index.html

This is the particular podcast[0] that quickly goes through post-revolution Haiti. Highly recommended podcast and the Haitian revolution was in particular really interesting. The author is currently in the middle of the Simon Bolivar's revolution in Venezuela.

[0] - http://www.revolutionspodcast.com/2016/04/419-the-history-of...

The author is currently in the middle of the Simon Bolivar's revolution in Venezuela.

And which, I'd like to add, was helped by post-revolution Haiti, who helped Bolivar with ships, weapons and volunteers, in exchange for pushing for the abolishment of slavery.

The slave revolt in Haiti put great fear into the incumbent governments of the time (France and U.S. included), and that fear drove economic revenge and isolation for many decades after the revolt -- even centuries, as you point out.

It's always worth remembering when reading an article pointing out the problems of Haiti, as if that island just happens to be one of the poorest places in the Western hemisphere, e.g. due to bad government in the Duvalier years.

Article lacks images and indeed a quick look on the net yielded nothing noteworthy to back this up and all I saw were the usual bush sized ones. So somewhat curious if this the norm or just a few exceptions that got picked upon.

Also they say coffee but there are many types of coffee plant/bush/tree, so no idea what variation of plant. Also note a bush is just a small tree too many.

TLDR; Haiti is pretty bad for growing coffee, for a number of reasons spanning politics to poor farming practices. So the coffee trees tend to be really tall because if they actually manage to grow one which produces beans, they are hesitant to cut it down.

Haiti has social, economic, and political issues with growing coffee. The core issue is most coffee trees are not on farms, even if it's useful for them to clam to be farms.

PS: Haiti has over 800 people per square mile, that's on par with Massachusetts which does not do a lot of farming (0.1% GDP).

This reminds me of Colombia albeit the situation is better due to the peace agreement they reached with the rebel group/they are a hilly country but they are also plagued by massive corruption yet one of their biggest exporter is coffee. Interesting to compare the 2 places

I have spent about 9 months cumulative in the coffee-producing region of Nicaragua, known as Jinotega, and have been fortunate enough to spend some time with small coffee producing farmers (fincas), and have followed the entire production process that they have in-country from drying the beans to roasting and packing. I have also spoken to various coffee importers here in America, in my local metro area, about how they purchase, both fair-trade and not. I have also spent about a year cumulatively in Haiti, and worked for a Haitian manufacturing company. I hiked from sea level to the highest point in Haiti, and saw a lot of rural areas in the middle portion of the country, but I didn't see much coffee growing in Haiti personally, although I did drink a lot of Rebo brand Haitian Coffee. I would agree that the technical level of coffee production in Nicaragua is likely higher, and that they do at least appear to have a larger export market. I have heard stories about how it's challenging to export agricultural goods from Haiti to the US, in general. Technically it's an ITAR restricted country, which is not a good starting point at all, for any kind of exporting. Beyond that, while both Nicaragua and Haiti have had massive amounts of political instability, it's just more expensive to import all sorts equipment to Haiti, because it's an island. You can get all sorts of coffee grinders and roasters in Nicaragua by driving it down from Mexico or wherever, but in Haiti it would have to be brought in by boat or from the Dominican Republic. This creates an expertise/knowledge bottleneck. Multiply this expertise/knowledge bottleneck out over every industry, and every piece of equipment. Also the geography and infrastructure doesn't help. Nicaragua has a huge highway leading from the coffee producing region, so it's an hour drive from Managua. Back in 2004 it took more like 4-6 hours to drive there from Managua. In Haiti...you have nothing of the sort...it's just crappy roads, pretty much everywhere. Multiply that cost over the cost of importing vehicles, parts, the lack of mechanical expertise, etc...everything is just more expensive. So it's also a distribution problem. That's basically how I see Haiti in a nutshell, compared to Nicaragua, not just in the coffee realm.

The comment about, "things being done for charity rather than business," is both true and not true...it's an over-generalisation. There are a lot of people making money and producing things in Haiti as well. I don't have an official breakdown of charity dollars vs. non-charity dollars.

It's quite a contrast between the two halves of that island. If you like Jared Diamond, he wrote an interesting essay on the subject[1]

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=iIeTZ6SfOnkC&lpg=PA128&ots...

The most salient thing I learned from this article is there are lots of old jokes in Haiti.

Three word answer: high time preference.

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