Home Grown! Haitian coffee. Haitian porridge. Haitian orange juice!

Reports from the ground in Haiti

I haven’t yet mentioned the coffee in Haiti – it is fantastic. Locally grown. Haiti is the rare coffee-exporting country that has a local market for coffee. In fact, the Haitian farmers believe they are getting the better of the exporters, because they will export the larger beans, and keep the small beans to sell in the local market. But the smaller beans have much richer flavors. So, the orange juice and the coffee are great in the mornings. And Pascale made a huge pot of porridge, and I thought, I’m going for cereal. She saw me grab the box of cereal and hold it over my bowl and she was giving me a look and pointed at the porridge and said “tu ne l’aimes pas?” And I hesitated, not really wanting to eat it, but I dropped a few ladle-fulls in my bowl and sprinkled a little raw sugar, thinking, this should help it go down. But it was awesome. Haitian coffee. Haitian porridge. Haitian orange juice. Even Haitian raw sugar. Local, organic. No fossil fuels burned transporting these goods across an ocean.

Author: Chris Oxner, Market Analyst