FORI Haiti v2
FORI | Project results | Haiti
Farmers leading the research on coffee and cocoa agroforestry
Coffee is failing at the bottom of the slope in Baptiste, and warming will keep pushing it uphill. What this project changes is who decides what replaces it. Eight coffee cooperatives on Haiti’s Central Plateau analysed their own soils, designed three agroforestry models by altitude, opened the region’s first cocoa nursery and started making fertiliser from what their farms already produce. All of it through a national security crisis that made reaching the research site the hardest part of the work.
Photo: UPA DI
Who is involved
A farmer organisation, an agri-agency and a university
UCOCAB
The Union of coffee cooperatives of Baptiste. Sets the research questions, holds the agreements and owns the results.
UPA DI
UPA Développement international, Quebec, and AgriCord member. Technical advice, programming and financial monitoring.
UCNH
Faculty of Agronomy of the Université Chrétienne du Nord d’Haïti, Haut-Limbé. Ran both research projects with the farmers.
Eight cooperatives
The base cooperatives affiliated to UCOCAB, across the Baptiste zone of the Lascahobas arrondissement.
Everyone involved in the work
- UCOCAB, Union des coopératives caféières de Baptiste, main executor, with its 8 base cooperatives
- UPA DI, UPA Développement international, Quebec, supporting agri-agency
- UCNH, Université Chrétienne du Nord d’Haïti, Faculty of Agronomy, Haut-Limbé, research partner
- AYITIKA SA, a citizen enterprise, on organic fertiliser production
- FECCANO, federation of northern cocoa cooperatives. One of its agronomists supports the nursery
- INCAH and PNPCH, on advocacy for the coffee sector
- nOula, the Quebec cooperative that sells the coffee in Quebec
- Bruno Rodney, agronomist and trainer, who founded the cocoa nursery
The research partner had to be changed
Two universities were lined up at the start, both in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area, and neither could deliver. By November 2023 the research staff and students had left Université Quisqueya. During 2024, travel difficulties and the destruction of part of the research facilities made the FAMV of the State University impossible too.
The major adjustment of the project was to replace both with the Université Chrétienne du Nord d’Haïti, which carried the agroforestry research in 2024 and 2025 and the biofertiliser research in 2025 and 2026. Field missions were cut in number because of the journey from Haut-Limbé to Baptiste, but lengthened in days, with WhatsApp and video calls filling the gaps.
The project
How Carboneutre AYITI worked
A coffee region losing its trees, its soil and its climate
Baptiste is the water tower of the Lascahobas arrondissement: what happens to its slopes determines the water supply of several communities downstream. For generations its economy has rested on coffee agroforestry, and that system has been coming apart. Economic, demographic, natural and institutional pressures have thinned the tree cover. Coffee itself is under attack from pests, disease and repeated extreme weather, and warming is making the crop steadily harder to grow at low altitude.
The Carboneutre AYITI agroforestry project set out to answer that on two fronts at once: rebuild diversified agroforestry on degraded land, and introduce cocoa as a low-altitude crop where coffee no longer performs. Both according to agroecological principles, and both researched by the farmers themselves.
The context never let up. Gang violence spread well beyond Port-au-Prince, into Artibonite and the Centre department, where Mirebalais, the junction for any journey from the north to Baptiste, was taken. Inflation rose, fuel ran short and the Port-au-Prince airport closed repeatedly. Baptiste itself stayed relatively calm, and took in a growing number of displaced people.
Project facts
- Full name
- Diversifying coffee and cocoa agroforestry systems through agroecology, action research and multi-stakeholder collaboration in Haiti. Known locally as the Carboneutre AYITI agroforestry project
- Country
- Haiti: Baptiste, Lascahobas arrondissement, Central Plateau
- Dates
- 1 June 2022 to 30 June 2026. Figures on this page are from the final report, covering the whole implementation period
- Implemented by
- UCOCAB with its eight base cooperatives, with UPA DI as agri-agency and UCNH as research partner
- Farmers involved
- 4,608 reached directly, of whom 1,763 women and 863 young people, and an estimated 9,216 reached indirectly
- Programme
- FO-RI: research and innovation led by producer organisations on agroecology for sustainable food systems, Component 4, action research
A farmer-led research cycle
It started with 91 participatory surveys of how farmers in the zone actually work and what they are up against. From that, 30 hectares were selected among cooperative members, then 15 of the 91 plots were sampled in detail to find out whether these soils could carry cocoa at all. Two successive research agreements with UCNH followed: the first on agroforestry systems, the second on turning farm residues into fertiliser.
Diagnosis of the zone
91 participatory surveys on cultivation habits and the difficulties farmers face. Thirty hectares selected among members of the base cooperatives against eligibility criteria, of which 17 for the cocoa and mixed systems.
Each site was visited and assessed for soil degradation, shade, slope, altitude and tree cover, then geolocated and photographed in its initial state, with the findings entered on a digital form.
Soil research and agroforestry design
Fifteen of the 91 plots were selected at random across three altitude bands, a 16.5% sample, and studied for both chemical fertility and biological life using the Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility method for soil macrofauna.
Three agroforestry models were then defined by altitude, nine local nurseries were run, temporary shade was established with bananas and pigeon pea, and the systems were planted during the rainy season.
A second research question: fertiliser
A second cooperation agreement between UCOCAB and UCNH was signed in September 2025, on valorising production and processing residues to make organic fertiliser.
The first field mission ran in December 2025: focus groups by altitude band, an inventory of the organic matter available in the zone, and the first recipe trials. A second mission followed in March 2026 to monitor the trials and sample the fertilisers for laboratory analysis.
Research delivered around a security crisis
UCNH’s researchers were due in Baptiste in early 2025 to present the soil results. It proved impossible to move the team, so they briefed the UCOCAB team remotely instead, and UCOCAB then took the findings to the members of all eight cooperatives using the printed technical sheets. Dialogue and advocacy meetings often happen on WhatsApp or Zoom for the same reason.
Getting to Baptiste means vehicle then motorbike from Haut-Limbé, on roads that heavy rain can close outright. When gangs took Mirebalais, the junction for the whole route, UCOCAB’s leaders found alternative roads and the budget was adjusted to pay for them.
So the travel happened in the other direction
UPA DI managed one field mission, in June 2022, during a brief lull. After that the security situation ruled them out, so two members of the Haitian team travelled to Canada instead.
Donald Donazald, the agronomist leading the project, came in February 2024 for working sessions on programming and financial monitoring, visits to UCOCAB’s strategic partners including its Haitian coffee buyers and roaster, and a conference in Montreal. Micheline Mezadieu, agronomist and professional trainer, came in April 2025 and gave two conferences on the next generation of Haitian farmers and the progress of the project.
Reach over the whole project
Reach built year on year: 526 people in 2022, 767 in 2023, 1,266 in 2024, 1,516 in 2025 and 533 in the final six months to June 2026, giving 4,608 over the whole period, against a target of 2,000.
The 561 who changed their practices break into two groups: 51 producers who established a new agroecological plot, and 510 who took up at least one new agroecological practice through the project, including the nursery work. Alongside them, 231 farmers launched experiments of their own, against a target of 90, and 195 are now able to co-lead action research with UCNH and their own organisation, against a target of 90.
Two indicators finished below target, both attributed in the final report to the late start of the research and the security situation. Advocacy products reached 10 against a target of 15, and partner entities taking part in advocacy events 5 against a target of 10. Several of UCOCAB’s longstanding partner representatives left the country over the period. Capitalisation products, by contrast, landed exactly on target at 10 of 10.
Photo: UPA DI
What the research found
Four answers the farmers now have
The first research project asked four questions, all of them practical: which trees can be planted with coffee and cocoa, which of those can be raised in the cooperatives' own nurseries, which cocoa varieties suit Baptiste, and whether these soils can carry cocoa at all.
Three agroforestry models, one per altitude band
The innovation is not a single system but a set of three, matched to where the plot sits on the slope. All three combine fruit trees, legumes, bananas, shade trees and food crops: maize, beans and yam.
- Below 900 m: cocoa-based system
- 900 to 1,200 m: coffee with cocoa, or a mixed system
- Above 1,200 m: coffee-based system
Sites were prepared with temporary shade from bananas and pigeon pea (Cajanus cajan), planted in the rainy season, then followed up with weeding, pruning and protection from animals.
Species the cooperatives can raise themselves
Several useful species are already present in the zone and can be multiplied locally from seed, cuttings or young plants, at an affordable cost:
- Sucrin (Inga vera), a legume with high-germination fresh seed, fast growing, nitrogen fixing, excellent shade for cocoa and very well suited to community nurseries
- Laurier (Cordia alliodora), easy, fast in the nursery, drought resistant once established, used for shade, timber and forest regeneration
- Trompette (Cecropia peltata), light abundant seed, fast growing, ideal for land under regeneration
- Bois rouge (Guarea trichilioides), more technical from seed, good for timber and shade
- Avocado and mango, from seed or grafting, high value as both fruit and shade
Three species of high agroecological and economic interest are not yet present in the zone: Gmelina arborea, Samanea saman and Spondias mombin.
Which cocoa varieties suit Baptiste
The Forastero genetic group is the one recommended. For the zone, and particularly below 1,000 m, three types come first for their resilience, vigour, adaptability to local soil and climate, and yield potential:
- Amelonado, hardy and productive, widely grown in Haiti, very disease resistant, tolerant of moderate soils and climatic shocks
- Contamana, vigorous, well adapted to humid tropical conditions, resilient to water stress, fast growing
- Nanay, an upper-Amazon Forastero type performing well at moderate altitude
Nacional is more disease sensitive but has superior aromatic quality, which makes it a useful complement in a diversified planting. Iquitos suits slightly acid soils and humid tropical climates like Baptiste.
What the soils actually said
Fifteen plots, five per altitude band, at least 300 m apart. In each, a 10 m by 10 m zone was marked out for five samples taken at three depths, with soil fauna sorted by hand and physico-chemical samples augered to 20 cm.
- Acidity is the main problem: pH below 5 in most plots, which limits the availability of phosphorus, calcium and magnesium and can mobilise aluminium
- Organic matter is good, above 4% in several samples, which feeds microbial activity and soil macrofauna
- Electrical conductivity low to moderate, though a few plots exceed 1,500 µS/m, a risk of osmotic stress for cocoa in dry spells
- 2,716 invertebrates counted. Haplotaxida, the earthworm order, were the most representative group across all three strata. Richness rises with altitude: 297 earthworms below 1,000 m against 565 above 1,200 m, the lower figure explained by more intense human activity
- Agroforestry pays biologically: coffee plantations under agroforestry and agroecological management had better chemical fertility, higher average macrofauna abundance and more earthworms, ants, beetles and spiders
What the soil results mean in practice
Correct acidity with amendments such as crushed limestone or wood ash, monitor salinity, and improve moisture management with compost, bokashi, biofertilisers and the collection and appropriate use of livestock slurry and poultry droppings, alongside organic mulching. Which is precisely why the second research project is about fertiliser.
The soils are workable for cocoa: silty clay to clay in the main, which holds water well, a crop-critical property given how sensitive cocoa is to water stress.
Photo: UPA DI
“This approach rests on the co-construction of knowledge, local experimentation and collective learning, recognising peasant knowledge as an essential component of agroecological innovation.”
Two innovations on the ground
A crop the region had never grown, and fertiliser from its own residues
A crop the region had never grown
The hardest part was the seed. None was available locally, so it was collected from elite trees in the north and carried to Baptiste by an agronomist who specialises in the crop.
In February 2025, agronomist and trainer Bruno Rodney ran the founding mission. Contacts were made with producers holding elite cocoa trees in Grande Rivière du Nord, and on 10 and 11 February 585 pods were collected of the 625 targeted, routed through Cap-Haïtien. On 12 February the team travelled to Baptiste with a UCOCAB delegation.
On 13 and 14 February, about thirty people, nursery workers, programme staff and cooperative lead trainers, took the first training session on installing and running a cocoa nursery: varietal characterisation, pre-germination technique, sowing principles, substrate preparation, maintenance and monitoring. Sowing of pre-germinated seed began on 15 February and continued on 17 and 18 February with a larger group. On 19 February, about twenty people were trained on establishing a cocoa plot, which starts not with cocoa but with the associated crops that provide temporary and permanent shade.
The trainer’s own tally records 18,000 seedlings sown against the 20,000 planned, some containers having taken two seeds. UCOCAB’s technical team then supported the nursery worker through the raising of close to 20,000 seedlings, and the first cocoa and mixed plots were planted in autumn 2025. Nine local nurseries are still in operation.
Photo: UPA DI
The trainer’s own caveats
Cocoa needs well-distributed rainfall with a dry period no longer than three months, and the mission found the soils badly short of water. Most of the land is clay, whereas cocoa prefers a sandy clay. Climate also affects germination of the beans.
His conclusion all the same: Baptiste can now be counted as a new cocoa-producing zone in Haiti. The climate is favourable, the land is identified, the producers are motivated, and he noted particular dedication among the women.
Fertiliser made from what the farms already produce
Farmers in Baptiste used to buy chemical fertiliser for their coffee. They have largely stopped, for three reasons they name themselves: no money, no local supply, and no technical guidance. Meanwhile the price of a 50 kg sack of chicken manure has gone from 1,000 to 1,500 to 2,000 gourdes.
The December 2025 mission ran focus groups in each of the three altitude strata, inventoried the organic matter actually available, and tried recipes on the spot. What it found was not a blank slate: technicians and some producers already had a local bokashi initiative that the population had taken up, made from cow dung, charcoal powder, sawdust, sugar and baker’s yeast. Asked to choose, the participants voted unanimously for bokashi over ordinary compost and vermicomposting.
Laboratory analysis in 2026 bore that out. Three fertilisers were tested, and all three showed high organic matter, satisfactory nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and calcium, and pH near neutral. Bokashi came out best for the zone, on the availability of raw materials, low production cost, speed of preparation and the fact that producers already accept it. Decomposed coffee pulp proved an excellent amendment for coffee agroforestry, recycling processing by-products straight back into the soil.
The other recipes have their uses. Rapid composting works in 18 to 20 days with a biostimulant of water, sugar and yeast, provided the carbon to nitrogen ratio, moisture, aeration, pH and temperature are controlled. Compost tea is technically simple and a good way to use animal droppings. Vermicompost can be made from available residues and has the potential to restore degraded soils.
Farms already doing it right
On Wilson Jean-François’s plot, banana stems and bean residues are put back to work and ash is used to correct soil acidity: the mission recorded it as an example of good agroecological practice. UCOCAB’s own carbon plot, coffee with banana, cabbage, sugar cane and forest species, was identified as a potential site for a vermicomposting centre.
And one going the other way
A plot at 1,400 m was found to be under intensive herbicide use, which the mission flagged as an environmental risk. The recommendation is to phase herbicides out with mulching, cover crops and manual or animal-draught weeding.
“We realised that we can use several organic materials to develop our plots without destroying the soil: chicken droppings, kitchen residues, animal waste, compost.”
The mission’s 13 recommendations, in four groups
- Technical. Structure production of compost, bokashi, compost tea and vermicompost through simplified protocols adapted to each altitude band
- Technical. Promote grinders and simple equipment to prepare organic matter and make composting more efficient
- Technical. Encourage reasoned use of ash to correct soil acidity without creating chemical imbalances
- Technical. Phase out chemical herbicides by spreading agroecological alternatives
- Organisational. Set up a community production centre at UCOCAB, serving as production, training and demonstration site
- Organisational. Build the capacity of UCOCAB technicians and professional trainers through continuous training
- Organisational. Develop inclusive governance guaranteeing women and young people a place in decision-making bodies
- Socioeconomic. Treat organic fertiliser production as an income-generating activity, particularly for women and young people
- Socioeconomic. Encourage local sales while keeping priority access for UCOCAB members
- Socioeconomic. Cut production costs by reducing dependence on imported commercial fertiliser
- Research. Continue regular physico-chemical analysis of the fertilisers produced and the soils amended
- Research. Document the effects of organic fertilisers on crop productivity, soil biodiversity and carbon sequestration
- Research. Strengthen links between universities, research centres and farmer organisations so the innovations last
Who the project reached
Women, young people and the land they can prove is theirs
Fifty-one participants established the new agroforestry systems. UCOCAB set out to have 25% women landholders among them, which is an ambitious target in a context where women struggle to access land and few hold title to it. The target was passed: 31.4%, or 16 of the 51.
Holding title is not a formality there. Through the carbon-neutral certification process, all 51 participants were supported by a local lawyer to draw up and authenticate actes sous seing privé, which serve as deeds in Haiti. Proper title is an eligibility criterion for the project, and it is also how a household secures its land.
Inside UCOCAB, the field team of four technicians and an agronomist was recruited entirely male, which drew questions early on. Two professional women trainers were hired at the start of 2023 to complete the team, lead the training and awareness work and handle gender and youth inclusion specifically. The technical and training team is 100% young people. The effect is measurable: women’s attendance was low in 2022 and 2023 and rose markedly from 2024, finishing at 1,763 women across the project.
Forty-seven women and young people took part in the decisions on the local experiments, against a target of 23, on the biofertiliser production and the youth group that formed in 2026 among other things. 863 young people took part in the project in total, 407 of them young women. The workshop held exclusively for young people in March 2026 was the high point: a WhatsApp group came out of it, set up by the professional trainers, where young farmers share their own projects, ask for advice and encourage each other. They have met several times since, on their own initiative.
Photo: UPA DI
Photo: UPA DI
“With the arrival of the programme in the commune of Baptiste, women producers now have a way of finding methods to adapt better to climate change.”
Two workshops of their own
In December 2025 a session was held specifically for the women taking part in the programme, to work through the needs and difficulties particular to them rather than assume the general activities covered it. They named what participation had given them: high-level training, more knowledge, better food security, the means to pay school fees from the income, and a real change in the family.
In March 2026 the youth workshop ran over three days and ended in the field, on the plot of Ronicson Cameau, a young producer in the programme, and at the site where the bio-inputs are prepared. Sixty young people took part.
The results went public
Four technical sheets, in both languages
The research findings were turned into illustrated technical sheets on soil analysis, agroforestry systems, agroecological cocoa growing and biofertilisers. Printed and laminated in 250 copies, in French and Haitian Creole, and left at the base cooperatives' own premises so that farmers in the outlying areas can reach them.
Alongside them, six training modules in Creole on cocoa production, processing and biopesticide making, used in the field sessions and kept afterwards as an aide-mémoire.
107 local events
Training and awareness workshops across all eight cooperatives and exchange visits to the nurseries and the planted plots, against a target of ten events. Two days of exchange visits in July 2025 drew 87 people, 8 women and 25 young people among them.
Further afield: the FO4ACP and FORI experience-sharing workshop in the Dominican Republic in June 2023, and visits in July 2023 to AYITIKA in the South and FECCANO in the North, reached by three domestic flights because the roads were not safe.
34 pieces of visibility
Nine Facebook posts by UPA DI, three by UCOCAB and one by nOula. An article in AQANU’s online magazine. Two in-person conferences in Montreal and Longueuil. Three mentions in UPA DI’s annual reports from 2023 to 2026, and six items in its e-newsletter.
Five video capsules were produced on the nurseries, cocoa production, biofertilisers, the agroforestry systems and the capacity-building work, published on UPA DI’s YouTube channel and shared widely on WhatsApp.
What it means going forward
Held by eight cooperatives and a permanent nursery
The project closed on 30 June 2026. What continues is not a project structure but a set of assets that now belong locally: a permanent cocoa nursery in a region that had never grown the crop, three agroforestry models matched to the altitude bands, four technical sheets in Creole and French in the hands of all eight cooperatives, two women professional trainers who have changed who turns up to training, and a research relationship with UCNH that has already been renewed once.
The research relationship is contractual and farmer-held. UCOCAB signed its first cooperation agreement with UCNH in March 2024, covering the agroforestry work, and a second in September 2025 for the research on residues and organic fertiliser. In both cases the university brings the expertise and the farmer organisation sets the questions and owns the results. The target was one such agreement; there are two.
Relations with the state were the weak point, and the report says so plainly: few contacts took place, which it attributes to the weakness of the Haitian state rather than to any lack of effort by UCOCAB. It did not stop the work progressing.
The commercial picture is the piece that is genuinely new. A market study on low-altitude cocoa, carried out in 2026 by a volunteer agricultural economist after field surveys, found strong growth potential for the value chain, with turnover projected in the hundreds of millions of gourdes over twenty years. Getting there depends on raising the stock of living plants, renewing the orchards, matching varieties to yields and market demand, and keeping technical support to the producers.
What happens after June 2026
UCOCAB is carrying on: the nurseries, the production of biofertilisers and the monitoring of the planted agroforestry plots all continue, and the technicians are still visiting producers in the field. The report’s own phrase is that the project is there to stay.
UPA DI and UCOCAB continue to work together through a school canteen programme, and are looking for further funding to take the work to scale. UCOCAB is diversifying its own income, and sees cocoa as the most promising avenue. Synergies continue with AYITIKA SA on organic fertiliser and FECCANO on Haitian cocoa, one of whose agronomists already supports the nursery. The coffee route to Quebec through nOula is already in place.
The recommended next step is a community fertiliser production centre at UCOCAB, doubling as a training and demonstration site, which would turn the research findings into a standing service for members and an income-generating activity for women and young people.
Photo: UPA DI
Resources
Download the outputs
This project is part of the FORI programme (Farmer-led Research and Innovation), implemented by the AgriCord Alliance with the financial support of the European Union and the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States (OACPS).
