Habitation Belot La Cafeiere is an environmentally sustainable micro-farm focused on growing Haitian specialty coffee. The farm was established in 2017 by Douglas Pape. Douglas aims to continuously enhance his farm and revive Haiti’s long lost coffee growing culture, which would be an important step towards healing both Haiti’s economy and its ecosystem. Our close ties to this family business allows us to ensure that our coffee is grown through socially and environmentally just practices.
Vast deforestation, which was initiated during the country’s colonization and is continued today through the use of charcoal and slash-and-burn agriculture, led to the extinction of many endemic species and the erosion of the land’s topsoil. Soil erosion threatens Haiti’s coastal marine ecosystems, lowers the productivity of the land, worsens droughts, and eventually leads to desertification. Although initiatives to reforest the country exist, they are mostly limited in their impact as they rely on charitable donations.
As coffee trees need to be grown in the shade, they require the planting of larger trees alongside them. Aside from providing much needed economic growth, restoring Haiti’s coffee industry would therefore also provide an economic incentive to reforest the country and heal its ecosystem.
