1726-00-00: (Coffee Cultivation Introduced to Haiti, the Crop That Would Replace Sugar as the Primary Export After Independence and Sustain the Haitian Econo…

1726-00-00: (Coffee Cultivation Introduced to Haiti, the Crop That Would Replace Sugar as the Primary Export After Independence and Sustain the Haitian Economy Through Two Centuries of Political Upheaval): In 1726, coffee cultivation was introduced to Haiti, a development whose economic significance would outlast the sugar industry that had defined the colonial period. Coffee was better suited to small-plot farming than sugar, which required large-scale plantation infrastructure and massive labor inputs. After independence, when the great sugar plantations had been destroyed and the plantation labor system abolished, coffee replaced sugar as Haiti’s primary cash crop. Small peasant farmers cultivated plots of coffee plants to supplement their subsistence agriculture, and female marketers transported the beans to urban areas for sale to exporters. The majority of the profit, however, was earned by middlemen and exporters rather than the farmers who grew the crop. Coffee would remain central to the Haitian economy through every political upheaval of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a constant in a nation where everything else was in flux.