Many Americans' concept of Haiti goes little beyond disaster, despair, or darkness, if not a single question: "Why is Haiti so poor?" After living in Haiti for nearly four years working as a journalist and then with small-scale coffee farmers, Tate Watkins uses his experience to try to give a glimpse into how things work, or often don't, in the country.Watkins uses coffee as the vehicle to explore the country, tracing the history of the crop from its introduction to the French colony that predated Haiti, which once grew half the world's coffee, to the struggling Haitian coffee sector of today. He also examines how the historical and political foundations of the nation still affect everyday life for coffee farmers and all Haitians, often hamstringing their efforts to get ahead, and documents why the tens of millions of dollars in recent aid spending hasn't been able to stem the decline of the coffee sector. He notes, however, that the evolution of the high-end coffee market might just provide opportunities for Haitian coffee farmers to help themselves, despite the underlying difficulties they face.In Haitian Coffee Grows on Trees, Watkins outlines how, despite the fact that Haiti isn't set up in a way that would help everyday people flourish, small changes still have the potential to add up to real improvements in the lives of ordinary Haitians.

A new history of post-Revolutionary Haiti, and the society that emerged in the aftermath of the world's most successful slave revolution Haiti is widely recognized as the only state born out of a successful slave revolt, but the country's early history remains scarcely understood. In this deeply researched and original volume, Johnhenry Gonzalez weaves a history of early independent Haiti focused on crop production, land reform, and the unauthorized rural settlements devised by former slaves of the colonial plantation system. Analyzing the country's turbulent transition from the most profitable and exploitative slave colony of the eighteenth century to a relatively free society of small farmers, Gonzalez narrates the origins of institutions such as informal open-air marketplaces and rural agrarian compounds known as lakou. Drawing on seldom studied primary sources to contribute to a growing body of early Haitian scholarship, he argues that Haiti's legacy of runaway communities and land conflict was as formative as the Haitian Revolution in developing the country's characteristic agrarian, mercantile, and religious institutions.

The evolution of a cup of coffee; Dealing with the etymology of coffee; History of coffee propagation; Early history of coffee drinking; Introduction of coffee into Western Europe; Beginnings of coffee in France; Introduction of coffee into England, Holland, Germany; Telling how coffee came to Vienna; Coffee houses to oud London; History on the early parisian coffee houses; Introduction of coffe into North America; History of coffe in old New York, Philadelphia; Botany of the coffe plant; Microscopy of the coffee fruit; Chemistry of the coffee bean; Pharmacology of the coffee drink; Commercial coffee of the world; Cultivation of the coffee plant; Preparing green coffee por market; Production and consumption of coffee; How green coffes are bought and sold; Green and boasted coffee characteristics; Factory preparation of roasted coffee; Wholesale merchandising of coffee; Retail merchandising of roasted coffee; Short history of coffee advertising; Coffee trade in the United States; Development of the green roasted coffee; Some big men and notable achievements; History of coffee in literature; Evolution of coffee apparatus; Worl's coffee manners and customs.

Yemen Country Study Guide - Strategic Informtion and Developments Volume 1 Strategic Information and Developments