Overview:
Elan Amadis, known as “The Bamboo Guy,” reflects on his journey from reluctant coffee farmer to charismatic leader in Haiti’s farming revival. His story highlights the struggles farmers face and the need for national support, credit access, and organized policy.
CAP-HAÏTIEN — Elan Amadis can still feel the cold water his father used to throw on him in bed when he refused to wake up at 3:00 a.m. to help out on the coffee plantation during the early 1990s in Ennery, a commune about 18 miles north of Gonaïves in the Artibonite Department.
After Amadis finally woke up, he, his father, and about 15 other farmers would hike up a mountain in the dark to get to the farm. Amadis hated it. Often, once he reached the farm, he spent hours mowing the land. One day, tired of chasing a future rooted in coffee, a teenage Amadis refused to work. He paid the price with lashes across his back, leaving a scar he still bears to this day.
“I hated it back then,” Amadis, now 43, recalls. “But today, I understand. It was survival.”
Amadis never understood why his father was so serious about farming until he grew older. It was to make sure the family didn’t go without money — not just in the moment, but in the future.
Coffee that was once one of Haiti’s top exports — disappeared, and with it, a key part of the economy. However, farmers have long lacked access to proper mechanical tools, fertilizers and access to financial resources to produce at a high level. By the late 1990s, Haiti’s once-thriving coffee sector collapsed, battered by political instability, environmental degradation, private sector greed, lack of national agricultural policy, falling global prices, and.
“Coffee production was important,” Amadis said. “After that chain of production stopped, Haiti’s economy broke into pieces. When we had coffee, my mother used to say, ‘You might be hungry, but you’re not hungry.”
During his teenage years, Amadis remembers seeing farmers planting coffee in just about every corner across the northern region — especially in towns like Plaisance, Saint-Michel, and Limbé.
“I can’t tell you how many farmers want to work but don’t have the money to do so.”
Elan Amadis, bamboo farmer
“Even though coffee was cheap, just one coffee tree with a modest harvest could send farmers’ children to school,” he said.
Today, Amadis hopes Haitians will once again cultivate their land in a serious, organized way — especially coffee — to dig themselves out of misery. But two things are desperately needed to make that happen, he said: coordinated work or unity and access to credit.
“I can’t tell you how many farmers want to work but don’t have the money to do so,” Amadis said.
Amadis, who is known for his charisma, is doing his part. He owns a farm in Ouanaminthe, a northeastern commune, that is famous for cultivating bamboo trees. His work earned him the nickname Nèg Banbou a, or “The Bamboo Guy.”
He also grows coconuts, corossol, mangoes, cherries, and more. Amadis gained popularity on social media as an eloquent and patriotic voice for Haitian farming, especially after the irrigation canal in Ouanaminthe was built — a project that has slowly begun to spark an agricultural revival in the region
Fertilizer has long been a challenge for farmers. But Amadis has found a more natural solution. Amadis found a clever way to nourish his soil. He said his plants grow fast in the northeast’s soil. He boosts it further by mixing cow dung and banana peels, which he applies monthly as fertilizer.
Haiti’s northern region holds strong potential for export crops like coffee and cocoa — two commodities that still remain the pillars of the country’s economy.
Agronomist Wilfrid Sinclus says well-thought-out agricultural policy would allow farmers to scale up through access to credit.
“We have rich volcanic soil in many parts that can produce a lot of coffee, especially near Limbé,” he explains.
Back at his farm, under the bright Ouanaminthe sun, Amadis remains hopeful that stronger government policies will help farmers get financing to do serious farming.
“The soil here is alive,” he said. “We just have to believe in it — and in ourselves.”