DAME MARIE, Haiti — A soft rain is falling as a dozen farm­ers, shel­tered by sur­round­ing cacao trees, stand in a semi­cir­cle. One by one, each tells a sim­i­lar story of why this year’s cocoa har­vest is more cru­cial than ever.

“We’ve had a lot of peo­ple come who were injured, and there are more mouths to feed,” said Guer­lains Saint-Louis, who has had eight rel­a­tives leave Port-au-Prince since the Jan. 12 earth­quake to join his fam­ily of six.

So much money has been spent help­ing new­com­ers that there is none left to hire work­ers to pre­pare the 250 acres of land he and his father farm. “As long as the rains fall, there isn’t a problem.”

Before a U.S. government-funded train­ing project helped these farm­ers improve their crop, rain had been all they depended on.

Boost­ing agri­cul­tural pro­duc­tion will be high on the agenda Wednes­day when more than 100 coun­tries meet at the United Nations as part of an inter­na­tional donors con­fer­ence on Haiti. The earth­quake has high­lighted the need for fur­ther invest­ment out­side of Port-au-Prince, espe­cially as thou­sands flock to the countryside.

Cocoa is like much of the agri­cul­ture pro­duced in Haiti: Farm­ers have lit­tle train­ing or tech­nol­ogy to work their crops, result­ing in the low­est cocoa yield per cacao tree in the West­ern Hemisphere.

“Food aid is impor­tant for the short term, but in areas out­side of Port-au-Prince, you have hun­dreds and hun­dreds of hectares that have been under­uti­lized, where there has been no invest­ment or sup­port,” said Kim­berly Flow­ers, a spokes­woman for the United States Agency for Inter­na­tional Devel­op­ment in Haiti. “There is tremen­dous oppor­tu­nity for growth in agriculture.”

But with many coun­tries jug­gling fund­ing, some long-term projects like this one are being cut to sup­port imme­di­ate human­i­tar­ian efforts.

Alex Deprez, who heads USAID’s eco­nomic growth projects in Haiti, said that’s inevitable as every­thing the agency does in Haiti is judged through a “post-earthquake lens” — and the real­ity that USAID must redi­rect $80 mil­lion of its $287 mil­lion annual bud­get toward imme­di­ate relief and rebuild­ing efforts.

That puz­zles Hait­ian exporter Theo Weiner, one of the country’s largest cocoa exporters and a fund­ing part­ner in the project.

‘THE EASIEST WAY’

“If you want to do some­thing to help Haiti, I can’t believe you don’t think about devel­op­ing agri­cul­ture,” Weiner said. ‘It’s the eas­i­est way to get money to large amounts of people.”

The project is a joint effort by his com­pany, Geo Weiner S.A., and Washington-based not-for-profit CNFA. Three years in the mak­ing, it began last fall. The goal is to dou­ble the cur­rent cocoa crop — and those farm­ers’ profits.

This part of the coun­try, in a province called Grand’Anse on Hait’s west­ern­most tip, pro­duces half of Haiti’s export crop for cocoa. It is one of the more fer­tile areas of the coun­try, with abun­dant trees, reg­u­lar rain­fall and until now, a small population.

But most farm­ers, who usu­ally have just a hand­ful of cacao trees, tucked among other crops, usu­ally farmed on the sides of hills, often don’t even prune their trees.

“See this tree?” asks Amer­i­can cocoa expert B. K. Matlick, point­ing to one near the farmer Saint-Louis. ‘It’s got money on it. Cocoa is like a money pump.”

Matlick, an agron­o­mist from Her­shey, Penn., trav­els the world help­ing cocoa farm­ers improve their crop. On a recent trip to Haiti, Matlick taught farm­ers here and in a sis­ter project in the north basics of prun­ing, graft­ing and tree grow­ing. In all, 3,600 farm­ers will receive training.

PEAK SEASONS

Cocoa beans are har­vested dur­ing two peak sea­sons, between April and May and Novem­ber and Decem­ber. On mar­ket day, farm­ers sell their beans to middlemen.

The mid­dle­men — spec­u­la­tors — sell those beans to Weiner, whose fam­ily has exported the com­mod­ity for four gen­er­a­tions. His fac­tory in Dame Marie dries the beans, a process known as fer­men­ta­tion, before they are shipped from Jere­mie to Port-au-Prince and even­tu­ally to com­pa­nies like Mars Inc. in the United States.

While the global aver­age for cocoa pro­duc­tion is about 990 pounds for every two and a half acres, in Haiti, it’s just one third of that — about 330 pounds.

Dou­bling the crop means another 8,000 gour­des, or roughly $210, a sig­nif­i­cant amount of money in a coun­try where half the pop­u­la­tion lives on less than $1 a day, accord­ing to the United National Devel­op­ment Program.

USAID’s Deprez said cut­ting the fund­ing for this pro­gram doesn’t mean the agency will stop focus­ing on agri­cul­ture and invest­ments out­side of Port-au-Prince.

“We’re by no means con­sid­er­ing giv­ing up the strat­egy,” said Deprez, adding they’re in a wait­ing period until the donor con­fer­ence pro­vides clarity.