The tariff was never the problem

A Lakou investigation into what the UK's Developing Countries Trading Scheme actually offers Haitian exporters — and what it doesn't.

In 2024, Britain imported £4,786,739 worth of Haitian-origin goods.

From the Dominican Republic, next door, sharing the same island: £156,961,558. From Jamaica: £53,784,519.

All three countries send goods into Britain at the same tariff. On every product line we checked — apparel, cocoa, coffee, essential oils, rum, mangoes, chocolate, handicrafts — Haiti's rate and the Dominican Republic's rate are identical. Both zero.

Those figures come from the same UK government spreadsheet, in the same year, measured the same way. Whatever explains the thirty-three-fold gap, it is not the tariff.

That matters because a message now circulating in Haiti says otherwise.

What the Embassy said

On 18 August 2026, the British Embassy in Haiti posted a three-part message on X, in French and in Kreyòl:

"Le programme britannique DCTS vous ouvre les portes du marché du Royaume-Uni avec 0 % de droits de douane et sans quotas sur 99,5 % de vos produits."

"Pwogram DCTS Wayòm Ini a (UK) pèmèt nou voye 99.5% pwodwi nou yo san peye dwàn epi san limit sou kantite." — "The UK's DCTS programme lets us send 99.5% of our products without paying customs duty and without limits on quantity."

The third post linked to a UK government page. That was the entire communication: no event, no programme, no figures beyond the percentage. The offer of assistance was a hyperlink.

Two things about that number.

First, no UK government publication says 99.5%. The Department for Business and Trade's guidance says 99.8%. Its March 2026 factsheets round it to 99%. Its 2022 policy paper said 85%. Its launch press release said 100%. We could not find 99.5% in any of them.

Second, and more importantly: the figure counts lines in the British tariff schedule — not Haitian products.

Picture Britain's tariff schedule as a very long list of every product category that can cross its border — a list built to cover the whole of world trade, most of which has nothing to do with Haiti. Saying that 99.8% of those lines are duty-free for Haiti describes the shape of Britain's list. It says nothing about what Haiti grows, sews or makes.

The Kreyòl phrasing — 99.5% pwodwi nou yo, "99.5% of our products" — quietly converts the first statement into the second. They are not the same claim.

Haiti sits in the DCTS Comprehensive Preferences tier, alongside 46 other least-developed countries. Bangladesh has the same 99.8%. So does Cambodia. It is not a fact about Haiti.

To their credit, both Haitian outlets that covered the post handled it carefully. Juno7 used 99.8% and attributed it correctly to British government data. Vant Bèf Info used 99.5% and attributed it to the Embassy. Both were accurate to what they cited. The confusion starts upstream.

Nothing new opened

Haiti has had duty-free, quota-free access to the British market continuously since 1 January 2021 — first under the UK's Generalised Scheme of Preferences, then under the DCTS from 19 June 2023. Before that, the same access came through the EU's Everything But Arms.

When the DCTS replaced the older scheme, Haiti's tariffs did not change at all. What changed were the rules of origin.

So the August announcement was not an opening. It was a reminder about a door that has been open for five years.

Most of what Haiti sells is already duty-free — for everybody

We looked up seventeen commodity codes on the UK's live tariff, one at a time, reading each product description off the page.

Nine of them carry a 0% rate for every country on earth:

(These nine were selected because they correspond to what Haiti actually exports or plausibly could. They are not a random sample of the tariff schedule, and the ratio should not be read as one.)

Here is what that means in practice. A Haitian grower ships a container of fresh mangoes to Britain. The British duty on it is zero. Now imagine the DCTS had never existed, and Haiti had no trade preference of any kind. The duty on that same container would still be zero — because Britain charges nothing on fresh mangoes from anywhere. The preference did not save the exporter a penny, because there was nothing to save.

That list is most of Haiti's export identity — mangoes, cocoa, coffee, vetiver, art. On all of it, the DCTS is worth exactly nothing at the British border.

Britain's own database says so. In the Department for Business and Trade's preference-utilisation database, eight of Haiti's fourteen product chapters show preference-eligible imports of £0 and a utilisation rate of "Not applicable" — because, in the spreadsheet's own words, "the denominator in the calculation of that value is 0."

Those eight chapters cover £2,431,028 of Haiti's 2024 exports to Britain: cocoa (£48,937), essential oils (£2,081,485), works of art (£18,850), oil seeds, beverages, machinery, furniture. On every pound of it, there was no preference to use — because there was no tariff in the first place.

Where the preference does pay

The tariff only starts to matter once Haiti processes something.

Follow a single sack of Haitian coffee.

A Haitian cooperative sells green beans. Britain's duty on green coffee is 0% — same for Haiti, Colombia, Vietnam, everyone. The buyer is a roaster abroad, who will roast the beans, package them under their own name, and sell them on.

Now suppose that cooperative roasts and packs the coffee in Haiti and ships finished retail bags instead. Britain's duty on roasted coffee is 6% — but Haiti's rate is 0%.

On a £10,000 shipment, that 6% is £600. On £100,000, it is £6,000. A competitor without a preference pays it; a qualifying Haitian exporter does not.

(Those shipment sizes are illustrations to show the arithmetic, not records of actual consignments.)

The point is not that £600 transforms a business. The point is what had to happen for that £600 to exist at all. To ship roasted coffee rather than green, somebody in Haiti has to own a roaster, run it, package the product, design a label, hold a brand, and employ the people who do all of that. The tariff saving is the smallest part of the gain. It is a signal that the value-adding step moved to Haiti — and the value added is worth far more than the duty avoided.

The pattern repeats across the schedule:

This is tariff escalation, and it is the whole point. Britain charges nothing on Haiti's raw materials and something on Haiti's finished goods. The scheme becomes valuable at precisely the moment Haiti moves beyond exporting only the raw commodity and starts exporting more of the value created from it.

The lesson is emphatically not "stop selling coffee beans." Green coffee is a real export earning real money today. The lesson is that Haiti captures more of what its own crops are worth when the roasting, the milling, the packing and the branding happen in Haiti — and that when they do, Britain's tariff schedule stops being neutral and starts working in Haiti's favour.

One technical detail worth knowing, because it is a genuine Haitian advantage. Some British duties are compound — a percentage plus a fixed charge per 100kg. Haiti's tier removes the entire duty, percentage and fixed charge together. The tier below removes only the percentage and leaves the fixed charge in place. On the processed-fruit line where we verified this, Haiti's rate was 0.00% while the next tier down still paid £16 per 100kg.

That advantage does not extend to garments. Since 1 January 2026, Enhanced-tier countries such as Pakistan, Nigeria and the Philippines follow the same origin rules for clothing as Haiti does.

And none of it beats the Dominican Republic, which pays nothing either.

The £4.5 million question

Alongside the Embassy's post, two figures began circulating: that more than £4.5 million of eligible Haitian goods had entered Britain, and that only about £1.8 million had claimed the zero tariff.

Those numbers appear in no UK government publication, in neither Haitian news report, and in no statistical release. They were attributed to unnamed "UK officials."

We traced them.

The Department for Business and Trade publishes an Import preference utilisation database, a spreadsheet attached to a statistical release in April 2026. Haiti is in it — fourteen rows, one per product chapter, for 2024:

The £4.5 million is real — but it is the wrong column. It is close to Haiti's total imports, £4,786,739. The claim calls it eligible imports, which were £2,355,711 — roughly half. And the "about 40%" utilisation implied by the circulating numbers is near the true 43.6%.

The £1.8 million matches nothing. Actual preference usage was £1,027,505.

So the figures appear to be a misreading of genuine British government data, not an invention. That distinction is worth preserving. We could not resolve where £1.8 million came from, and we are not going to guess.

The real money left on the table

Strip out the chapters where no preference exists, and one sector remains: knitted apparel.

More than half of the Haitian knitwear that reached Britain in 2024 paid a tariff it did not have to pay. At the 12% rate, that is on the order of £145,000 in avoidable duty in a single year.

Here is what that looks like from inside one factory.

A Haitian plant ships £100,000 of cotton T-shirts to a British retailer. The goods qualify for Haiti's zero rate. If the importer claims the preference on the customs declaration, the duty is £0. If nobody claims it, Britain charges 12% and the duty is £12,000.

Same shirts. Same factory. Same British buyer. Same law. The shirts qualified either way. What changed was whether the preference was actually claimed on the British customs declaration.

(The £100,000 figure is an illustration of the arithmetic. The £2,233,767, £1,027,505 and £1,206,262 are actual 2024 totals from the British database.)

And notice where that cost lands. An importer who pays 12% on Haitian shirts and 0% on Bangladeshi shirts does not conclude that their paperwork is wrong — they conclude that Haiti is 12% more expensive. The Haitian factory loses the order and never learns why.

Five smaller chapters — organic chemicals, woven fabric, non-knitted apparel, headgear, toys — were eligible and used the preference not at all. Zero percent, across the board.

This is the "Haitian exporters are paying tariffs unnecessarily" story. It is real, it is narrow, and it is nothing to do with mangoes or cocoa or vetiver. It is about garments.

For scale on the other end: Haiti's overall 43.6% utilisation compares with 51.4% for Jamaica and 83.2% for the Dominican Republic, same database, same year. The number that describes real behaviour is apparel's 46%.

The claiming problem is smaller than it looks

Claiming the preference is administratively light, and Haitian exporters should know how light.

• There is no registration. No REX number, no export licence, no government stamp. The exporter self-certifies.
• Proof of origin is an origin declaration written on the invoice, or a Form A. Britain does not require the Form A to be stamped by Haitian customs. Valid two years.
• But the preference is not automatic. The British importer must claim it on the customs declaration. If they don't, full duty is paid — and the Haitian exporter looks expensive for nothing. Say so in writing when you quote.
• A missed claim can be recovered for two years from the date of import.

That last point is worth sitting with. Every one of those £1,206,262 of 2024 shipments that paid 12% was, at the time it happened, still recoverable — and much of it may still be.

Haiti doesn't have to make every input itself

There is an entitlement almost nobody knows about, because the government's own guidance does not mention it.

Think of a garment plant in Port-au-Prince. It buys fabric from the Dominican Republic, thread from Jamaica, and sews the finished shirts in Haiti with Haitian labour. The ordinary question a factory manager would ask is: doesn't all that imported material make this a Dominican shirt?

Under regulation 21 of the DCTS origin rules, the answer can be no. Haiti — as a least-developed country — may treat materials originating in the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and eleven other Caribbean states as if they were Haitian. Automatically. No application, no waiting period, and no exclusion for food and agriculture.

If those materials satisfy the applicable origin requirements and the cooperation condition is met, the shirts can leave Port-au-Prince as Haitian-origin goods and enter Britain at Haiti's rate.

This is called cumulation. In a region of small economies that cannot each produce every input at competitive scale, it is not a technicality. It is the difference between a viable supply chain and an impossible one.

The gov.uk page on cumulation describes a different route, one that requires a form and a six-month assessment and excludes agricultural goods entirely. That page is about a rule that does not apply to Haiti. A Haitian exporter reading it would reasonably conclude the opposite of the truth.

Two caveats, and they are real. Each imported material must itself qualify for a zero rate if it were shipped straight to Britain — a test applied material by material, not country by country. In other words: buying something from the Dominican Republic isn't enough. You have to check the particular fabric, ingredient or component you plan to use.

And the whole arrangement depends on a customs-cooperation condition between Haiti and Britain that no public list allows an exporter to verify. We could not establish whether Haiti satisfies it, and nobody outside government currently can.

One limit matters, though. Combining is not processing. The rules explicitly exclude "simple mixing," dilution, cutting, peeling, packing and labelling from conferring origin. Peel three imported fruits and put them in a tray and you have not made a Haitian product. Turn them into a juice or a jam and you have.

Chocolate is the clearest worked example — and it shows that cumulation is not always needed.

Every product has its own origin rule, and chocolate's is unusually permissive: a single line reading "manufacture from materials of any heading, except that of the good", with no cap on sugar and no cap on weight. In plain terms, a chocolate maker in Haiti may use imported sugar and imported vanilla freely, because neither sits in chocolate's own tariff heading. No cumulation is required for that. The rule permits those imported materials outright, so the unverifiable cooperation condition above does not even arise.

What the rule does not do is excuse the processing. Origin still requires genuine manufacture — the minimal-operations exclusion applies here as everywhere — so whether any particular Haitian chocolate qualifies turns on what is actually done to the cocoa in Haiti, not only on where the sugar came from.

Britain charges 8% on chocolate and 0% on cocoa beans; Haiti pays nothing on either.

Haitian vetiver compounded into perfume qualifies just as easily — but perfume enters Britain at 0% regardless, so nothing is gained at the border. That contrast is the scheme in miniature: the goods easiest to qualify are often the ones where qualifying is worth nothing.

(Both examples illustrate how the origin rules work. Any actual product would need its own commodity code checked and its own recipe tested against the rule for that specific heading.)

Mangoes: the case study

Here is a fact that deserves more attention than it has had.

Great Britain classifies mango fruit, from every country, as "low risk." No phytosanitary certificate. No pre-notification. No routine plant-health inspection at the border. We checked this against the underlying legislation, not just the guidance: mango appears in none of the relevant annexes, and the fruit flies that govern the American regime are not British quarantine pests at all.

The United States requires an import permit, a phytosanitary certificate, and immersion of every mango in 46.1°C water for 65 to 110 minutes, supervised on the ground by a USDA-authorised inspector. That preclearance arrangement was suspended for Haiti with effect from the end of January 2023, after American inspectors withdrew for security reasons. We could not establish from any current source whether it has since resumed.

On the phytosanitary rules as written, Britain asks less of a Haitian mango than the United States does.

And it changes almost nothing.

Put two exporters in front of the same British supermarket buyer — one Haitian, one Dominican. Both face a 0% tariff. Both face identical plant-health rules. The tariff conversation is over before it starts; there is nothing left to compete on there.

So the buyer asks the questions buyers actually ask. What is the landed price per case? Can you supply every week for the whole season? What proportion arrives unsaleable? Which certifications do you hold? How is it packed? Who is your British importer? And the question that ends most conversations: if I build a promotion around this fruit, will you still be shipping in eight weeks?

The Dominican exporter answers those questions. That is why the Dominican Republic supplies roughly 8% of the UK's 87,000 tonnes of annual mango imports, and Haiti supplies none. If the rules were the obstacle, the Dominican Republic would not be there either.

What stands between a Haitian mango and a British supermarket is not paperwork. It is that there is no direct shipping service from Haiti to Europe — everything transships through Kingston, Caucedo or Manzanillo. It is that Cap-Haïtien's container terminal has a 29-foot draft limit, so no mainline vessel can call. It is that gangs tax the national roads, that the grid supplies four to six hours a day, that Haiti ranks 134th of 139 on the World Bank's logistics index, and that we found no evidence of British buyers being actively introduced to the Francique mango.

"Low risk" is not "no requirements," either. Marketing standards apply. Pesticide limits apply. Any prepacked food needs a British food business operator's name on the label — which means a Haitian exporter cannot sell to Britain without a British importer. That is not a shortcut. It is the only lawful structure.

So what can Haiti actually do with this?

The honest summary of everything above is that the tariff preference is real, permanent, and much narrower than the announcement suggested. That still leaves something to work with — provided nobody confuses an open door with a customer.

Five things follow from the evidence.

1. Process more in Haiti

This is where the preference stops being decorative. Green coffee enters Britain at 0% from everywhere; roasted coffee carries 6% and Haiti pays none of it. Cocoa beans enter at 0% from everywhere; chocolate carries 8% and Haiti pays none of it.

The duty avoided is the small prize. The real prize is that roasting, conching, milling and packing are jobs, equipment, brands and margin — and they happen wherever the processing happens. Britain's tariff schedule is, in effect, offering Haiti a discount for keeping that work at home.

One caution the data forces. Haiti sent Britain £48,937 of cocoa in 2024. That is the base to build from — not a rounding error, but not an industry either. A chocolate export business is a thing somebody would have to build, not a switch to flip.

2. Claim the preferences Haiti already has

This one is not theoretical, and it is not a proposal. It already happened.

In 2024, £1,206,262 of Haitian knitwear that qualified for a zero tariff paid 12% anyway — roughly £145,000 of duty nobody owed. Not because of a rule, a quota, or a dispute. Because the claim was not made on the British customs declaration.

Every Haitian exporter shipping into Britain can do something about this in an afternoon: ask the importer, in writing, whether they are claiming Haiti's DCTS preference on the entry. And missed claims can be recovered for two years after import — so some of that money may not be gone yet.

3. Build regional supply chains where the rules permit

Regulation 21 means a Haitian factory can source qualifying inputs from the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and eleven other Caribbean states, transform them in Haiti, and export a genuinely Haitian product.

For an economy that cannot produce every input at competitive scale, that is the difference between "we cannot make this here" and "we can finish this here." It is also, on the evidence, close to invisible — the government's own guidance points exporters at the wrong rule.

The two caveats stand: each input must independently qualify, and the customs-cooperation condition is one nobody outside government can currently verify.

4. Build the buyer and logistics side, because the tariff will not

A 0% tariff does not find a British importer. It does not consolidate a part-container into a full one. It does not put a food business operator's name on a label, hold a cold chain through transshipment, meet a retailer's certification requirements, or answer the question of whether you will still be shipping in eight weeks.

Every constraint in the mango section is of this kind, and none of them is a tariff. This is where the thirty-three-fold gap actually lives. It is also, unlike the tariff schedule, something Haitian firms, the diaspora and Haitian institutions can act on directly.

5. Sectors worth investigating — and how strong the evidence is for each

We are drawing a hard line here between what this investigation established and what it merely suggests.

Evidenced today:

• Knitted apparel. Real volumes, a real 12-point tariff, and a documented failure to claim it. The one place where money was demonstrably left on the table in 2024. But note what the preference is worth competitively: Bangladesh and Cambodia sit in the same tier at 0%, Pakistan and the Philippines reached the same garment origin rules on 1 January 2026, and Vietnam has its own UK trade agreement. The 12-point margin bites against suppliers with no preference at all — it is parity with Haiti's real competitors, not an edge over them.
• Coffee and cocoa, processed rather than raw. The tariff differential is verified — 0% versus 6% for coffee, 0% versus 8% for chocolate — and the origin rule for chocolate is unusually permissive. The existing export base to Britain is very small.

Proposed, and requiring product-specific verification before anyone acts:

• Processed agricultural goods more broadly. The compound-duty advantage is real and verified, but on a line for a product Haiti does not export. Whether it applies to any specific Haitian product depends entirely on that product's own commodity code.
• Cassava flour appears in the tariff at £138 per tonne, which Haiti does not pay. We verified the tariff line. We did not establish that Haiti has cassava-processing capacity, export volumes, or a British market — and this article should not be read as saying it does.
• Mango products beyond fresh fruit — juice, purée, jam. We could not identify the specific commodity codes or rates, and we declined to substitute a neighbouring product's numbers. Twice, in earlier drafts, we did substitute, and were wrong both times.

The reader who wants to act on any of this should start where this article started: look up the actual commodity code on the UK tariff and read what it says.

What this adds up to

The British market is genuinely open to Haiti, and has been for five years. It is also open, on identical terms, to every one of Haiti's Caribbean competitors — and to Bangladesh, and to Cambodia, and to forty-four other countries.

An open door is not a competitive advantage. It is the absence of one particular obstacle.

And the harder truth underneath: Britain took £4.8 million of Haitian goods in 2024. The United States took US$607.7 million, roughly 79% of everything Haiti exported. The US programmes that underwrite Haiti's garment sector — HOPE and HELP — expire on 31 December 2026, four months from now, having already lapsed once in late 2025.

Whatever happens with the British market, that is the number that decides the year.

What we could not establish

In keeping with how Lakou handles its own metrics, here is what this investigation could not settle.

• Where "£1.8 million" came from. It matches no field in the 2024 database. It may come from the 2023 edition, which we did not obtain.
• Whether US preclearance for Haitian mangoes has resumed. The suspension is documented; the current position is not. The most recent engagement we found was July 2024.
• Whether Haiti meets the customs-cooperation condition that the Caribbean cumulation right depends on. No public list exists.
• The exact commodity codes and tariff rates for mango juice and mango purée. We identified the headings but not the specific lines, and we are not going to substitute a neighbouring product's rate. An earlier draft of this research did exactly that, twice, and was wrong both times.
• Whether British buyers want Francique mangoes at all. We found no evidence either way.
• Whether Haiti has any commercial cassava-processing or export capacity. We verified the British tariff line; we established nothing about Haitian supply.

A note on the numbers

Two different British datasets count trade with Haiti, and they disagree — because they answer different questions.

The standard HMRC trade statistics identify imports by country of dispatch, which HMRC states "is not necessarily the country of origin." The preference database identifies goods by country of origin, because that is what a preference is claimed against. On the dispatch basis, Britain imported £250,511 from Haiti in 2024. On the origin basis, £4,786,739. Both are correct measurements of different things.

Every figure in this article that concerns the DCTS uses the origin basis, because DCTS eligibility depends on origin. Why individual Haitian shipments acquire a different dispatch country is a question we have not answered and are not going to speculate about.

Shipment values given as illustrations — the £10,000 and £100,000 consignments used to show how the arithmetic works — are exactly that. They are not records of real transactions, and no claim is made that a shipment of that size occurred.

Sources. Department for Business and Trade, Import preference utilisation database, 2024 (published 23 April 2026); DBT, Preference tiers under the Developing Countries Trading Scheme (19 June 2023); the UK Integrated Online Tariff, read 21 August 2026; The Customs (Origin of Chargeable Goods: Developing Countries Trading Scheme) Regulations 2023 and the amending regulations in force from 1 January 2026; Defra's Border Target Operating Model risk categorisations (updated 3 August 2026); 7 CFR 305.4 and 319.56-3; HMRC Overseas Trade Statistics methodology; British Embassy Haiti, 18 August 2026.