Baradères


Baraderes is a commune in the Nippes department in the southwest part of Haiti. The town has a picturesque market square with a large church. There are few shops and no hotels.
The area economy is based on subsistence agriculture, although a small association of subsistence farmers, Kafe Devlopman Barade, began exporting coffee to the U.S. in 2008. The town is vulnerable to flooding and is accessible via a rocky dirt road. T
he road is periodically improved, but remains passable only by lorries or high-clearance, four-wheel-drive vehicles. Baradères is also accessible by boat from Petite Trou de Nippes, but sedimentation has made the Bay of Baradères very shallow in places and difficult to navigate—even by canoe. The river mouth is increasingly being blocked by sediment.
This sediment is a result of severe soil erosion upstream. Primary causes of the erosion probably are riverbank scouring during heavy rainstorms, along with deforestation and cropping of hillsides in the Baradères River valley.