Haiti's Imports Fell by More Than a Quarter in September. Did Something Break?

Ships arriving in Haiti in September 2026 carried 313,357 tonnes of cargo. In August, the figure was 438,210 tonnes. That is a fall of 28.5% in a single month, in a country that imports most of the rice it eats and nearly all of the fuel it burns. When a number like that appears, the first instinct is to look for a disaster: a port shut down, a blockade, demand drying up. The manifests point somewhere else. Most of the gap sits on a handful of bulk carriers loaded with cement that simply did not come in September. And once you step back from the single month, the picture turns around.

A month that looks worse than it is

Start with the headline series. Haiti's seaborne imports were 313,357 tonnes in September 2026, down 28.5% from 438,210 tonnes in August and up 7.6% from 291,209 tonnes in September 2025. It was the lightest month since February 2026, but not out of line with the past two years. (These figures use revised source data: late and corrected manifests moved July to September 2026, with shipment counts changing by -152, -209 and +133 against the 12 October export.)

The line moves in steps, not in a smooth curve. That is the first clue. A country whose imports arrive in containers tends to show a steady line. A country that brings in its heaviest goods on bulk ships, 20,000 or 30,000 tonnes at a time, shows a jagged one. Haiti is the second kind.

The cement ships that did not come

So which products fell? One stands out above all others. Portland cement (HS 2523) dropped from 150,548 tonnes in August to 51,915 tonnes in September, a decline of 65.5%, on 7 bills of lading compared with 12 a month earlier. Everything else combined went from 287,662 tonnes to 261,442 tonnes, a decline of 9.1%.

Cement alone accounts for 98,633 tonnes of the month's 124,853-tonne drop, or 79.0%. Take it out, and Haiti's September imports were 19.5% higher than in September 2025. That is not what a breakdown looks like.

Cement is one of Haiti's heaviest imports. In 2025, our records show 1,076,888 tonnes of it arriving by sea, about a quarter of all import weight that year. It comes from Turkey, Egypt, Colombia and the Dominican Republic, and each ship moves the monthly total by tens of thousands of tonnes. The run makes the point better than any description: 54,559 tonnes in April 2026, 163,375 in May, 94,014 in June, 174,155 in July, 150,548 in August, and 51,915 in September.

The route shifted too. In August, cement loaded in the Turkish ports of Iskenderun and Aliaga went mostly to Cap-Haïtien, which received 129,160 tonnes of all goods that month, its heaviest month in our series. In September, Cap-Haïtien took 29,870 tonnes, down 76.9%. The month's largest single cement load, 31,353 tonnes from Istanbul, went instead to Saint-Louis-du-Sud on the south coast. Port-au-Prince held 223,176 tonnes, 71.2% of the month's weight and slightly more than in August.

Why August was so heavy, and September so light, I cannot tell you. I searched Haitian, Dominican and trade press in French, Creole, English and Spanish for anything on cement shipments to Haiti in those months and found nothing that explains the timing. Bulk cargo of this kind usually follows vessel schedules and stock levels rather than month-to-month demand, but that is a general pattern, not an explanation of these particular ships.

The twist: by quarter, Haiti imported more

Here is where the story turns. Add up July, August and September, and Haiti brought in 1,204,685 tonnes by sea, up 6.1% from 1,135,261 tonnes in the second quarter of 2026 and up 17.1% from 1,029,108 tonnes in the third quarter of 2025. It was the second-heaviest quarter in our data, behind only the second quarter of 2025.

Cement is part of that, not a footnote to it. Over the first nine months of 2026, 992,333 tonnes of cement have arrived, up 23.5% from 803,767 tonnes in January to September 2025. That is already 92% of the full 2025 total, with a quarter still to go. The September dip is a pause inside a year of heavier cement imports, not a turn away from them.

Inside that busier quarter, two essentials moved in opposite directions. One was fuel. The other was rice.

More fuel, while prices climbed

Refined petroleum fuels (HS 2710: gasoline, diesel, kerosene and similar) were Haiti's largest single import by weight in September. Over the quarter, 216,829 tonnes arrived, up 38.0% from 157,138 tonnes in July to September 2025 and the heaviest quarter in our data since January 2025. The previous high was 208,219 tonnes in the last quarter of 2025, so the new record is narrow, but it is a record.

The monthly view shows how the quarter was built. June 2026 brought only 46,927 tonnes. July then brought 100,703 tonnes, the heaviest fuel month since January 2025. August added 61,710 tonnes and September 54,417 tonnes, which was 11.8% below August but 95.3% above September 2025.

The June gap has a documented backdrop. Fuel distribution from the Varreux terminal, the capital's main fuel depot, was disrupted by armed clashes in Cité Soleil from June 13, and "Long lines are being observed at some service stations in Port-au-Prince," HaitiLibre reported on June 18. A heavy July after a disrupted June looks like restocking, and that is likely part of the story. But I want to be careful here: no source I could verify ties the July tankers to the June disruption, and the quarter stayed heavy through August and September, after any catch-up should have been done.

This is a volume story, not a price story. CargoFax measures Haiti's fuel in tonnes, so higher world oil prices do not inflate it. Prices did climb, sharply. The World Bank's monthly price data shows Brent crude averaging $116.8 a barrel in September 2026, up from $68.0 a year earlier. In Haiti, the government "increased diesel prices by 37% and gasoline prices by 29%" in early April, AP reported. A second adjustment took effect on August 10, when, according to the central bank's monthly note reported by Rezo Nodwes, gasoline rose 7.7%, diesel 10% and kerosene 10.9%.

September also brought a quality question rather than a quantity one. In early September, a ship delivered petroleum products to Varreux "without any quality control by the relevant authorities," and a Ministry of Commerce and Industry notice on September 15 confirmed the products had not been analysed, HaitiLibre reported. That matters for drivers, but it does not change the tonnes.

So why did more fuel arrive while it got more expensive? The honest answer is that the data does not show why. The possibilities include restocking after June, more demand for generator and transport fuel, and the timing of large tanker cargoes. I found no reporting that settles it.

Less rice, more wheat

Rice went the other way. Haiti imports most of the rice it eats, and in 2025 our records show 495,662 tonnes arriving by sea. The first half of 2026 was heavy, so the year to date is still ahead: 376,067 tonnes through September, up 14.8% from a year earlier. Then the third quarter thinned out. July to September 2026 rice totalled 86,294 tonnes, down 36.2% from 135,356 tonnes in the second quarter and down 25.4% from 115,692 tonnes in July to September 2025, the lightest quarter in our data.

September's 21,768 tonnes were the lowest monthly rice figure since January 2025. Wheat moved in the opposite direction, rising 39.8% to 40,598 tonnes in September, and sugar rose 46.8% to 17,699 tonnes.

The price backdrop is hard on families even though it does not change our tonnes. FEWS NET's July 2026 update says "staple food prices remain nearly 90 percent above the five-year average" (FEWS NET). The central bank's August figures, as reported by Rezo Nodwes, put food and non-alcoholic drinks 17.6% higher than a year earlier. Whether the light rice quarter reflects those costs, stocks built up in the first half, or shipment timing, the data does not show. It is the trend in this edition I would watch most closely.

Across the border: Hispaniola

There is one more piece, and it changes how to read every number above. Haiti's seaborne imports from the Dominican Republic were 10,877 tonnes in September 2026, down 44.9% from 19,742 tonnes in September 2025 and down 56.0% from 24,718 tonnes in August, just 3.5% of the month's seaborne total. It was the lowest monthly figure in our series, which begins in January 2025.

Over nine months the sea route from the Dominican Republic is still ahead, at 261,312 tonnes in January to September 2026, up 18.0% from a year earlier, but the third quarter was much lighter than the third quarter of 2025, which included a heavy July.

The bigger story is on land, and it is invisible in a dataset of ships arriving at Haitian ports. Dominican customs reports that around 3,900 containers bound for Haiti have moved through Dominican territory so far in 2026, an increase of about 50% on the same period of 2025, according to Revista Mercado. The same report says shipping lines have been avoiding Haitian ports, and quotes the head of Dominican customs saying that insurance for a ship entering a Haitian port "puede llegar a duplicar el valor del flete" (can double the cost of the freight).

Dominican goods themselves cross overland too, and the mix rhymes with what Haiti buys by sea. Iron and steel bars, hydraulic cement and wheat flour led the Dominican Republic's national-regime exports to Haiti in the first half of 2026, elDinero reported, and the same three products led through August, according to Revista Mercado.

So a falling seaborne figure from the Dominican Republic and a rising overland trade are not in conflict. They measure different routes. What it does mean is that CargoFax's Haiti data, which counts ships, understates the total supply reaching the country, and likely by more in 2026 than in 2025.

So, did something break?

No. A few cement ships came on a different schedule, and the month fell by more than a quarter. The quarter was busier than a year earlier, with the most fuel in our data and the least rice. The questions still open are the important ones: why fuel is up, why rice is down, and how much of Haiti's supply is now arriving by road rather than by sea.

What to watch

• October 2026 cement (the next month of CargoFax data): whether bulk cargoes return to the 150,000-tonne range of July and August or stay near September's 51,915 tonnes.
• Rice in October to December 2026: a second quarter below 100,000 tonnes would stand out; FEWS NET's next Haiti update is the outside check on prices.
• Fuel after the August 10 price adjustment: whether tanker volumes hold near the third quarter's 216,829 tonnes while Brent stays above $100 a barrel.
• Port access and transit: whether more cargo keeps landing at Cap-Haïtien and Saint-Louis-du-Sud, and whether Dominican customs reports further growth in Haiti-bound transit containers.

Sources

Every link on this page passed the verification gate (live article, date in window, quote found, archived). Tier 1: Bloomberg, WSJ, Reuters, FT. Tier 2: other highly relevant sources (trade press, government, company releases, local press).

Tier 1

No Tier 1 source on this page.

Tier 2

• Tier 2 haitilibre.com. Haiti - News : Zapping.... 2026-06-18 archive
• Tier 2 WTOP News. Surging oil prices spark protest in Haiti as workers demand salary increases. 2026-04-13 archive
• Tier 2 Rezo Nòdwès. Haïti – Inflation : les prix repartent à la hausse. 2026-10-19 archive
• Tier 2 HaitiLibre. Haiti - FLASH : Official sale at gas stations of fuel dangerous for vehicles. 2026-10-15 archive
• Tier 2 FEWS NET. Conflict and elevated prices continue to restrict access to food in Haïti. 2026-07-01 archive
• Tier 2 Mercado Media Network. Efecto en la frontera: La crisis de Haití dispara el tránsito de mercancías a través de República Dominicana. 2026-09-02 archive
• Tier 2 Periódico elDinero. Exportaciones dominicanas hacia Haití crecen 22.5% en el primer semestre de 2026. 2026-07-17 archive
• Tier 2 Mercado Media Network. Comercio entre RD y Haití: Crecen las exportaciones pero caen las importaciones. 2026-09-22 archive