The mango trapper muscles his way high up the tree then stops on a branch. Spotting a hanging fruit, he pushes his homemade picking pole forward, trapping it.

He then drops the kidney-shaped Madame Francis mango to a teenage boy who holds out a rice sack to break its fall.

It's a homespun harvesting technique that helps feed about a half-million Haitian peasants, but one that is also keeping the $10 million- to $12 million-a-year industry from tapping its full potential.

"We would like another way to pick the mangoes," said Ernst Excellent, 22, a farmer who along with his dad, Ernest, is among hundreds off fournisseurs or middle men who wander Haiti's rugged terrain in pursuit of mangoes, most of which end up in U.S. supermarkets.

"We don't have any help. We don't have any specialist telling us what to do, or what not to do when we are planting. If we had someone, we could grow more mangoes."

As Haiti seeks to rebuild following the Jan. 12 earthquake, so too does the country's challenging mango industry. One of the few bright spots even before the 7.0-magnitude quake, mangoes and the peasants who grow them have become key in helping put revenue back in this quake-shattered economy.

"Right now, there are a lot of opportunities," said Maria Teresa Villanueva, a senior project officer with the Inter-American Development Bank. "We think relief and reconstruction are very important, but we also need to work on economic recovery, to make Haiti's long-term development possible."

The momentum to help Haiti's mango industry begun well before the quake, but has picked up since. For instance, weeks before this year's season opened, executives from Coca-Cola held a reception during an international donors conference for Haiti in New York and unveiled a new juice, Haiti Hope Mango Lime-Aid, to help Haitian mango farmers.

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