PORT-AU-PRINCE–A char­i­ty for for­mer US2 Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton award­ed more than $700,000 to de­vel­op the coun­try's agri­cul­ture sec­tor.The Clin­ton Foun­da­tion an­nounced on Mon­day that the grants will go to­ward ef­forts to plant trees, build a cof­fee farm and train farm­ers.Clin­ton has been the UN's spe­cial en­voy to Haiti since short­ly be­fore the dev­as­tat­ing 2010 earth­quake. He left Haiti fol­low­ing a two-day vis­it ac­com­pa­nied by po­ten­tial in­vestors rep­re­sent­ing a per­fume com­pa­ny, restau­rants and a lin­gerie com­pa­ny.

"The coun­try has been beat down so long and the con­tro­ver­sies are so fa­mil­iar to peo­ple that it's some­times too easy to see the down side. I'm not naive. I know what the down side is," he told AP. But, even so, he said, "This is a place of stag­ger­ing po­ten­tial."One of the del­e­ga­tion's vis­its on Mon­day was to a brew­ery Heineken NV pur­chased last year. The com­pa­ny an­nounced on Mon­day that it would in­vest $40 mil­lion to ex­pand the brew­ery and help farm­ers who sup­ply it with sorghum.

Pres­i­dent Michel Martel­ly is try­ing to lure for­eign in­vestors to help re­build the Caribbean na­tion fol­low­ing the mas­sive quake. His ad­min­is­tra­tion has rou­tine­ly em­ployed the mantra, "Haiti is open for busi­ness."But an­a­lysts in both Haiti and abroad say the na­tion is held back by an old-fash­ioned bank­ing sys­tem and a dys­func­tion­al jus­tice sys­tem that pro­vides lit­tle le­gal cer­tain­ty for in­vestors.

Oth­er de­ter­rents in­clude US gov­ern­ment ad­vi­sories that alert trav­el­ers to se­cu­ri­ty con­cerns, a cholera epi­dem­ic and in­ad­e­quate in­fra­struc­ture.The trav­el warn­ings didn't es­cape the no­tice of first-time Haiti vis­i­tor Mario Batali, an Amer­i­can celebri­ty chef, even if he did have the lux­u­ry of trav­el­ing with Clin­ton's se­cu­ri­ty de­tail.

"The dan­ger is in my opin­ion very over­played," said Batali, wear­ing his sig­na­ture or­ange Crocs and shorts.Batali said he could imag­ine in­tro­duc­ing Hait­ian prod­ucts to cus­tomers in his Ital­ian restau­rants: "I could see us­ing their cof­fee. I could see us­ing their man­goes. I could see us­ing their rum. I could see us­ing just about every­thing we've bumped in­to."