Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies
through an export promotion agency, the Dominican Center
for the Promotion of Exports (Centro Dominicano de Promocion
de Exportaciones—Cedopex), and through cooperation
with a nongovernmental organization, the Joint
Agricultural Consultative Committee, which promotes agribusiness
investment in the republic. By the 1990s, some success had
been achieved with citrus and pineapples, but quicker growth
in nontraditional agricultural exports was hindered by the slow
pace of the CEA's diversification program, which had scheduled
portions of the fertile sugar plains for conversion to nontraditional
crop production.
As part of the national dish of rice and beans, rice was a
major Dominican food crop in the late 1980s and 1990s. Rice
production expanded significantly in the post-Trujillo era, and
by late 1979 the country had achieved self-sufficiency for the
first time. Rice production, however, waned in the 1980s and
1990s, forcing renewed imports.
The annual harvest of paddy rice reached 566,000 tons in
1992 but fell to 533,000 tons in 1994. Declines in production
were related to a series of economic factors. Rice subsidies to
the urban poor, who had less than two kilograms of rice a week
as part of Inespre's food basket, or canasta popular, were generally
at odds with the goal of increased output. Apart from such
subsidies, the cost of rice was more than twice that on the world
market. The government's land reform measures also may have
had a negative impact on rice yields; IAD's rice holdings, which
accounted for 40 percent of the nation's rice, were noticeably
less productive than private rice holdings. In the late 1980s, the
government continued to involve itself extensively in the industry
by supplying irrigation systems to more than 50 percent of
rice farmers as well as technical support through the Rice
Research Center in Juma, near Bonao. The government also
moved to increase the efficiency of local distribution in 1987; it
transferred rice marketing operations from Inespre to the Agricultural
Bank of the Dominican Republic (Banco Agricola de
la Republica Dominicana—Bagricola) and then to the private
sector.
The other principal grains and cereals consumed in the
Dominican Republic include corn, sorghum, and imported
wheat. Corn, native to the island, performed better than many
food crops in the 1980s and 1990s because of the robust growth
of the poultry industry, which used 95 percent of the corn crop
as animal feed. The strong demand for feed notwithstanding,
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