Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies
late 1990s. The production cost of Haitian sugar was three
times more than the world price in the 1980s.
Shifts in the world sugar market, caused mainly by international
substitution of corn-based fructose for sugarcane,
exerted further pressure on Haitian producers, and production
stagnated. Total sugar exports dropped from 19,200 tons
in 1980 to 6,500 tons in 1987. In 1988 Haiti exported no sugar.
The country's three major industrial sugar mills, including the
oldest one, the Haitian American Sugar Company (HASCO)
near Port-au-Prince, have ceased operations, citing losses
caused by competition from cheap legal and illegal imports.
Another industrial mill, the Centrale Dessalines, produced
20,000 tons of sugar in 1994. In addition, Haiti has almost
1,000 peasant-run mills. Total production of raw sugar in 1994
was estimated at 30,000 tons. Sugar export earnings fell from
G22.7 million in 1986-87 to G2 million in 1990-91. Haiti is
now a net importer of sugar.
Other cash crops include cocoa, cotton, sisal, and essential
oils. Cacao plants covered an estimated 10,400 hectares in 1987
and yielded about 4,000 tons of cocoa a year. But cocoa has
been declining in importance, as shown by the drop in its
export earnings from US$4 million in 1987-88 to US$660,000
in 1995-96.
Cotton cultivation peaked in the 1930s, before Mexican boll
weevil beetles ravaged the crop. In the 1960s, growers introduced
a higher quality of cotton, which was processed in local
cotton gins and then exported to Europe. But when cotton
prices fell in the 1980s, cotton plantings shrank from 12,400
hectares in 1979 to under 8,000 hectares by 1986, and exports
ceased.
Sisal, exported as a twine since the 1920s, peaked in the
1950s, when industries spawned by the Korean War used up
much of the nation's 40,000-ton output. As the substitution of
synthetic fibers for sisal reduced most large-scale growing of
the plant in the 1980s, however, Haiti exported an average of
only 6,500 tons a year, mainly to the Dominican Republic and
Puerto Rico.
The export of essential oils, derived from vetiver, lime,
amyris, and bitter orange for the cosmetics and pharmaceutical
industries, peaked in 1976 at 395 tons. Exports gradually leveled
off at a little more than 200 tons, generating an average of
US$5 million in foreign exchange.
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