Cuban sugar trade demise mirrors meals disaster

By Marc Frank

HAVANA (Reuters) – Cuba, which as soon as produced thousands and thousands of tons of sugar, expects to output simply 300,000 metric tons of the sweetener in 2025, in accordance with provincial media studies, because it struggles to seek out the sources to plant cane in a bitter image of agriculture’s decline on the Caribbean island.

Sugar was lengthy “king” in Cuba as 100 mills churned out uncooked sugar for home consumption and export. However the gas, fertilizer, equipment and labor shortages that plague Cuba’s broader farm sector have hit the sugar trade particularly onerous, with 12 months after 12 months of record-breaking low output.

Manufacturing of sugar cane is dominated by state mills in Cuba’s Communist-run economic system.

This 12 months, much less cane means a file low of simply 15 mills will likely be open for sugar manufacturing, versus 24 the 12 months earlier than, the federal government introduced as the primary mill opened this week.

“We’ve got to plant cane,” Vice President Salvador Valdes mentioned in central Camaguey province in late November, a province slated to provide 10,000 tonnes in contrast with as much as 200,000 prior to now.

“The very first thing is the cane. If there may be cane there will likely be a harvest, however we’ve got much less and fewer cane,” Valdes mentioned.

The federal government has but to report final season’s output, which Reuters estimated at a file low of 300,000 metric tons of uncooked sugar, based mostly on studies in provincial Communist celebration newspapers and sources.

The determine is much like manufacturing within the late 1800s.

Ten of 13 sugar-producing provinces have reported manufacturing plans this 12 months much like their output over the last season.

Since robust new U.S. sanctions and the COVID-19 pandemic gutted the import-dependent nation’s international change earnings and sparked a grueling financial disaster in 2020, meals manufacturing has fallen over 40% and meals processing an identical quantity, in accordance with the federal government.

In jap Las Tunas province – as soon as a outstanding sugar-producing area, the native Communist Occasion newspaper reported that “through the interval December 2020 to June 2024 the areas planted with sugarcane decreased 48%.”