By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Mar 30 1998 (IPS)

This year’s sugar harvest in Cuba is expected to be one of the worst ever. But sacrifices this year should pave the way for recovery, thanks to the government’s plans for a short harvest that will leave sugar cane in the fields for next year.

Projections put this year’s yield only slightly higher than the 1995 record low of 3.3 million tonnes, the worst ever since the 1959 triumph of the revolution led by Fidel Castro.

Deputy Minister of Sugar Gilberto Llerena said “this season will be neither the worst nor the best of the ‘special period’,” the euphemistic name given to the economic crisis gripping Cuba since 1990, in the wake of the collapse of the east European socialist bloc.

Production shot up to 4.45 million tonnes in 1996 after the 1995 low of 3.3 million tonnes. But last year’s yield fell to 4.2 million tonnes, a slump felt by the whole economy, which grew only 2.5 percent, below the government’s forecast of four percent growth.

Local experts say that if the current harvest ends early – in late April – as planned, the total yield will be no higher than 3.5 million tonnes, the second lowest since the crisis broke out. But thanks to this year’s sacrifices, next year’s harvest could pick up again, to four million tonnes, they add.

Sugar production averaged seven million tonnes a year in the 1980s, placing Cuba among the world’s top 10 exporters.

But two years ago, tourism surpassed Cuba’s traditional leading export product as the main foreign exchange-earner for the state’s impoverished coffers.

The International Sugar Organisation (ISO), meanwhile, projects a global production of 123.36 million tonnes of sugar, compared to a consumption level of 123.72 million tonnes, according to the state-owned marketing company Cubazucar.

The ISO also projects a close to one million tonne exportable surplus, due to the substantially higher yields expected this year in leading producers like Brazil and the European Union.

The US State Department reported that the United States increased its sugar imports by 200,000 tonnes, from countries like the Dominican Republic (35,736 tonnes), Brazil (29,442) and the Philippines (27,411).

China reported that in the September 1997 to January 1998 period it imported only 132,831 tonnes of sugar, down from 429,000 tonnes in the corresponding 1996-97 period. A record harvest of 7.5 million tonnes is projected this year.

Cuba’s sugar accords with China and its sugar-for-oil agreement with Russia, the local sugar sector’s most important deals, have not always been lived up to in the past few years.

Studies warn that if Cuba’s sugar production climbs back up to last decade’s levels, international sugar prices could fall once again.

Local analysts say Cuban authorities must do two things: guarantee recovery of the sector while taking steps to reduce the economy’s heavy dependence on sugar. Experts put the losses chalked up by the sugar industry in the past five years at 10 billion dollars.

The vice-president of the Council of State, Carlos Lage, pointed out this month that the recovery of the sugar sector would be a long process, and that once it got underway, “it will have to be sustained.”

A comeback in the strategic sector must be based not only on recovery in the fields, but also on an upgrading of the industry’s more than 100 factories scattered throughout the island.

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