By Marc Frank
HAVANA (Reuters) – Cuba, which once produced millions of tons of sugar, expects to produce just 300,000 tons of the sweetener in 2025, according to provincial media reports, as it struggles to find the resources to plant sugar cane in a bitter symbol of its decline of agriculture on the Caribbean island.
Sugar was “king” in Cuba for a long time, as a hundred factories produced raw sugar for domestic consumption and export. But the shortages of fuel, fertilizer, machinery and labor plaguing Cuba’s broader agricultural sector have hit the sugar industry especially hard, with record-breaking low production year after year.
Sugar cane production is dominated by state-owned factories in Cuba’s communist-led economy.
This year, less sugar cane means a record low of just 15 factories open for sugar production, down from 24 the year before, the government announced when the first factory opened this week.
“We need to plant sugar cane,” Vice President Salvador Valdes said in late November in the central province of Camaguey, a province expected to produce 10,000 tons, up from 200,000 in the past.
“The first is the sugar cane. If there is sugar cane, there will be a harvest, but we have less and less sugar cane,” Valdes said.
The government has not yet reported last season’s production. Reuters estimated this at a record low of 300,000 tons of raw sugar, based on reports in provincial newspapers and Communist Party sources.
The figure is comparable to production at the end of the 19th century.
Ten of the thirteen sugar-producing provinces have reported production plans this year that are comparable to their production during the past season.
Since tough new US sanctions and the COVID-19 pandemic devastated the import-dependent country’s foreign exchange earnings and triggered a debilitating economic crisis in 2020, food production has fallen by more than 40% and food processing has fallen by more than 40%, according to the government. comparable amount.
In the eastern province of Las Tunas, once a prominent sugar-producing region, the local Communist Party newspaper reported that “during the period December 2020 to June 2024, areas planted with sugar cane decreased by 48%.”
