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Dominican Republic AGRICULTURE
Agriculture, the backbone of the Dominican economy for
centuries, declined in significance during the 1970s and
the
1980s, as manufacturing, mining, and tourism began to play
more
important roles in the country's development. During the
1960s,
the agricultural sector employed close to 60 percent of
the labor
force, contributed one-quarter of GDP, and provided
between 80
and 90 percent of exports. By 1988, however, agriculture
employed
only 35 percent of the labor force, accounted for 15
percent of
GDP, and generated approximately half of all exports. The
declining importance of sugar, the principal source of
economic
activity for nearly a century, was even more dramatic.
Sugar's
share of total exports fell from 63 percent in 1975 to
under 20
percent by the late 1980s. The transformation in
agriculture
paralleled the country's demographic trends. In 1960, some
70
percent of the country's population was rural; by the
1990s,
upwards of 70 percent was expected to be urban. Government
policies accelerated urbanization through development
strategies
that favored urban industries over agriculture in terms of
access
to capital, tariff and tax exemptions, and pricing
policies. As a
consequence, the production of major food crops either
stagnated,
or declined, in per capita terms from the mid-1970s to the
late
1980s. Lower world prices for traditional cash crops and
reductions in the United States sugar quota also depressed
the
production of export crops in the 1980s.
Data as of December 1989
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