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Dominican Republic Farming Technology
In the 1980s, Dominican farmers still suffered from the
legacies of Trujillo's neglect and industrial strategies
that
placed little emphasis on agricultural development outside
the
sugar industry. As a result, the average farmer used far
fewer
purchased inputs, such as fertilizers, tractors, and
irrigation,
than his counterparts in many other Latin American
countries.
Some progress had been made in irrigation systems by
the late
1980s. The poor distribution of the country's generally
adequate
rainfall necessitated the development of irrigation under
the
management of the governmental National Water Resources
Institute
(Instituto Nacional de Recursos Hidráulicos--INDRHI). The
amount
of irrigated land increased rapidly with the construction
of
several dams, such as Tavera Dam and Sabana Yegua Dam, in
the
1970s and the 1980s. By the late 1980s, however, only
about
139,000 hectares, less than 15 percent of arable land,
benefited
from irrigation. Further expansion of irrigation was a key
to
reaching self-sufficiency, particularly in rice
production.
INDRHI pursued ambitious plans for future irrigation; it
was
projected that more than 200,000 hectares of land would be
functionally irrigated by the early 1990s.
The Secretariat of State for Agriculture (Secretaria de
Estado para la Agricultura--SEA) attempted to improve
farming
technology through its extension service and a series of
agricultural research centers. The greatest constraints
were
money and training. The Superior Institute of Agriculture,
established in 1962 and affiliated with the Catholic
University
Mother and Teacher (Universidad Católica Madre y
Maestra--UCMM)
in Santiago, successfully trained scores of agronomists;
it also
achieved crop innovations, the most important of which, in
the
late 1980s, concerned sorghum and African palm oil.
Several
regional, and generally crop-specific, institutes also
conducted
agricultural research.
Data as of December 1989
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