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Dominican Republic Livestock
The raising of livestock, the basis of the economy
during
colonial times, continued to be a common practice in the
1980s,
despite the country's warm climate and hilly interior. The
predominant livestock on the island were beef and dairy
cattle,
chickens, and pigs. The country was essentially
self-sufficient
in its production of basic meats. Cattle-raising was still
the
primary livestock activity in the late 1980s, and the
Dominican
stock exceeded 2 million head, the great majority of which
were
beef cattle, raised mostly on medium-to-large ranches in
the
east. The annual output of slaughtered beef surpassed
80,000 tons
annually, by the late 1980s, over 10 percent of which was
processed by five specially certified slaughterhouses and
was
exported to the United States. Ranchers also smuggled out
much
beef to circumvent export duties. The country also
contained an
undetermined, but dwindling, number of dairy cows. The
decline in
the dairy cow population was the direct result of years of
low
government prices for milk. Implemented in an effort to
keep milk
prices low, this policy dramatically increased milk
imports, and
it created serious milk shortages. Many private milk
pasteurizers
consequently closed their businesses in the 1980s. By the
late
1980s, only four pasteurizing plants, including one owned
by
Inespre, processed local milk and reconstituted imported
powdered
milk.
The poultry industry, in contrast to the dairy
industry,
enjoyed strong growth in the 1980s. A few large producers
supplied the nation with 90,000 tons of broilers a year
and with
hundreds of millions of eggs. As in other developing
countries,
the cost of feed continued to play a major role in the
pace of
the poultry industry's expansion in the 1980s. The pork
industry
had also rebounded by the mid-1980s, after suffering the
virtual
eradication of its stock from 1978 to 1982 because of an
epidemic
of African Swine Fever (ASF; see
Dominican Republic - Livestock and Fishing
,
ch. 8).
Afterward, the Dominican Republic established an
increasingly
modern and well-organized pork industry. By the late
1980s,
however, the national stock exceeded 500,000. This number
was
well below 1979's peak figure of 750,000, however. The
government
succeeded in restocking the pig population very rapidly
after
1982, but higher feed prices and slack consumer demand for
pork,
previously a traditional Dominican favorite, in response
to high
prices had slowed that effort by 1989.
Data as of December 1989
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