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Haiti Mining
Endowed with few commercially valuable natural
resources,
Haiti maintained only a small mining sector in the late
1980s;
mining accounted for less than 1 percent of GDP, and it
employed
less than 1 percent of the labor force. The country's only
bauxite mine, the Miragoâne mine in the southern
peninsula,
produced an average of 500,000 tons of bauxite a year in
the
early 1980s; however, in 1982 the declining metal content
of the
ore, high production costs, and the oversupplied
international
bauxite market forced the mine to close. Bauxite had at
one time
been the country's second leading export. Copper also was
mined,
beginning in the 1960s, but production of the ore was
sporadic.
Haiti contained relatively small amounts of gold,
silver,
antimony, tin, lignite, sulphur, coal, nickel, gypsum,
limestone,
manganese, marble, iron, tungsten, salt, clay, and various
building stones. Mining activity in the late 1980s focused
on raw
materials for the construction industry. The government
announced
the discovery of new gold deposits in the northern
peninsula in
1985, but long-standing plans for gold production
proceeded
slowly. With funding from the Inter-American Development
Bank
(IDB), the government planned to perform its first
comprehensive
geological survey in the late 1980s.
Data as of December 1989
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