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Venezuela Cash Crops
Cocoa and coffee provided most of Venezuela's export
revenues
before they entered a period of prolonged decline in the
1900s.
Jesuits introduced coffee in the 1740s, and by the 1800s
Venezuela was the world's third largest coffee producer.
By the
1980s, however, the coffee industry was in a decline. In
1988
coffee trees occupied 273,200 hectares and produced only
71,000
tons of coffee, one of the lowest yields in the world. The
value
of coffee exports, mainly to the United States and Europe,
was
about US$24 million in 1988. Coffee was primarily a
peasant crop,
grown largely on farms of under twenty hectares in
mountainous
areas. Low profits prevented most farmers from taking
steps, such
as the planting of newer coffee bushes, that could improve
yields. Worse still, Venezuelan coffee in the 1990s faced
the
impending introduction of plant diseases from the
neighboring
coffee crops of Colombia and Brazil.
Cocoa was also characterized by extremely low yields,
in part
as a result of aged trees and general deterioration in the
crop.
Once Venezuela's leading cash crop, by 1988 cacao plants
covered
only about 59,000 hectares and yielded a mere 13,500 tons
of
cocoa beans. As with coffee, most farmers sold their cocoa
through government marketing boards for use domestically
and
internationally. Exports of cocoa beans and products
exceeded
US$17 million in 1988, ranking it as the third leading
agricultural export (after coffee and tobacco), mainly to
Belgium, the United States, and Japan.
Tobacco appeared to be one of the country's few dynamic
cash
crops in the late 1980s. Although tobacco generally
stagnated in
the 1970s and early 1980s, output expanded notably in the
late
1980s as the industry turned to export markets in the
Caribbean.
In 1988 farmers in the west-central plains planted about
9,100
hectares of both dark and light tobacco, producing about
15,300
tons of leaf. In 1988 the cigarette industry exported
upwards of
US$20 million of cigarettes to the Caribbean, ranking
tobacco as
the second largest export crop.
Other leading cash crops included sugarcane, oilseeds,
and
cotton. Once a net exporter of sugar, Venezuela by the
mid-1970s
became a net importer, and in 1988 the country was only 71
percent self-sufficient in sugar. Sugarcane grew on
117,000
hectares in 1988 and produced 8.33 million tons of raw
sugar, but
annual output fluctuated according to weather conditions,
management practices, price changes, and currency
devaluations.
Many farmers plowed under their cane fields in the 1980s
in order
to plant more lucrative crops, and the nation's sixteen
sugar
mills faced ongoing technical obstacles.
Oilseeds, such as sesame, sunflower, coconut, peanut,
and
cotton, faced a fate similar to other cash crops, and in
1988 the
nation was only 21 percent self-sufficient in edible oils.
Although Venezuela was once one of the world's leading
producers
of sesame oil, the industry declined as a result of a
deterioration of the genetic content of the country's
sesame
plants and low market prices. Sesame plants, however,
still
extended over 148,700 hectares and yielded 68,300 tons in
1988.
By the 1980s, Venezuela imported large amounts of soybean
oil.
Data as of December 1990
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