Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

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Dominican Republic: The Society and Its Environment
tural work. Both these practices limit the overall demand for
casual labor.
The vast majority (84 percent) of farm women contribute to
the family's earnings. Women devise means of earning income
that mesh with their domestic tasks: they cultivate garden plots,
raise small livestock, and/or help tend the family's fields. In
addition, many rural women work at diverse cottage industries
and vending. They sell everything from lottery tickets to homemade
sweets. In the late 1990s, approximately 20 percent of
rural households were headed by women.
Because rural areas provide few services, working women
have to add physically demanding and time-consuming domestic
tasks to their work day. Single women are further handicapped
by the traditional exclusion of women from
mechanized or skilled agricultural work. Women work during
the labor-intensive phases of harvesting and in processing
crops like cotton, coffee, tobacco, and tomatoes. They usually
earn piece rate rather than a daily wage, and their earnings lag
behind those of male agricultural laborers.
Sugar Plantations
Most sugar mills and cane fields are concentrated in the
southeast coastal plains. Four large groups, one government
and three privately owned, own 75 percent of the land. They
are the State Sugar Council (Consejo Estatal del Azucar
CEA) , the Central Romana (formerly owned by Gulf and Western),
Casa Vicini (a family operation), and the Florida-based
Fanjul group (which bought out Gulf and Western in 1985).
The government created the CEA in 1966, largely from lands
and facilities formerly held by the Trujillo family.
In the mid-1980s, there were roughly 4,500 colonos (see Glossary),
who owned some 62,500 hectares. By the late 1980s, the
number had increased to 8,000 colonos owning 85,000 hectares,
which was 12 percent of the land in sugar production. These
small to mid-sized landholders are independent growers who
sell their harvested cane to the sugar mills. Although the
colonos level of prosperity varies significantly, some are prosperous
enough to hire laborers to cut their cane and to buy cane
from smaller producers. Their actual number fluctuates widely
in response to the market for cane. There were only 3,200 in
1970; the number more than doubled by 1980, then declined
by mid-decade but increased in the late 1980s. A slow decline
in the number of colonos has occurred in the 1990s.
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