Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies
workers cannot remove themselves from hazardous workplace
situations without jeopardizing continued employment. Conditions
for agricultural workers are generally much worse, especially
in the sugar industry. On many sugar plantations, cane
cutters are paid by the weight of cane cut rather than by hours
worked. Many cane cutters earn the equivalent of approximately
US$3.70 per day. Many villages in which workers, often
Haitians, gather for mutual support have high rates of disease
and lack schools, medical facilities, running water, and sewerage
systems.
Agriculture
The backbone of the Dominican economy for centuries,
agriculture declined in significance during the 1970s and
1980s, as manufacturing, mining, and tourism began to play
more important roles in the country's development. During
the 1960s, the agricultural sector employed close to 60 percent
of the labor force, contributed 25 percent of GDP, and provided
between 80 and 90 percent of exports. By 1988, however,
agriculture employed only 35 percent of the labor force,
accounted for 15 percent of GDP, and generated approximately
50 percent of all exports. In 1992 the sector's share of
exports dropped to 43 percent and employed only 28 percent
of the total workforce. By the end of 1995, the agricultural sector's
contribution to GDP stood at 12.7 percent, and it
employed approximately 12.9 percent of the labor force. The
declining importance of sugar, the principal source of economic
activity for nearly a century, was even more dramatic.
Sugar's share of total exports fell from 63 percent in 1975 to
less than 20 percent by the late 1980s. Sugar exports in 1995
were 75 percent lower than in 1981, and the severe drought of
1997 also lowered production.
The transformation in agriculture paralleled the country's
demographic trends. In 1960, some 70 percent of the country's
population was rural; that figure was reduced to 30 percent in
the 1990s. Government policies accelerated urbanization
through development strategies that favored urban industries
over agriculture in terms of access to capital, tariff and tax
exemptions, and pricing policies. As a consequence, the production
of major food crops either stagnated or declined in
per capita terms from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s. However,
production of some major export products, coffee and
cocoa, grew by some 9 percent in the latter 1990s.
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