Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies
stock contained 2.4 million head of cattle, up from 2 million
head in the late 1980s. The great majority of the cattle were
beef cattle, raised on medium-to-large ranches in the east.
The country also contains an undetermined, but dwindling,
number of dairy cows. The decline in numbers of dairy cows
because of large-scale slaughter of breeding cattle resulted
from years of low government prices for milk. Implemented in
an effort to keep consumer milk prices low, this policy had the
unintended effect of dramatically increased milk imports.
The poultry industry, in contrast to the dairy industry,
enjoyed strong growth in the 1980s. In the mid-1990s, the
country had some 33 million chickens. A few large producers
supplied the nation with 90,000 tons of broilers a year and with
hundreds of millions of eggs. 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. Afterward, the Dominican Republic established
an increasingly modern and well-organized pork industry.
By the mid-1990s, the number of pigs was estimated at
850,000. However, an attack of cholera in the late 1990s
affected the national pig stock. In addition, Dominican livestock
in the mid-1990s included some 574,000 goats. Livestock
accounted for 5.2 percent of GDP in 1996, compared with 4.9
percent in 1991.
Forestry and Fishing
Pine, hardwood, and other tree cover, once ample, covered
only 15 percent of the land by the beginning of the 1990s. To
offset losses caused by the indiscriminate felling of trees and
the prevalence of slash-and-burn agriculture, the government
outlawed commercial tree cutting in 1967. Since then, limited
development of commercial plantation forestry has occurred,
but the nation continues to import more than US$30 million
in wood products each year. Although not so drastic as in Haiti,
deforestation and the erosion that it causes pose serious environmental
concerns for the country's watersheds into the
1990s and beyond (see Land Use, this ch.). The limited
amount of land occupied by forest and woodland (0.6 million
hectares) continued to be steadily reduced in the late 1990s.
The fishing industry continued to be underdeveloped into
the 1990s. It consists of only small coastal fishermen using
small boats lacking refrigeration, who barely exploit the 1,400
138