Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

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Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies
of gold, silver, copper, iron, nickel, and marble. The country's
insignificant mining sector, which accounted for less than 1
percent of GDP and employed less than 1 percent of the labor
force in the early 1980s, all but vanished in 1983, when a
United States firm, Reynolds Company, decided to close its
bauxite mine at Miragoane after forty years of operation. The
plant produced an average of 500,000 tons of bauxite a year,
but the declining metal content of the ore, coupled with high
production costs and the oversupplied international bauxite
market, made it a losing business venture.
A Canadian mining company, Sainte Genevieve, which
started prospecting for gold in the northern part of the island
in 1995, decided to relocate its operations to the Dominican
Republic in late 1997. Although it had created more than 300
jobs, the local community expressed strong concerns about the
adverse effects the mining operation could have on their agricultural
output. Their demands that the company finance
rehabilitation of irrigation systems, bridges, and dams in their
region prompted the firm's decision to depart.
Energy
Haiti had limited energy resources in the late 1990s. The
country has no petroleum resources, little hydroelectricity
potential, and rapidly diminishing supplies of wood fuels.
Local timber and charcoal account for 75 percent of the total
energy used in the country, imported petroleum for 15 percent,
bagasse (sugarcane residue) for 5 percent, and hydroelectric
power for 5 percent. In addition, only a meager 10 percent
of the country had access to electricity in 1995. Even in Port-au-
Prince, where almost half the population has electricity, the
supply is so limited that many industries must resort to private
generators. Although most provincial towns have intermittent
electricity, only 3 percent of the rural population has any.
The Haitian Electricity Company (Electricite d'Haiti
EdH), established in 1971, operates the Peligre hydroelectric
plant above the Artibonite Valley, which provides approximately
one-third of the island's public electricity. Four thermal
plants in the Port-au-Prince area provide the other two-thirds.
Tapping illegally into power lines has long been a fairly common
practice, and almost half of the current produced by the
EdH was stolen.
Haiti imports all of its petroleum. When a petroleum
embargo was imposed in 1993, thousands of people made a liv-
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