Víctor Rolando Arroyo, UPECI
PINAR DEL RIO, July - The economic planning authority's decision to build
the huge "30 de noviembre" sugar mill in San Cristóbal, Pinar
del Rio province, in the 1970's not only didn't deliver the expected results,
but it also had economic and socially disruptive consequences for the adjoining
territory.
At the time, a number of experts opposed the construction of the gigantic
mill, on the grounds that the surrounding land could not supply enough sugar
cane for the mill. A sugar mill is one of the few industrial enterprises in
which the factory is customarily built in open countryside, where the raw
material for it is obtained, as opposed to the perhaps more usual method of
transporting the raw material to a factory in a more urban setting.
The experts pointed out that the mill would need 150,000 hundredweight of
sugar cane a day for 150 days of operation and the surrounding lands are not
optimal for that level of production.
In the beginning, the sugar industry planners assigned 26,429 acres of
agricultural land to feed the mill's processors. A decade later, 42, 484 acres
had been assigned to the mill, but yields had decreased by 20 percent, and there
wasn't enough sugar cane to keep the mill operating efficiently.
In order to save the mill's and the government planners' image, neighboring "José
Martí" sugar mill was shut down and its agricultural lands were
assigned to the "30 de noviembre." By now, the giant mill consumes the
cane produced in approximately 74,000 acres, some of it transported from as far
out as 50 miles, and it's still not enough. In the just-finished harvest, the "30
de noviembre" scarcely produced 86,000 tons of raw sugar, at an average
yield of 1.13 tons per acre under cultivation. The international average for
sugar mills varies between 3.24 and 5.67 tons of sugar per acre planted in sugar
cane. The mill was in operation for fewer than 100 days.
The survival of the "30 de noviembre," however, brought about the
demise of the "José Martí" mill, the sudden loss of just
under 1,000 sugar industry jobs and hundreds of agricultural jobs, and the
deterioration of the town around the closed mill, whose residents have little
hope for a better future.
The "30 de noviembre," far from becoming an economic engine, is a
dead weight on the local economy, keeps thousands of acres of productive land
from achieving full potential, left many locals jobless, and it did it all as a
consequence of a politically motivated decision.
Versión
original en español
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