Cuban sugar industry demise mirrors food crisis

By Marc Frank

HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuba, which once produced millions of tons of sugar, expects to output just 300,000 metric tons of the sweetener in 2025, according to provincial media reports, as it struggles to find the resources to plant cane in a bitter symbol of agriculture's decline on the Caribbean island.

Sugar was long "king" in Cuba as a hundred mills churned out raw sugar for domestic consumption and export. But the fuel, fertilizer, machinery and labor shortages that plague Cuba's broader farm sector have hit the sugar industry especially hard, with year after year of record-breaking low output.

Production of sugar cane is dominated by state mills in Cuba's Communist-run economy.

This year, less cane means a record low of just 15 mills will be open for sugar production, versus 24 the year before, the government announced as the first mill opened this week.

"We have to plant cane," Vice President Salvador Valdes said in central Camaguey province in late November, a province slated to produce 10,000 tonnes compared with up to 200,000 in the past.

"The first thing is the cane. If there is cane there will be a harvest, but we have less and less cane," Valdes said.

The government has yet to report last season's output, which Reuters estimated at a record low of 300,000 metric tons of raw sugar, based on reports in provincial Communist party newspapers and sources.

The figure is similar to production in the late 1800s.

Ten of 13 sugar-producing provinces have reported production plans this year similar to their output during the last season.

Since tough new U.S. sanctions and the COVID-19 pandemic gutted the import-dependent country's foreign exchange earnings and sparked a grueling economic crisis in 2020, food production has fallen over 40% and food processing a similar amount, according to the government.

In eastern Las Tunas province - once a prominent sugar-producing region, the local Communist Party newspaper reported that "during the period December 2020 to June 2024 the areas planted with sugarcane decreased 48%."

(Reporting by Marc Frank; Additional reporting by Nelson Acosta; Editing by Dave Sherwood and Sandra Maler)