Drought diminishes Cuban sugar outlook

Drought has dashed Cuba's plans to increase raw sugar output any time soon from the historic lows that followed the outdated industry's downsizing in 2002, though damage will depend on precipitation in the coming months, industry sources said this week.
"The plan was to build on the 2003/2004 harvest of 2.52 million tonnes toward more than 3 million tonnes in 2006," a local economist and sugar expert said. "Now we are talking about holding the line, something that may prove impossible."
Output in 2002/2003 was the lowest in more than 70 years at 2.2 million tonnes following the closure of 71 of 156 mills and a 50 percent cutback in the area dedicated to cane.
Prolonged drought from the eastern to the central parts of Cuba has destroyed and stunted cane earmarked for the coming harvest, and slowed planting for 2006.
But the unusually dry weather now extends across the entire territory of the world's fourth largest sugar exporting country, which sells abroad all but 700,000 tonnes of its crop.
"June rainfall was 56 percent of the historic average," Vice President Carlos Lage told the Cuban parliament last week. It was the third driest May since 1961, with just 40 percent of normal precipitation, Lage reported.
May and June mark the start of the six-month rainy season, which is critical for cane slated for crushing from December through April. They are also the most important planting months.
This week's official Bohemia magazine, the country's most widely read publication, described some plantations in eastern Cuba as "torched" by heat and drought.
"I have never before seen such massive areas of cane perish completely. Eighty percent of the plants have died," Maury Caceres, president of a Holguin province sugar co-operative, told Bohemia.
"The biggest concern now in the eastern part of the country is that the drought has delayed spring planting," Bohemia said.
Local AIN news agency reports had this year's planting more than 50 percent behind schedule across most of the country.
From April 2003 through May 2004 rainfall in parts of central and eastern Cuba was 400 millimetre's (16 inches) short of the norm, and worse in the provinces of Camaguey, Holguin, Las Tunas, Granma, Santiago and Guantanamo, which together produced more than 1 million tonnes of raw sugar this year.