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Dominican sugar industry looking sweet again

Santo Domingo.- After declining for many years, the Caribbean sugar industry is suddenly looking sweet again as a source of ethanol, the alternative fuel that some see as an answer to skyhigh oil prices.

Ethanol is also drawing renewed government interest and was a key topic for leaders from Central America, Mexico, Colombia and the Dominican Republic meeting in the coastal city of La Romana, which bills itself as the Dominican sugar capital.

In the Dominican Republic, which has lost tens of thousands of sugar jobs over the past 20 years, the industry is still key to the identity in sugar-growing areas like La Romana, the coastal city in the East. Vendors sell fresh cane stalks on the streets.

The local baseball team is called the Sugar Growers, and it's still common to see men with machetes clutched in gnarled hands. Most of them are illegal immigrants from Haiti who make about $US2 a day heading off to back-breaking work in the cane fields.

However, the work crews are much smaller than they used to be and longtime growers have steadily moved to other products as sugar waned, mostly because trade pacts and competition from cheaper producers elsewhere in the world have made Caribbean cane much less profitable.

According to many to the east of Santo Domingo, who grew cane for decades, Sugar had no longer been viable... until these days.