Hurricanes hit hard and hurt Cuba's citrus industry

By Marc Frank

HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuba's already hurricane and plague-damaged citrus industry took a hard hit from Hurricane Ike just one week after Hurricane Gustav felled fruit and damaged groves and processing plants, state-run media reported Thursday.

Workers rushed to salvage for processing and animal feed at least 50,000 tonnes of downed grapefruit ready or near ready for harvest, while tonnes of immature oranges were declared a total loss.

"Once again citrus has been battered by a hurricane," the official daily Granma reported from the 23,000-hectare state-run Jaguey Grande orchard in western Matanzas province.

"This time the storm felled 35,000 tonnes of grapefruit and around 3,500 tonnes of oranges," it said.

Jaguey Grande was devastated by Hurricane Michelle in 2001, Hurricane Dennis in 2005 and drought from 2005 through 2006.

In June it reported serious problems with plague and disease.

The picking season runs from late August through June, with grapefruit harvested into December and oranges after that.

Category-four Gustav destroyed processing facilities and groves and wiped out the entire crop on the Isle of Youth less than two weeks ago, while felling tonnes of fruit in western Pinar del Rio and Havana provinces, the state-run media reported at the time.

Ike entered eastern Cuba Saturday, felling fruit, damaging trees and a processing facility in the entire eastern part of the country, according to local sources.

It then moved along the entire length and breadth of the island, exiting in the west on Tuesday.

In central Cuba, tonnes of fruit were downed in Ciego de Avila, where a processing plant reported only light damage.

The government reported a 2007 citrus crop of 469,000 tonnes, compared with more than 800,000 tonnes in 2004.

Orange output was 302,000 tonnes in 2007, while grapefruit weighed in at 140,000 tonnes. The lime crop came in at 6,000 tonnes.

Output from January through April of this year declined around 35 percent from with the same period in 2007, the National Statistics office recently reported.

In the 1980s Cuba was the world's biggest citrus fruit exporter, producing more than a million tonnes of mainly oranges and grapefruit on 120,000 hectares, most destined for the former Soviet Union.