Cuba: 2025 tobacco harvest targets reduced

Of the 14,000 hectares of tobacco planned for the 2024-2025 campaign in the Vuelta Abajo, only 10,500 can actually be planted due to a lack of dryers.

A readjustment of the initial plan which provided for the planting of 14,771 hectares was carried out, due to the impossibility of building the necessary processing capacity, announces the regional weekly Guerillero published in Pinar del Rio (west).

“We closed the month of December with around 5,600 dryers built, which only covers around 10,500 hectares,” Osvaldo Santana Vera, coordinator of the Tabacuba state group in the Vuelta Abajo, the main tobacco growing region of the country, explains to the magazine. To date, there are nearly 7,000 planted, which represents 66% of the readjusted plan.”

He added that 3,575.6 hectares remained to be planted in January.

If this new objective of 10,500 ha is achieved, the 2024-2025 campaign will be equivalent to the previous one during which around 10,000 ha were finally planted and harvested despite an objective of more than 12,000 ha.

Photo: © Luc Monnet