Some 20 kilometers of the border with Haiti are populated by avocado trees, as part of a huge agricultural venture that reaches into the shelves of Walmart. Over 70,000 tareas (422,000,000 m2) of land in the area of El Calimete in the impoverished province of Elias Piña has been planted with highly selected varieties of avocado (mostly Hass), and the company has another 30,000 tareas in in San Jose de Ocoa.
As reported in El Dia, the farm belongs to Manuel Castillo Pimentel and has become the largest employer along the border with some 1,600 workers, which allows both Dominicans and Haitians to remain in the area. Castillo Pimentel told reporters from El Dia that the trees begin life as seeds in nurseries in San Jose de Ocoa, and at a very early age they are grafted by experts with the Hass variety of avocados that is what Walmart and BJ’s request. There are 300 persons employed in Ocoa for this purpose.
The MACAPI nursery produces some 300,000 plants a year, mostly for the farm in Elias Piña. Every avocado harvested is sold. According to the report, the climate in El Calimete is similar to that of Constanza, at 1,700 meters above sea level.
The project has not been easy and the company has had to construct some 300 kilometers of roads, including parts of the International Highway. Given the size of the production and the very strict demands of their customers, the company had to open a packing facility in Mexico in order to keep up with the demand. Castillo Pimentel called this move “one of the most important decisions to achieve the market we now have.”
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El Dia
22 January 2019
