Havana, Nov. 26 - Cuba on Tuesday named Sugar Minister Ulises Rosales del Toro to run the country's Agriculture Ministry and ordered massive tracts of land no longer producing sugar moved to his jurisdiction in the latest phase of the once massive industry's restructuring.
A government statement published on Wednesday said the Sugar Ministry's first vice minister, Luis Manuel Avila Gonzalez, was named sugar minister.
"Within six months land dedicated to nonsugar agriculture will be transferred from the Sugar Ministry to the Agriculture Ministry," the statement said.
Only 700,000 hectares of the over 2 million hectares (5 million acres) controlled by the Sugar Ministry are currently dedicated to sugar cane.
Sugar, once Cuba's main source of foreign exchange, accounted for less than 5 percent of goods and services exports in 2007.
Local experts applauded the move as the next logical step in the complicated and potentially volatile process of dismantling sugar's more than century-old dominance of the economy and rural life.
They said the decision would allow the sugar industry to better concentrate on its mission and speculated the once powerful ministry would eventually become a department within the Agriculture Ministry under Rosales.
Rosales, an army general and Communist party leader close to former Defense Minister and now President Raul Castro, was named to the sugar post more than a decade ago.
Rosales presided over the first phases of restructuring beginning in 2003.
During his term, 65 percent of the country's mills were closed and plantations were reduced by a similar amount, and the freed-up land and more than 200,000 workers and farmers were moved to food production and forestry.
Raw sugar output, once at more than 8 million tonnes, plummeted to historic lows of just over a million tonnes in recent years before rising to 1.5 million tonnes during the 2008 harvest.