Costa Rica’s Top Economic Industries

Tourism

Costa Rica is the world's fastest-growing destination for adventure and nature travel, and travelers from all over the world are pouring in, too. The resort industry is booming in Costa Rica and has surpassed their previous leading industries in agriculture; that being bananas and coffee back in 1993. The country has recently been adopted as the darling of the ecotourist: the just reward for preserving its national parks and wildlife reserves.

At current rates of tourism expansion, the country needs to open 500 new rooms each month. It is currently difficult to get beds Nov.-April, when a severe case of room shortage afflicts many of the more popular spots.

The Beach Resort Boom

Sprawling resort complexes are beginning to sprout all along the Pacific coast shoreline. Chief among these is the Gulf of Papagayo project encompassing several beaches. The megaresort, being constructed by a host of European developers spearheaded by the Spanish developers Sol Melia, will be the largest "leisure city" in Central America, with rooms for 6,000 tourists in 2,000 rooms, 50 luxury villas, 400 family villas, and 700 apartments, replete with shopping center, golf course, and other supporting amenities.

Costa Rica stands to gain much more than cash from the current boom. Firstly, optimists suggest that the profit potential of tourism encourages private landowners to regard natural areas as long-term assets rather than a source of quick cash, and that resort developers realize that the added expense of building around rather than through a forest pays ample dividends in the end. Kalia Modern Eco-Living is a good example of this.

Other Big Business...

Intel leads the way with for Costa Rica exports. The Intel facilities in Heredia sits upon 126 acres and includes two manufacturing plants and one distribution center dedicated to the assembly, testing and distribution of the world's fastest processors: the Intel Pentium 4 processor, Intel Celeron processor and Intel Xeon processor. Intel has nearly 2,000 employees in Costa Rica and annual exports of about US$1 billion.

Another brand name Procter and Gamble has well over 1,000 employees in Costa Rica and according to Alfonso Cos, the VP for GBS (Global Business Services) North America: "The quality of education we found in Costa Rica is impressive. We have confirmed that the talent and training of the people is one of the best we have seen worldwide."

Agriculture

Agriculture dominates the Costa Rican economy. The fact is obvious everywhere you go, where a remarkable feature of the land is the almost complete cultivation, no matter how steep the slope. Nationwide, some 12% of the land area is planted in crops, 45% is given to pasture, and only 27% is forested.

Coffee and bananas are the most important crops in terms of area and export earnings. The vast banana plantations which cover the Caribbean plains produce some 50 million boxes of bananas per year, accounting for 30% of the nation's export earnings in 1992 and making Costa Rica the second-biggest exporter of bananas in the world, behind Ecuador. Sugarcane is grown by small farmers all over the country but becomes a major crop on plantations as you drop into the lowlands (particularly rapid growth in sugar production occurred in the 1960s after the U.S. reassigned Cuba's sugar import quota; production has since gone into decline--in 1981 Costa Rica had to import sugar to meet domestic demand). And cacao, once vital to the economy many years ago, is on the rise again as a major export crop.

Recent attempts to stimulate nontraditional exports are paying dividends in agriculture. Cassava, papaya, the camote (sweet potato), melons, strawberries, chayote (vegetable pear), eggplant, curraré (plantain bananas), pimento, macadamia nuts, ornamental plants, and cut flowers are all fast becoming important export items.

Bananas

Costa Rica's banana industry, currently the country's number one earner of foreign currency (outside of tourism), continues to expand to meet the demand of a growing international market. Some 32,000 hectares are currently planted, a 50% increase since 1985. Most growth is concentrated in the north Atlantic lowlands.

Coffee

Costa Rica's possesses ideal conditions for coffee production, and beans grown here are ranked among the best in the world.

The first coffee beans were brought from Jamaica in 1779. Within 50 years coffee had become firmly established; by the 1830s it was the country's prime export earner, a position it occupied until 1991, when coffee plunged overnight to third place in the wake of a precipitous 50% fall in world coffee prices after Brazil scuttled the International Coffee Agreement quota system in 1989.