Endowed with few commercially valuable natural resources, Haiti maintained only a small mining sector in the late 1980s; mining accounted for less than 1 percent of GDP, and it employed less than 1 percent of the labor force. The country's only bauxite mine, the Miragoâne mine in the southern peninsula, produced an average of 500,000 tons of bauxite a year in the early 1980s; however, in 1982 the declining metal content of the ore, high production costs, and the oversupplied international bauxite market forced the mine to close. Bauxite had at one time been the country's second leading export. Copper also was mined, beginning in the 1960s, but production of the ore was sporadic.

Haiti contained relatively small amounts of gold, silver, antimony, tin, lignite, sulphur, coal, nickel, gypsum, limestone, manganese, marble, iron, tungsten, salt, clay, and various building stones. Mining activity in the late 1980s focused on raw materials for the construction industry. The government announced the discovery of new gold deposits in the northern peninsula in 1985, but long-standing plans for gold production proceeded slowly. With funding from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the government planned to perform its first comprehensive geological survey in the late 1980s.

Data as of December 1989

NOTE: The information regarding Haiti on this page is re-published from The Library of Congress Country Studies and the CIA World Factbook. No claims are made regarding the accuracy of Haiti Mining information contained here. All suggestions for corrections of any errors about Haiti Mining should be addressed to the Library of Congress and the CIA.