Most agriculture is concentrated on the coastal plain, where sugar is the main crop. Most of Guyana s sugar exports go to Europe under the EU quota system. Output of rice has also grown in the 1990s, following a decade of decline because of greater investment in machinery and different varieties of rice with higher yields. Other farm products are coffee, cocoa, cotton, coconut, copra, fruit, vegetables and tobacco. Dairy herds are kept mostly on the coast and beef herds on the savanna inland.
Fishing is mostly small scale, but both fish and shrimp are exported.
Between 1991 and 1996 the Government leased millions of hectares of forest in the northwest and Mazaruni districts for sustainable logging . The area of greatest growth in the mining sector is gold, which is now the leading export earner. Reserves at the mine are 54 million tonnes of gold-bearing ore. Total gold production was 450,000 ounces in 1998. Guyana was the world s largest producer of calcined bauxite, the highest grade of the mineral, but has lost its dominance to China.