Cuba Surrounds Towns With Organic Farms to Lessen Dependence on Imported
Food
By MARC FRANK
Feb. 15, 2010
The government of Cuba, chronically poor and forced to import most of
its food, is fighting back by going green. It is surrounding its urban
areas with thousands of organic farms, as part of a five-year plan under
President Raul Castro to make the country's food supply low-cost and
environmentally-friendly.
The plan calls for farmers to grow fruits and vegetables, and raise some
livestock, in four-mile rings around 150 cities and towns.
Bulk foods such as rice, beans, pork and plantains will still be
produced mainly by state farms and cooperatives farther from urban
areas, as will food for the capital, Havana.
The other day, as the sun same up over the beltway surrounding Camaguey,
Cuba's third largest city, men and women were plowing fields with oxen,
building protective coverings for crops, hoeing the earth and putting up
fencing. The Camaguey area is being used as the pilot project for the
new plan.
The quaint little city, where horse-drawn wagons and bicycles outnumber
cars and the 320,000 inhabitants take their time going about their daily
lives, will eventually have 1,400 plots and small farms covering 130,000
acres, according to the agriculture ministry, producing 75 percent of
Camaguey's food.
The project is modeled after the hundreds of smaller urban gardens
developed under Raul Castro during the economic depression that followed
the collapse of communism in Europe. Cuba's defense minister said at the
time that beans were more important than cannons.
Only organic materials are used on the farms. The government is trying
to revive soils threatened by large-scale state farming and salt from
rising sea-levels.
"This land they gave to us, the private farmers. I have four hectares
(10 acres) and now they have leased me eight more," said Camilo Mendoza,
a Camaguey-area farmer with a Florida cap on his head.
Mendoza said he grew fruit tree saplings on his farm, but his new plot
would be sown with Yuka, a root vegetable that is a Cuban favorite.
A few years ago a dense brush, known as Marabu, covered the area for as
far as the eye could see, making it useless even for the area's
traditional cattle ranching.
State Monopoly Eased
Just a few minutes from the city, Mendoza said urban residents had
joined the farmers to clear the brush.
Authorities hope small-scale farming close to urban areas will entice
city residents, laid-off from jobs in Cuba's bloated bureaucracy, back
to the land. Farming in Cuba has had a labor shortage for years.
The plan also seeks to save on the cost of transporting goods to market,
rely less on expensive and fuel-consuming machinery and ensure a greater
variety of fresh produce.
Mendoza pointed around the fields: "Look, on this side and the other
side are other plots, and over there another. Here they have given quite
a bit of land and support to private farmers," he said.
For the first time farmers can sell part of what they produce directly
to licensed street vendors and consumers at stands set up every mile or
so along the beltway.
The communist government monopolizes the sale of farm goods and controls
most of the land in Cuba.
Castro has made a priority of cutting imports and putting more food on
Cubans' sometimes-sparse dinner tables since taking over for his ailing
brother Fidel two years ago.
Under the sustainable agriculture project, the government is leasing
fallow state lands to some 100,000 mainly-private farmers. It has
decentralized decision-making. It has allowed farmers to raise prices.
"The suburban agriculture plan aims at the rational exploitation of land
around cities and other populated areas," Rodriguez Nodal, head of the
program and the man who led the widely acclaimed urban gardens'
development, said at a meeting last week.
Nodal called for the elimination of bureaucracy so that produce reaches
consumers fresh and in good condition.
Experts Want Markets
On the other side of Camaguey and a few miles up the central highway,
Armando, the head of a cattle cooperative, said they were persuaded to
join the plan when the state offered them more land to raise garden and
root vegetables and the chance to sell some of what they produced
directly to the population.
"In December we produced around five tons. The root vegetables we had to
sell to the state, but we were free to sell the garden vegetables
directly," he said, adding growing and selling vegetables was a first
for his cooperative.
"In the case of the suburban plan there are no chemicals or anything
else that can damage the environment," Armando said.
Plans in Cuba are made not to be broken, a local saying goes.
While foreign and local experts applaud the project, they are skeptical
it can meet its goals without the establishment of free markets where
farmers can buy their supplies and sell their produce.
"It will take a lot of seed. Let's see if the state can provide it on a
timely basis," one man said, asking that his name not be used.
Castro has opened shops where farmers for the first time can buy work
clothes and basics such as fencing and machetes, but fuel, seed,
irrigation systems and the like are still centrally allocated.
Mendoza and Armando said Cuba has not moved to free markets. The state
still sets prices for their produce.
"They are prices that benefit us, but not exaggerated, in reach of the
people with little money," Armando said.
Few of the farmers around Camaguey were ready to commit to the suburban
development scheme's long-term success. But they said they were
encouraged that it was based mainly on their efforts, not state farms.
"For sure, there will be more food around here if you come back in a few
years," quipped Mendoza. "More than that I can't say."
Cuba Seeks Agricultural Reform By Way of Organic Farms - ABC News (15
February
2010)http://abcnews.go.com/Travel/cuba-seeks-agricultural-reform-organic-farms/story?id=9807482
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