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| Cuba looks to private farmers to boost economy |
By Marc Frank, Reuters, December 19, 2011
HAVANA- Cuba, trying to lure people back to the land
and lift food production, has modified a land lease program so that private
farmers can rent more land and keep it in their family as if they owned it,
farmers said over the weekend.
The measures, adopted at a recent Council of Ministers meeting and not
yet announced, are the latest loosening of the doctrinaire communism that has
ruled Cuban agriculture policy for decades and were hailed by farmers as a step
forward.
Farmers said in telephone interviews they were told in local meetings
they will be able to lease up to 165 acres from the state beginning in January,
compared with the current maximum of 33 acres mandated in a program begun in
2008.
They said the leases will extend for up to 25 years, compared with the
current 10 years, and can be renewed and passed on to family members and in
some cases laborers.
Farmers also will be allowed for the first time to build homes on the
leased land and make other improvements under a regulation that guarantees the
state will reimburse them if they lose their lease.
They had complained that the small size of the plots, short leases and
other restrictions hampered production.
"These measures deal with many of the problems we face and give
us security in terms of our work," Anselmo Hernandez, one of 150,000
people who have leased 4 million acres (1.6 million hectares) of land, said
from eastern Cuba.
"Twenty-five years is a life-time of work and faced with whatever
problem the family will be the benefactor of what we have done," he added.
Cuba nationalized most property after the 1959 revolution and the
state owns more than 70 percent of the arable land on the Caribbean island.
Private farmers, using only 24 percent of the land, were responsible for 57
percent of the food produced in Cuba in 2010, a local agricultural expert said.
The expert, asking for anonymity, said the new changes "amount to
the state granting land to the private sector indefinitely under the guise of
leasing, and no doubt most farmers expect that well before their lease is up
they will get title to it."
STAGNATING ECONOMY
President Raul Castro has made agriculture the centerpiece of his
efforts to reform the stagnating, Soviet-style economy in favor of more local
and private initiative, but food production has increased only slightly since
he replaced his brother, Fidel Castro, in 2008 and remains below 2005 levels.
The country imports a budget-busting 60 percent to 70 percent of the
food it consumes and the average age of farmers and laborers is now 50 years
old.
Castro has decentralized decision-making on agricultural policy,
increased prices paid for produce and promised farmers more freedom to grow and
sell their crops.
In November new measures were announced making it easier for farmers
to get bank credits and allowing them to sell produce directly to the tourism
sector, bypassing the state.
They are all part of more than 300 reforms adopted by the ruling
Communist Party at an April congress to "update" the economy.
Oscar Palacios, president of the "Antonio Briones Montoto"
agricultural cooperative in the central town of Florida, said the new farming
measures were "of enormous importance."
"Now producers will feel much more motivated and secure that the
fruit of their labor will be theirs," he said.
"They bring farmers and their families closer to the land they
work. They make them feel the land is really theirs."
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