By Miguel A. Altieri and Fernando R. Funes-Monzote, Monthly Review, January 8, 2012
When
Cuba faced the shock of lost trade relations with the Soviet Bloc in the early
1990s, food production initially collapsed due to the loss of imported
fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, parts, and petroleum. The situation was so
bad that Cuba posted the worst growth in per capita food production in all of
Latin America and the Caribbean. But the island rapidly re-oriented its
agriculture to depend less on imported synthetic chemical inputs, and became a
world-class case of ecological agriculture.1 This was such a successful turnaround that Cuba rebounded to
show the best food production performance in Latin America and the Caribbean
over the following period, a remarkable annual growth rate of 4.2 percent per
capita from 1996 through 2005, a period in which the regional average was 0
percent.2
Much
of the production rebound was due to the adoption since the early 1990s of a
range of agrarian decentralization policies that encouraged forms of
production, both individual as well as cooperative—Basic Units of Cooperative
Production (UBPC) and Credit and Service Cooperatives (CCS). Moreover, recently
the Ministry of Agriculture announced the dismantling of all “inefficient State
companies” as well as support for creating 2,600 new small urban and suburban
farms, and the distribution of the use rights (in usufruct) to the majority of
estimated 3 million hectares of unused State lands. Under these regulations,
decisions on resource use and strategies for food production and
commercialization will be made at the municipal level, while the central
government and state companies will support farmers by distributing necessary
inputs and services.3 Through the mid-1990s some 78,000 farms were given in usufruct
to individuals and legal entities. More than 100,000 farms have now been
distributed, covering more than 1 million hectares in total. These new farmers
are associated with the CCS following the campesino production model. The
government is busy figuring out how to accelerate the processing of an unprecedented
number of land requests.4
The
land redistribution program has been supported by solid research- extension
systems that have played key roles in the expansion of organic and urban
agriculture and the massive artisanal production and deployment of biological
inputs for soil and pest management. The opening of local agricultural markets
and the existence of strong grassroots organisations supporting farmers—for
example, the National Association of Small Scale Farmers (ANAP, Asociación
Nacional de Agricultores Pequeños), the Cuban Association of Animal Production
(ACPA, Asociación Cubana de Producción Animal), and the Cuban Association of
Agricultural and Forestry Technicians (ACTAF, Asociación Cubana de Técnicos
Agrícolas y Forestales)—also contributed to this achievement.
But
perhaps the most important changes that led to the recovery of food sovereignty
in Cuba occurred in the peasant sector which in 2006, controlling only 25
percent of the agricultural land, produced over 65 percent of the country’s
food.5 Most peasants belong to the ANAP and almost all of them belong
to cooperatives. The production of vegetables typically produced by peasants
fell drastically between 1988 to 1994, but by 2007 had rebounded to well over
1988 levels (see Table 1). This production increase came despite using 72
percent fewer agricultural chemicals in 2007 than in 1988. Similar patterns can
be seen for other peasant crops like beans, roots, and tubers.
Cuba’s
achievements in urban agriculture are truly remarkable—there are 383,000 urban
farms, covering 50,000 hectares of otherwise unused land and producing more
than 1.5 million tons of vegetables with top urban farms reaching a yield of 20
kg/m2 per year of edible plant
material using no synthetic chemicals—equivalent to a hundred tons per hectare.
Urban farms supply 70 percent or more of all the fresh vegetables consumed in
cities such as Havana and Villa Clara.
Table 1. Changes
in Crop Production and Agrochemical Use
Crop
|
Percent
production change
|
Percent change
in agrochemical use
|
|
1988 to 1994
|
1988 to 2007
|
1988 to 2007
|
|
General
vegetables
|
-65
|
+145
|
-72
|
Beans
|
-77
|
+351
|
-55
|
Roots and
tubers
|
-42
|
+145
|
-85
|
Source: Peter Rosset, Braulio Machín-Sosa, Adilén M.
Roque-Jaime, and Dana R. Avila-Lozano, “The Campesino-to-Campesino Agroecology
Movement of ANAP in Cuba,” Journal of Peasant Studies 38 (2011): 161-91.
All over the world, and especially in Latin America, the
island’s agroecological production levels and the associated research efforts
along with innovative farmer organizational schemes have been observed with
great interest. No other country in the world has achieved this level of
success with a form of agriculture that uses the ecological services of
biodiversity and reduces food miles, energy use, and effectively closes local
production and consumption cycles. However, some people talk about the “Cuban
agriculture paradox”: if agroecological advances in the country are so great,
why does Cuba still import substantial amounts of food? If effective biological
control methods are widely available and used, why is the government releasing
transgenic plants such as Bt crops that produce their own pesticide using genes
derived from bacteria?
An article written by Dennis Avery from the Center for
Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute, “Cubans Starve on Diet of Lies,”
helped fuel the debate around the paradox. He stated:
The Cubans told the world they had
heroically learned to feed themselves without fuel or farm chemicals after
their Soviet subsidies collapsed in the early 1990s. They bragged about their
“peasant cooperatives,” their biopesticides and organic fertilizers. They
heralded their earthworm culture and the predator wasps they unleashed on
destructive caterpillars. They boasted about the heroic ox teams they had
trained to replace tractors. Organic activists all over the world swooned. Now,
a senior Ministry of Agriculture official has admitted in the Cuban press that
84 percent of Cuba’s current food consumption is imported, according to our
agricultural attaché in Havana. The organic success was all a lie.6
Avery has used this misinformation to promote a campaign
discrediting authors who studied and informed about the heroic achievements of
Cuban people in the agricultural field: he has accused these scientists of
being communist liars.
The Truth About
Food Imports in Cuba
Avery referred to statements of Magalys Calvo, then Vice
Minister of the Economy and Planning Ministry, who said in February 2007 that
84 percent of items “in the basic food basket” at that time were imported.
However, these percentages represent only the food that is distributed through
regulated government channels by means of a ration card. Overall data show that
Cuba’s food import dependency has been dropping for decades, despite brief
upturns due to natural and human-made disasters. The best time series available
on Cuban food import dependency (see Chart 1) shows that it actually declined
between 1980 and 1997, aside from a spike in the early 1990s, when trade
relations with the former Socialist Bloc collapsed.7
Chart 1. Cuba Food
Import Dependency, 1980–1997
Source: José Alvarez, The Issue of Food Security in Cuba,
University of Florida Extension Report FE483, downloaded July 20, 2011 from http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pdffiles/FE/FE48300.pdf.
However, Chart 2 indicates a much more nuanced view of
Cuba’s agricultural strengths and weaknesses after more than a decade of
technological bias toward ecological farming techniques. Great successes have
clearly been achieved in root crops (a staple of the Cuban diet), sugar and
other sweeteners, vegetables, fruits, eggs, and seafood. Meat is an
intermediate case, while large amounts of cooking oil, cereals, and legumes
(principally rice and wheat for human consumption, and corn and soybeans for
livestock) continue to be imported. The same is true for powdered milk, which
does not appear on the graph. Total import dependency, however, is a mere 16
percent—ironically the exact inverse of the 84 percent figure cited by Avery.
It is also important to mention that twenty-three other countries in the Latin
American-Caribbean region are also net food importers.8
Chart 2. Import
Dependence For Selected Foods, 2003
There is considerable debate concerning current food
dependency in Cuba. Dependency rose in the 2000s as imports from the United
States grew and hurricanes devastated its agriculture. After being hit by three
especially destructive hurricanes in 2008, Cuba satisfied national needs by
importing 55 percent of its total food, equivalent to approximately $2.8
billion. However, as the world food price crisis drives prices higher, the
government has reemphasized food self-sufficiency. Regardless of whether food
has been imported or produced within the country, it is important to recognize
that Cuba has been generally able to adequately feed its people. According to
the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Cuba’s average daily per
capita dietary energy supply in 2007 (the last year available) was over 3,200
kcal, the highest of all Latin American and Caribbean nations.9
Different Models:
Agroecology versus Industrial Agriculture
Under this new scenario the importance of contributions
of ANAP peasants to reducing food imports should become strategic, but is it?
Despite the indisputable advances of sustainable agriculture in Cuba and
evidence of the effectiveness of alternatives to the monoculture model,
interest persists among some leaders in high external input systems with
sophisticated and expensive technological packages. With the pretext of
“guaranteeing food security and reducing food imports,” these specific programs
pursue “maximization” of crop and livestock production and insist on going back
to monoculture methods—and therefore dependent on synthetic chemical inputs,
large scale machinery, and irrigation—despite proven energy inefficiency and
technological fragility. In fact, many resources are provided by international
cooperation (i.e., from Venezuela) dedicated to “protect or boost agricultural
areas” where a more intensive agriculture is practiced for crops like potatoes,
rice, soybean, and vegetables.
These “protected” areas for large-scale,
industrial-style agricultural production represent less than 10 percent of the
cultivated land. Millions of dollars are invested in pivot irrigation systems,
machinery, and other industrial agricultural technologies: a seductive model
which increases short-term production but generates high long-term
environmental and socioeconomic costs, while replicating a model that failed
even before 1990.
Last year it was announced that the pesticide enterprise
“Juan Rodríguez Gómez” in the municipality of Artemisa, Havana, will produce
some 100,000 liters of the herbicide glyphosate in 2011.10 In early 2011 a Cuban TV News program informed
the population about the Cubasoy project. The program, “Bienvenida la Soya,”
reported that “it is possible to transform lands that over years were covered
by marabú [a thorny invasive leguminous tree] with soybean monoculture in the
south of the Ciego de Ávila province.” Supported by Brazilian credits and
technology, the project covers more than 15,000 hectares of soybean grown in
rotation with maize and aims at reaching 40,500 hectares in 2013, with a total
of 544 center pivot irrigation systems installed by 2014. Soybean yields rank
between 1.2 tons per hectare (1,100 lbs per acre) under rainfed conditions and
up to 1.97 tons per hectare (1,700 lbs per acre) under irrigation. It is not
clear if the soybean varieties used are transgenic, but the maize variety is
the Cuban transgenic FR-Bt1. Ninety percent of machinery is imported from
Brazil—“large tractors, direct seeding machines, and equipment for crop
protection”—and considerable infrastructure investments have been made for
irrigation, roads, technical support, processing, and transport.
The Debate Over
Transgenic Crops
Cuba has invested millions in biotechnological research
and development for agriculture through its Center for Genetic Engineering and
Biotechnology (CIGB) and a network of institutions across the country. Cuban
biotechnology is free from corporate control and intellectual property-right
regimes that exist in other countries. Cuban biotechnologists affirm that their
biosafety system sets strict biological and environmental security norms. Given
this autonomy and advantages biotechnological innovations could efficiently be
applied to solve problems such as viral crop diseases or drought tolerance for
which agroecological solutions are not yet available. In 2009 the CIGB planted
in Yagüajay, Sancti Spiritus, three hectares of genetically modified corn
(transgenic corn FR-Bt1) on an experimental basis. This variety is supposed to
suppress populations of the damaging larval stage of the “palomilla del maíz”
moth (Spodoptera frugiperda, also known as the fall armyworm). By 2009 a total
of 6,000 hectares were planted with the transgenic (also referred to as
genetically modified, or GM) variety across several provinces. From an
agroecological perspective it is perplexing that the first transgenic variety
to be tested in Cuba is Bt corn, given that in the island there are so many
biological control alternatives to regulate lepidopteran pests. The diversity
of local maize varieties include some that exhibit moderate-to-high levels of
pest resistance, offering significant opportunities to increase yields with
conventional plant breeding and known agroecological management strategies.
Many centers for multiplication of insect parasites and pathogens (CREEs,
Centros de Reproducción de Entomófagos y Entomopatógenos) produce Bacillus
thuringiensis (a microbial insecticide) and Trichogramma (small wasps), both
highly effective against moths such as the palomilla. In addition, mixing corn
with other crops such as beans or sweet potatoes in polycultures produces
significantly less pest attack than maize grown in monocultures. This also
increases the land equivalent ratio (growing more total crops in a given area
of land) and protects the soil.
When transgenic Bt maize was planted in 2008 as a test
crop, researchers and farmers from the agroecological movement expressed
concern. Several people warned that the release of transgenic crops endangered
agrobiodiversity and contradicted the government’s own agricultural production
plans by diverting the focus from agroecological farming that had been
strategically adopted as a policy in Cuba. Others felt that biotechnology was
geared towards the interests of the multinational corporations and the market.
Taking into account its potential environmental and public health risks, it
would be better for Cuba to continue emphasizing agroecological alternatives
that have proven to be safe and have allowed the country to produce food under
difficult economic and climatic circumstances.
The main demonstrated advantage of GM crops has been to
simplify the farming process, allowing farmers to work more land. GM crops that
resist herbicides (such as “Roundup Ready” corn and soybeans) and that produce
their own insecticide (such as Bt corn) generally do not yield any more than comparable
non-GM crops. However, using these GM crops along with higher levels of
mechanization (especially larger tractors) have now made it possible for the
size of a family corn and soybean farm in the U.S. Midwest to increase from
around 240 hectares (600 acres) to around 800 hectares (2,000 acres).
In September 2010 a meeting of experts concerned about
transgenic crops was convened with board and staff members from the National
Center for Biological Security and the Office for Environmental Regulation and
Nuclear Security (Centro Nacional de Seguridad Biológica and the Oficina de
Regulación Ambiental y Seguridad Nuclear), institutions entrusted with
licensing GM crops. The experts issued a statement calling for a moratorium on
GM crops until more information was available and society has a chance to
debate the environmental and health effects of the technology. However, until
now there has been no response to this request. One positive outcome of the
year-long debate on the inconsistency of planting FR-Bt1 transgenic corn in
Cuba was the open recognition by the authorities of the potential devastating
consequences of GM crops for the small farmer sector. Although it appears that
the use of transgenic corn will be limited exclusively to the areas of Cubasoy
and other conventional areas under strict supervision, this effort is highly
questionable.11
The Paradox’s
Outcome—What Does the Future Hold?
The instability in international markets and the
increase in food prices in a country somewhat dependent on food imports
threatens national sovereignty. This reality has prompted high officials to
make declarations emphasizing the need to prioritize food production based on
locally available resources.12 It is in fact paradoxical that, to
achieve food security in a period of economic growth, most of the resources are
dedicated to importing foods or promoting industrial agriculture schemes
instead of stimulating local production by peasants. There is a cyclical return
to support conventional agriculture by policy makers when the financial
situation improves, while sustainable approaches and agroecology, considered as
“alternatives,” are only supported under scenarios of economic scarcity. This
cyclical mindset strongly undermines the advances achieved with agroecology and
organic farming since the economic collapse in 1990.
Cuban agriculture currently experiences two extreme
food-production models: an intensive model with high inputs, and another,
beginning at the onset of the special period, oriented towards agroecology and
based on low inputs. The experience accumulated from agroecological initiatives
in thousands of small-and-medium scale farms constitutes a valuable starting
point in the definition of national policies to support sustainable
agriculture, thus rupturing with a monoculture model prevalent for almost four
hundred years. In addition to Cuba being the only country in the world that was
able to recover its food production by adopting agroecological approaches under
extreme economic difficulties, the island exhibits several characteristics that
serve as fundamental pillars to scale up agroecology to unprecedented levels:
Cuba represents 2 percent of the Latin American
population but has 11 percent of the scientists in the region. There are about
140,000 high-level professionals and medium-level technicians, dozens of
research centres, agrarian universities and their networks, government
institutions such as the Ministry of Agriculture, scientific organizations
supporting farmers (i.e. ACTAF), and farmers organizations such as ANAP.
Cuba has sufficient land to produce enough food with agroecological
methods to satisfy the nutritional needs of its eleven million inhabitants.13 Despite soil erosion, deforestation, and
loss of biodiversity during the past fifty years—as well as during the previous
four centuries of extractive agriculture—the country’s conditions remain
exceptionally favorable for agriculture. Cuba has six million hectares of
fairly level land and another million gently sloping hectares that can be used
for cropping. More than half of this land remains uncultivated, and the
productivity of both land and labor, as well as the efficiency of resource use,
in the rest of this farm area are still low. If all the peasant farms
(controlling 25 percent of land) and all the UBPC (controlling 42 percent of
land) adopted diversified agroecological designs, Cuba would be able to produce
enough to feed its population, supply food to the tourist industry, and even
export some food to help generate foreign currency. All this production would
be supplemented with urban agriculture, which is already reaching significant
levels of production.
About one third of all peasant families, some 110,000
families, have joined ANAP within its Farmer to Farmer Agroecological Movement
(MACAC, Movimiento Agroecológico Campesino a Campesino). It uses participatory
methods based on local peasant needs and allows for the socialization of the
rich pool of family and community agricultural knowledge that is linked to
their specific historical conditions and identities. By exchanging innovations
among themselves, peasants have been able to make dramatic strides in food
production relative to the conventional sector, while preserving
agrobiodiversity and using much lower amounts of agrochemicals.
Observations of agricultural performance after extreme
climatic events in the last two decades have revealed the resiliency of peasant
farms to climate disasters. Forty days after Hurricane Ike hit Cuba in 2008,
researchers conducted a farm survey in the provinces of Holguin and Las Tunas
and found that diversified farms exhibited losses of 50 percent compared to 90
to 100 percent in neighboring farms growing monocultures. Likewise
agroecologically managed farms showed a faster productive recovery (80 to 90
percent forty days after the hurricane) than monoculture farms.14 These evaluations emphasize the
importance of enhancing plant diversity and complexity in farming systems to
reduce vulnerability to extreme climatic events, a strategy entrenched among
Cuban peasants.
Most of the production efforts have been oriented
towards reaching food sovereignty, defined as the right of everyone to have
access to safe, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food in sufficient
quantity and quality to sustain a healthy life with full human dignity.
However, given the expected increase in the cost of fuel and inputs, the Cuban
agroecological strategy also aims at enhancing two other types of
sovereignties. Energy sovereignty is the right for all people to have access to
sufficient energy within ecological limits from appropriate sustainable sources
for a dignified life. Technological sovereignty refers to the capacity to
achieve food and energy sovereignty by nurturing the environmental services
derived from existing agrobiodiversity and using locally available resources.
Elements of the three sovereignties—food, energy, and
technology—can be found in hundreds of small farms, where farmers are producing
70–100 percent of the necessary food for their family consumption while
producing surpluses sold to the market, allowing them to obtain income (for
example, Finca del Medio, CCS Reinerio Reina in Sancti Spiritus; Plácido farm,
CCS José Machado; Cayo Piedra, in Matanzas, belonging to CCS José Martí; and
San José farm, CCS Dionisio San Román in Cienfuegos). These levels of
productivity are obtained using local technologies such as worm composting and
reproduction of beneficial native microorganisms together with diversified
production systems such as polycultures, rotations, animal integration into
crop farms, and agroforestry. Many farmers are also using integrated
food/energy systems and generate their own sources of energy using human and
animal labor, biogas, and windmills, in addition to producing biofuel crops
such as jatrophaintercropped with cassava.15
Conclusions
A rich knowledge of agroecology science and practice
exists in Cuba, the result of accumulated experiences promoted by researchers,
professors, technicians, and farmers supported by ACTAF, ACPA, and ANAP. This
legacy is based on the experiences within rural communities that contain
successful “agroecological lighthouses” from which principles have radiated out
to help build the basis of an agricultural strategy that promotes efficiency,
diversity, synergy, and resiliency. By capitalizing on the potential of
agroecology, Cuba has been able to reach high levels of production using low
amounts of energy and external inputs, with returns to investment on research
several times higher than those derived from industrial and biotechnological
approaches that require major equipment, fuel, and sophisticated laboratories.
The political will expressed in the writings and
discourses of high officials about the need to prioritize agricultural
self-sufficiency must translate into concrete support for the promotion of
productive and energy-efficient initiatives in order to reach the three
sovereignties at the local (municipal) level, a fundamental requirement to
sustain a planet in crisis.
By creating more opportunities for strategic alliances
between ANAP, ACPA, ACTAF, and research centers, many pilot projects could be
launched in key municipalities, testing different agroecological technologies
that promote the three sovereignties, as adapted to each region’s special
environmental and socioeconomic conditions. These initiatives should adopt the
farmer-to-farmer methodology that transcends top-down research and extension
paradigms, allowing farmers and researchers to learn and innovate collectively.
The integration of university professors and students in such experimentation
and evaluation processes would enhance scientific knowledge for the conversion
to an ecologically based agriculture. It would also help improve agroecological
theory, which would in turn benefit the training of future generations of
professionals, technicians, and farmers.
The agroecological movement constantly urges those Cuban
policy makers with a conventional, Green Revolution, industrial farming mindset
to consider the reality of a small island nation facing an embargo and
potentially devastating hurricanes. Given these realities, embracing
agroecological approaches and methods throughout the country’s agriculture can
help Cuba achieve food sovereignty while maintaining its political autonomy.
Notes
1.
↩ Peter Rosset and
Medea Benjamin, eds., The Greening of the Revolution (Ocean Press: Melbourne,
Australia, 1994); Fernando Funes, et. al., eds., Sustainable Agriculture and
Resistance (Oakland: Food First Books, 2002); Braulio Machín-Sosa, et. al., Revolución
Agroecológica (ANAP: La Habana, 2010).
2.
↩ Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), The State of Food and
Agriculture 2006 (Rome: FAO, 2006), http://fao.org.
3.
↩ MINAG (Ministerio
de la Agricultura), Informe del Ministerio de la Agricultura a la Comisión
Agroalimentaria de la Asamblea Nacional, May 14, 2008 (MINAG: Havana, Cuba,
2008).
4.
↩ Ana Margarita
González, “Tenemos que dar saltos cualitativos,” Interview with Orlando Lugo
Fonte, Trabajadores, June 22, 2009, 6.
5.
↩ Raisa Pagés,
“Necesarios cambios en relaciones con el sector cooperativo-campesino,” Granma,
December 18, 2006, 3.
7.
↩ Fernando Funes,
Miguel A. Altieri, and Peter Rosset, “The Avery Diet: The Hudson’s Institute
Misinformation Campaign Against Cuban Agriculture,” May 2009, http://globalalternatives.org.
11.
↩ Fernando
Funes-Monzote and Eduardo F. Freyre Roach, eds., Transgénicos ¿Qué se gana?
¿Qué se pierde? Textos para un debate en Cuba (Havana: Publicaciones Acuario,
2009), http://landaction.org.
12.
↩ Raúl Castro,
“Mientras mayores sean las dificultades, más exigencia, disciplina y unidad se
requieren,” Granma, February 25, 2008, 4–6.
13.
↩ Fernando
Funes-Monzote, Farming Like We’re Here to Stay, PhD dissertation, Wageningen
University, Netherlands, 2008.
14.
↩ Braulio
Machin-Sosa, et. al., Revolución Agroecológica: el Movimiento de Campesino a
Campesino de la ANAP en Cuba (ANAP: La Habana, 2010).
15.
↩ Fernando
Funes-Monzote, et. al., “Evaluación inicial de sistemas integrados para la
producción de alimentos y energía en Cuba,” Pastos y Forrajes (forthcoming,
2011).
Miguel A. Altieri (agroeco3 [at] berkeley.edu) is Profesor of
Agroecology at the University of California, Berkeley and President of the
Latin American Scientific Society of Agroecology (SOCLA). He is the author of
more than 250 journal articles and twelve books. Fernando R. Funes-Monzote
(mgahonam [at] enet.cu) is currently a researcher at the Experimental Station
Indio Hatuey, University of Matanzas, Cuba. He is one of the founding members
of the Cuban Association of Organic Agriculture.
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