THE EARTHSCAN READER IN SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE

EDITED BY JULES PRETTY

EARTHSCAN          2005

PART XIII

 

PART V: PERSPECTIVES FROM DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Perspective 25: Lessons of Cuban Resistance by Peter Rosset and Martin Bourque

At the Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First), we have spent 25 years studying hunger around the world, and its relationship to agriculture and rural development. Over the years we have seen many countries enter into food crises. The proximate causes have been many, ranging from wars to droughts or floods, though invariably the ultimate causes have been more tightly linked to inequality or lack of social justice in some form, be it in access to land, jobs, government assistance, or the structure of the world economy. Such crises have often led to famines, which have only been resolved by massive international intervention and food aid, usually leaving the afflicted region or country less able to feed itself in the future and more dependent on food imports from the West than ever before.

The experience of Cuban resistance to external shocks during the 1990s stands in sharp contrast to this panorama. When collapsing trade relations plunged this island nation into a food crisis, foreign assistance and food aid were scarcely available, thanks to the tightening of the US trade embargo. Cuba was forced to turn inward, towards its own natural and human resources, and tap both old and new ways to boost production of basic foods without relying on imports. It wasn’t easy, but in many ways the Cuban people and government were uniquely prepared to resist – the well-educated and energetic populace put their dynamism and ingenuity to the task, and the government its commitment to food for all and its support for domestic science and technology. Cubans and their government pulled through the crisis, and their tale offers powerful lessons about resistance, self-reliance, and alternative policies and production methods that could well serve other countries facing their own rural and food crises.

• Our global food system is in the midst of a multifaceted crisis, with ecological, economic and social dimensions.
• To overcome that crisis, political and social changes are needed to allow the widespread development of alternatives.
• Cuba offers one of the few examples where fundamental policy shifts and serious governmental resources have supported this movement.
• It is important all people interested in developing food systems that are socially just, environmentally sustainable, and economically viable, pay close attention to current policy and technological developments in Cuba.

The world food system, based largely on the conventional ‘Green Revolution’ model, is productive – there should be no doubt about that – as per capita food produced in the world has increased by 15% over the past 35 years. But that production is in ever fewer hands, and costs ever more in economic and ecological terms. In spite of these per capita increases, and an overall per capita surplus of calories, protein and fats, there are at least 800 million people in the world who do not reap adequate benefits from this production. And it is getting worse. In the last 20 years the number of hungry people in the world – excluding China – has risen by 60 million.

Ecological impacts of industrial-style farming include adverse effects on groundwater due to abuse of irrigation and to pesticide and fertilizer runoff, on biodiversity through the spread of large scale monocultures and the elimination of traditional crop varieties, and on the very capacity of agroecosystems to be productive into the future.

Economically, production costs rise as farmers are forced to use ever more expensive machines and farm chemicals, while crop prices continue a several-decade-long downward trend, causing a cost-price squeeze which led to the loss of untold tens of millions of farmers worldwide through bankruptcies. Socially, we have the concentration of farmland in fewer and fewer hands as low crop prices make farming on a small scale unprofitable (despite higher per acre productivity of small farms), and agribusiness corporations extend their control over more and more basic commodities.

Clearly the dominant corporate food system is not capable of adequately addressing the needs of people or of the environment. Yet there are substantial obstacles to the widespread adoption of alternatives. The greatest obstacles are presented by political-corporate power and vested interests, yet at times the psychological barrier to believing that the alternatives can work seems almost as difficult to overcome. The oft-repeated challenge is: ‘Could organic farming (or agroecology, local production, small farms, farming without pesticides) ever really feed the entire population of a country? Recent Cuban history – the overcoming of a food crisis through self-reliance, smaller farms and agroecological technology – shows us that the alternatives can indeed feed a nation, and thus provides a crucial case study for the ongoing debate.

Around the globe, farmers, activists, and researchers are working to create a new model for agriculture that responds to the multiple facets of the crisis. The goals of this model are to be environmentally sound, economically viable, socially just, and culturally appropriate. The Cuban experience presented in this volume offers many new ideas to this movement.

A brief history

When trade relations with the Soviet Bloc crumbled in late 1989 and 1990, and the US tightened the trade embargo, Cuba was plunged into economic crisis. In 1991 the government declared the ‘Special Period in Peacetime’, which basically put the country on a wartime economy-style austerity program. An immediate 53% reduction in oil imports not only affected fuel availability for the economy, but also reduced to zero the foreign exchange that Cuba had formerly obtained via the re-export of petroleum. Imports of wheat and other grains for human consumption dropped by more than 50%, while other foodstuffs declined even more. Cuban agriculture was faced with an initial drop of about 70% in the availability of fertilizers and pesticides, and more than 50% in fuel and other energy sources produced by petroleum.

Suddenly, a country with an agricultural sector technologically similar to California’s found itself almost without chemical inputs, with sharply reduced access to fuel and irrigation, and with a collapse in food imports. In the early 1990s average daily caloric and protein intake by the Cuban population may have been as much as 30% below levels in the 1980s.

Fortunately, Cuba was not totally unprepared to face the critical situation that arose after 1989. It had, over the years, emphasized the development of human resources, and therefore had a cadre of scientists and researchers who could come forward with innovative ideas to confront the crisis. While Cuba has only 2% of the population of Latin America, it has almost 11% of the scientists.

Alternative technologies

In response to this crisis Cubans and their government rushed to develop and implement alternatives. Because of the drastically reduced availability of chemical inputs, the state hurried to replace them with locally produced, and in most cases biological, substitutes. This has meant biopesticides (microbial products) and natural enemies to combat insect pests, resistant plant varieties, crop rotations and microbial antagonists to combat plant pathogens, and better rotations and cover cropping to suppress weeds. Scarce synthetic fertilizers were supplemented by biofertilizers, earthworms, compost, other organic fertilizers, animal and green manures, and the integration of grazing animals.

In place of tractors, for which fuel, tyres and spare parts were often unavailable, there was a sweeping return to animal traction.

When the crisis began, yields fell drastically throughout the country. But production levels for domestically consumed food crops began to rise shortly thereafter, especially on Agricultural Production Cooperatives (APCs) and on the farms of individual small holders or campesinos. It really was not all that difficult for the small farm sector to effectively produce with fewer inputs. After all, today’s small farmers are the descendants of generations of small farmers, with long family and community traditions of low-input production. They basically did two things: remembered the old techniques – like intercropping and manuring – that their parents and grandparents had used before the advent of modern chemicals, and simultaneously incorporated new biopesticides and biofertilizers into their production practices.

The state sector, on the other hand, faced the incompatibility of large monocultural tracts with low-input technology. Scale effects are very different for conventional chemical management and for low external input alternatives. Under conventional systems, a single technician can manage several thousand hectares on a ‘recipe’ basis by simply writing out instructions for a particular fertilizer formula or pesticide to be applied with machinery on the entire area. Not so for agroecological farming. Whoever manages the farm must be intimately familiar with the ecological heterogeneity of each individual patch of soil. The farmer must know, for example, where organic matter needs to be added, and where pest and natural enemy refuges and entry points are. This partially explains the difficulty of the state sector to raise yields with alternative inputs. A partial response was obtained with a programme that began before the Special Period, called Vinculando el Hombre con la Tierra, which sought to more closely link state farm workers to particular pieces of land, but it wasn’t enough.

• In September 1993 Cuba began radically reorganizing the state sector in order to create the small-scale management units that seemed most effective in the Special Period.
• The government issued a decree terminating the existence of the majority of state farms, turning them into Basic Units of Cooperative Production (BUCPs), a form of worker-owned enterprise or cooperative.
• Much of the 80% of all farmland that was once held by the state was turned over to the workers.
• The BUCPs allow collectives of workers to lease state farmlands rent free, in perpetuity.
• It is clear that the process of turning farm workers into farmers will take some time.

 

Food shortage overcome

• By the latter part of the 1990s the acute food shortage was a thing of the past, though sporadic shortages of specific items remained a problem, and food costs for the population had increased significantly.
• The shortage was largely overcome through domestic production increases which came primarily from small farms, and in the case of eggs and pork, from booming backyard production.
• The earlier food shortages and the resultant increase in food prices suddenly turned urban agriculture into a very profitable activity for Cubans, and once the government threw its full support behind a nascent urban gardening movement, it exploded to near epic proportions.

 

An alternative paradigm?

• To what extent can we see the outlines of an alternative food system paradigm in this Cuban experience?
• The first thing to point out is that contemporary Cuba turned conventional wisdom completely on its head.
• We are told that small countries cannot feed themselves; that they need imports to cover the deficiency of their local agriculture. Yet Cuba has taken enormous strides toward self-reliance since it lost its key trade relations.
• We hear that a country can’t feed its people without synthetic farm chemicals, yet Cuba is virtually doing so.
• We are told that we need the efficiency of large-scale corporate or state farms in order to produce enough food, yet we find small farmers and gardeners in the vanguard of Cuba’s recovery from a food crisis.
• In the absence of subsidized machines and imported chemicals, small farms are more efficient than very large production units.
• We hear time and again that international food aid is the answer to food shortages – yet Cuba has found an alternative in local production.

Abstracting from that experience, the elements of an alternative paradigm might therefore be:

v  Agroecological technology instead of chemicals: Cuba has used intercropping, locally produced biopesticides, compost, and other alternatives to synthetic pesticides and fertilizers.

v  Fair prices for farmers: Cuban farmers stepped up production in response to higher crop prices. Farmers everywhere lack incentive to produce when prices are kept artificially low, as they often are. Yet when given an incentive, they produce, regardless of the conditions under which that production must take place.

v  Redistribution of land: Small farmers and gardeners have been the most productive of Cuban producers under low-input conditions. Indeed, smaller farms worldwide produce much more per unit area than do large farms. In Cuba redistribution was relatively easy to accomplish because the major part of the land reform had already occurred, in the sense that there were no landlords to resist further change,

v  Greater emphasis on local production: People should not have to depend on the vagaries of prices in the world economy, long distance transportation, and superpower ‘goodwill’ for their next meal. Locally and regionally produced food offers greater security, as well as synergistic linkages to promote local economic development. Furthermore such production is more ecologically sound, as the energy spent on international transport is wasteful and environmentally unsustainable. By promoting urban farming, cities and their surrounding areas can be made virtually self-sufficient in perishable foods, be beautified, and have greater employment opportunities. Cuba gives us a hint of the underexploited potential of urban farming.

The Cuban experience illustrates that we can feed a nation’s population well with an alternative model based on appropriate ecological technology, and in doing so we can become more self-reliant in food production. Farmers must receive higher returns for their produce, and when they do they will be encouraged to produce. Expensive chemical inputs – most of which are unnecessary – can be largely dispensed with. The important lessons from Cuba that we can apply elsewhere, then, are agroecology, fair prices, land reforms, and local production, including urban agriculture.

Perspective 26: Benefits from Agroforestry in Africa, with examples from Kenya and Zambia by Pedro A. Sanchez