The Cuban agricultural revolution

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention - and when Cuba ran out of oil in the 1990s, they had to get very inventive indeed. Crisis has lead to Cuba blossoming as a world leader in organic, sustainable agriculture, and now Venezuela is following in their dirt tracks. Roz Paterson and Jack Ferguson report.
It’s a question we may have to consider in this country one day - just how do you survive after the oil runs out, or becomes too hazardous to the climate to burn any more? Luckily for us, and the world, Cuba can shine a light on that future darkness.
In the 1990s, Cuba made the transition from an industrial society, where farming was conducted on a massive scale, with a heavy reliance on fossil-fuel based pesticides and fertilisers, to a sustainable one, with a food economy based on small organic farms, workers’ co-operatives and urban gardens.
The Special Period, as this austerity-to-abundance story is referred to by Cubans, was a shockingly hard time to begin with yet in time, and not too much time at that, the island nation began to feel its way.
Nowadays, while the children of much richer nations begin to fall prey to diet-related diseases we thought we’d seen the back of, such as malnutrition and rickets, as well as life-shrinking levels of obesity, and at a time when we’re throwing away a third of all the food we buy, Cubans are chowing down on the kind of food we can only aspire to - local, organic, fresh - and learning to waste nothing.
The crisis for Cuba began in 1989, with the collapse of the USSR.
Up until then, Cuba had been almost entirely dependent upon the Soviet Union for oil, two thirds of its food supply, and 80 per cent of its machinery and spare parts, for which it paid with sugar exports.
In one fell swoop, 85 per cent of its foreign trade vanished and, thanks to the US trade embargo, which was cranked up in 1992 and ’96, there was no-one else Cuba could turn to, with the exception of Nicaragua and Venezuela, who helped a little, but not enough to avert disaster.
Between 1989 and 1993, GDP fell by half, from $19.3billion to $10billion, as factories closed, public transport ground to a halt, oil-fired power plants providing electricity faltered, causing daily blackouts at some periods of up to ten hours a day (called apagones). Even the fresh water supply was disrupted.
And all because there was no oil.
On the land, agriculture stalled. There was no transport, so crops rotted in the fields. And machinery that had broken down couldn’t be fixed due to lack of spare parts, so a spring sowing season began to look insurmountable too.
With food running out, average caloric and protein intake dropped nearly 30 per cent below 1980s levels and the spectre of widespread starvation loomed.
This massive economic dislocation demanded a massive, state-wide response, and the government implemented a national programme to pull the country back from the brink.
Cuba, literally, had to return to its roots and the people who knew the land best, the small farmers and workers’ cooperatives, were able to lead the way.
Cuba’s challenge was to rid itself of its chemical dependency almost overnight, and embrace the world of organic fertilisers and traditional farming methods.
Instead of the vast sugar plantations - giant monocultures where farming was a case of pouring in fertiliser X (up to 200 kgs of nitrates per hectare in some cases) and pesticide Y to get product Z - Cuba needed small units, where the workers knew the land, and the soil.
Instead of fossil-fuel-based pesticides and insecticides, they needed biopesticides (microbials, such as fungi and bacteria, which are formulated into sprays or granules and applied like conventional pesticides), resistant plant varieties, crop rotations and cover cropping (to suppress weeds).
Instead of synthetic fertilisers, they needed biofertilisers (micro-organisms which enrich the soil), earthworms, compost, animal and green manure, and the integration of grazing livestock.
And instead of tractors - which the shortage of fuel and spare parts rendered unusable - they needed a return to animal traction and to a food economy where the producer and the consumer lived within striking distance of each other.
Agricultural yields fell dramatically at first, but Cubans seemed to hold firm. Rationing was not a new concept and everyone seemed to take on board that this was a national crisis and everyone should pull together.
However, yields began to rise again quite quickly, especially on the small farms and co-operatives, where those working the land were heirs to generations of tradition. Low input farming was in their lifeblood, and they were able to resurrect the old methods, such as intercropping - where you plant different crops that complement each other in terms of warding off pests - as well as incorporate new innovations, such a biofertilisers.
Their advantage was that they knew their acreages, where fertiliser was needed, and where certain crops thrived best.
On the big farms, including the plantations which had been taken into state control, the transition was not so straightforward. The farmers here were strangers to the land; without chemical assistance, they found it hard to work with and yields plummeted and people went hungry.
In 1993, therefore, the government radically reorganised these farms, breaking them down into small-scale units, called Basic Units of Co-operative Production (UBPCs) - workers’ co-operatives in essence, only the land was not bequeathed to them, but rented to them free in perpetuity.
These UBPCs were set production quotas of key crops.
In 1994, legislation was passed enabling them to sell of any surplus produce, for profit, at the newly established farmers’ markets.
Many struggled at first, and it was not until the late 1990s that the acute food crisis could be said to be over.
Even then, some food items remained scarce, supply was sometimes stretched, and prices remained higher than they had been before 1989, which meant that poorer people were condemned to a poor, inadequate diet.
This problem began to be solved - though it isn’t fully solved even now - by the upsurge of urban gardening, which saw city-dwellers turn every available scrap of unused land over to food production, much as happened here in the UK during World War II.
These networks of intensively cultivated urban gardens, called organopónicos, made a major contribution to food security, and security of supply.
People not only feed themselves, but sell the surplus at roadside stalls, or use it to nurture their communities, through providing fresh produce to their nearest school, hospital or nursing home.
They also produce compost and seeds, thus fuelling the next generation of urban crops.
Says Dr Nelso Campanioni Concepcion, deputy director of the National Institute for Fundamental Research on Tropical Agriculture:
“The goal of urban agriculture is to gain the most food from every square metre of available space.
“The secret of the success of urban agriculture in Cuba has been the introduction of new technologies and varieties and an increase in areas farmed.”
Furthermore, urban agriculture solved the transport and distribution problem!
In Havana, over 90 per cent of perishable produce is grown within or near the city limits.
It’s been good for the Cuban national diet too, with the incidence of vegetarianism and vegetable-rich diets on the rise, proving that when natural, sustainable food production is part of the fabric of life, people are more inclined to eat well.
It’s still not a perfect system.
As mentioned above, not everyone gets a bite of this bounty and Cuba is still working on extending the green revolution to the most needy in their society.
But Cuba’s experience does show that the conversion from an oil-dependent economy to a post-hydrocarbon one can be achieved, even in the most straitened circumstances.
There are, however, clouds on the horizon.
In 2000, US president Bill Clinton lifted the trade embargo. At least to the extent that Cuba could now buy from the US, though the reverse was not true.
In 2002, despite Cuba being by then self-sufficient in food, the Cuban government purchased $91.9million in food and agricultural products from the US, even though they could have bought most of it cheaper elsewhere.
Their motivation was clearly political; a gesture of goodwill which they hoped would persuade the US to allow Cuba, in time, to trade its goods.
Cuba is a great untapped market for a globalised system that is running out of such things. As such, big firms, notably bio-tech, are salivating at the thought of making inroads into Cuba.
Will this self-sufficient island, a beacon of sustainability in a world of exhausted soils and artificial agricultures, crumble when the air of the world streams in? Or will it prove resistant to the pests and diseases of globalisation?
Only time will tell but, whatever happens, we have in Cuba a roadmap to an organic, local, sustainable future and we may need it for future navigation.

Biofuels: a murderous myth

Three billion people could be condemned to an early death as a result of thirst and hunger if George W Bush’s plans to turn food into fuel comes to fruition, according to Fidel Castro, who made a spectacular return to the world stage from his long-term sickbed this month to pen a series of articles condemning Bush’s biofuels bender.
In an article published by Counterpunch, Castro stressed that he had no argument with the proposal to reduce fuel needs through the development of more fuel-efficient engines and the recycling of materials to make fuel, but the idea of turning food for humans into fuel for cars is where it gets more sinister.
Bush’s plans, outlined on 26 March, require 35billion gallons of alternative fuels for the US by 2017.
It takes one ton of corn to produce 109 gallons (413 litres) of ethanol, so to produce 35billion gallons will require 320million tons of corn. In 2005, US production of corn amounted to 280.2million tons, which leaves you with a serious shortfall, even when you factor in the most optimistic input of woodchips (by-products of the timber industry) and switchgrass (a native US weed, which has the advantage of growing on soils generally too poor to sustain crops) to the biofuel equation.
The US does not have the capacity to be self-sufficient in ethanol, any more than it does to be self-sufficient in oil, at current rates of consumption.
So they will need to import - but from where?
Not Europe, which is on a biofuel binge of its own and is already compelled to import, but from developing countries, where the financial incentive to grow fuel will outweigh that to grow food for already hungry people.
Not only that, but developing world producers will feel encouraged to clear yet more forestry to make way for lucrative cash crops, contributing further to climate change by dissolving the carbon sinks that currently absorb so much of the world’s CO2 emissions.
Cuba, says Castro, is already feeling the impact of climate change, in droughts and excessive rainfalls that are lowering yields of such crops as sugar cane, of which alcohol as a biofuel was once an important by-product.
It is better, he maintains, to use the land to feed people and, rather than follow the biofuel route to its inevitable dead-end, instead combat global warming through such initiatives as changing all incandescent light bulbs to the less energy-hungry fluorescent ones.
“This would be a palliative that will enable us to cope with climate change without killing the poor people on this planet with hunger.”
Water is also at stake.
The World Water Council predicts that 3.5billion people will be affected by serious water shortages by 2015. Can we really afford to be locked into a global system where water - which one day might become known as ‘blue gold’, such will be its value - is wasted on something as trivial as maintaining our passion for recreational driving?
Bush’s embrace of ethanol is not so inexplicable as it first appears. It is not the case of an oil man suddenly seeing the light, but a crude power-broker seeking to counter Venezuela’s influence, based on its oil revenues, in Latin America.
By creating ethanol pacts with nations such as Brazil, Bush hopes to undermine the emerging alternative economy that is seeing nations like Argentina and Ecuador unchain themselves from the World Bank and IMF and rebuild their economies.
But he is not without his critics, even at home.
Anti-poverty campaigners, environmentalists, scientists and economists, and not just left-leaning ones either, are queuing up to warn policy-makers of the folly of biofuels
The Economist, for instance, is surprised to find itself in agreement with Castro.
“When he roused himself from his sickbed last week to write an article criticising George W Bush’s unhealthy enthusiasm for ethanol, he had a point.”

Venezuela follows in the green revolution

Venezuela is a society where for decades everything has been skewed by the huge oil wealth that lies beneath the country.
As a result a small elite of rich white businessmen collaborated with the US to build a society where 80 per cent of the population live in poverty, while a quarter of the US oil supply comes from Venezuela.
One of the consequences of this is that the Venezuelan diet was increasingly Americanised, with meat and dairy imported from abroad. Around 88 per cent of Venezuela’s food is currently imported.
This means that in Venezuela, just like hundreds of other countries in the developing world, the poorest people in rural areas just haven’t been able to compete and farming has collapsed. Landless people flock to the city in search of work, swelling the shanty towns that ring cities like Caracas.
It’s got to the point where only 8 per cent of Venezuelans now live in rural areas.
From the very start, one of the key priorities of the radical administration of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has been reform of the highly unequal distribution of land, and establishing food security for the country.
The government understands that if it truly wishes to move towards “Socialism of the 21st Century”, as Chavez has called for, it’s likely to face sanctions and blockades from its powerful neighbour in the North. Just as Cuba has done, Venezuela needs to be able to feed itself and end its dependency on food imports.
Chavez bases his agricultural policy on what he calls ‘endogenous development’. Endogenous means ‘inwardly creating’.
In practice this has meant already that 5.5million acres of under-used land has been re-distributed to 116,000 families. This has allowed many people from a rural background to return to the land from urban poverty.
The new farms are organised in co-operatives, and have received support from the government to develop organic sustainable agriculture based on the ecology of Venezuela. The co-operative members build new homes, and are helping re-populate areas of the country that had been virtually abandoned.
And so in the future they can assist other areas of the world who are waking up to the fact that fossil fuel and chemical based agribusiness has no future, the Venezuelan government has established a huge seed bank to preserve indigenous crop varieties threatened with extinction by the corporate farming monoculture. They have also banned the use of genetically modified organisms.
But the greening isn’t confined to the countryside. In Caracas, many have followed Cuba’s development of organic urban gardening with excitement. Now the first experiments are underway in Venezuela.
In the heart of the capital, in the shadow of the Hilton hotel, the first organopónico, or organic urban garden, has been set up. It provides fresh vegetables at a fraction of the cost of the far-travelled, pesticide-laden and often damaged greens available in the supermarket.
Unemployed people from the shantytowns are able to come and work in the gardens and are paid in kind with fresh produce. Organopónico Bolivar I, as it is called, has become a model for all of Venezuela, and students studying agriculture at the Bolivarian University are required to come and work there. The government aims to expand the model, and have announced they plan to plant 2,470 more acres of urban organic gardens this year. They ultimately want 20 per cent of vegetable consumption to be supplied by the organopónicos.
Those working on the garden programme hope it can have a similar effect on the health of the people as their counterparts in Cuba, where heart disease rates have plummeted. Certainly the diet of local people who use Organopónico Bolivar I has moved away from the traditional meat and fried starches towards much more consumption of vegetables.
As the garden’s director Noralí Verenzuela says: “We’ve been dependent on McDonald’s and Wendy’s for so long. Now people are learning to eat what we can produce ourselves.”