August/September 2005
Cultivating
Relational Intelligence
Nina Simons
Crimes
Against Democracy: An Interview with Thom Hartmann
Jim Guiness
Rebirth
in the Forest
Will Sears
Right
Living, and Surviving, After The Age Of Oil
John Darling
Permaculture
and Place
Steve Gabriel
Think
of Local Food First
Wendy Siporen
Sustainable
Living at Solviva
Anna Edey
Year-Round
Gardening in Home and GreenHouse
Jeffrey M. Smith
The
Greening of Cuba
Caroline Whyte
A
Path of Peace, Kindness and Compassion
Jody Wooduyff
From
Hurt to Heart
Eryn Kalish
Epictetus'
Handbook Revisited
Gay Hendricks & Phillip Johncock
The
Sky of Now
Katie Davis
The
Complete Book of Raw Food
Reviewed by Rachel Bendat
Whole
Foods Companion
Reviewed by Rachel Bendat
Cosmic
Calendar
Salina Rain
The Greening
of Cuba
By Caroline Whyte
The world’s largest ever transition to small scale, organically-based farming is taking place in Cuba.
One of the more unexpected effects of the fall of the Iron Curtain has been the rise of organic farming in Cuba. Until the fall of the Iron Curtain, Cuba’s agriculture was strongly dependent on oil, pesticides and fertilizers, mostly provided by Eastern Bloc countries. 75% of Cuba’s trade was with these countries, and the USSR subsidized the sale of their sugar cane by about 300%. The emphasis was on making Cuba’s agriculture as “modern” as possible, and the government was very proud of the country’s Green Revolution. However, this all changed drastically after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Suddenly, oil supplies were reduced by 80%, and fertilizers and pesticides became much more expensive and difficult to obtain, leading to the largest-ever conversion to small-scale, organically-based farming.
Many of the large, state-run, mechanized farms which used to be dominant in Cuba have now been replaced by much smaller, un-mechanized farms which use few chemicals. Would-be farmers are granted land by the government in exchange for growing a certain amount of a particular crop. They are also encouraged to grow their own gardens. Anything they grow above and beyond the amount demanded by the government can be sold at farmer’s markets. Competition is intense at these markets and the quality of the food is usually very high. In addition, there’s a movement to make the cities of Cuba as self-sufficient as possible—26,000 people in Havana now take part in urban gardening.
In the early nineties, the conversion to modernity had been so “successful” that there were over 75,000 tractors in Cuba, and a half million tons of fertilizer were used every year. However, Cubans are now beginning to re-learn traditional methods of farming. Tractors have some limitations anyway, as they can’t be used on soil which is not dry, whereas oxen will work in all conditions. Oxen hadn’t completely died out in Cuba, but their numbers had dwindled considerably, from around 400,000 pairs in the fifties, to 1,000 in the late eighties. However, now their numbers are up to over 300,000 pairs again. This achievement was the result of a campaign to stop farmers from slaughtering cattle for food.
There are no exact statistics for the degree of conversion to organic farming in Cuba, but it is estimated that 90% of farming there is now mainly, though not entirely, organic (with about 5% entirely organic).
The government has been funding research on biological pest control since the 70s and is now funding research on biofertilizers. Farmers are encouraged to use legumes to “fix” nitrogen in the soil, to practice crop association (e.g. growing corn with beans, so that each crop “controls” the other’s pests), and to “plant” worms in the soil.
The drastic nature of these changes made some of them very difficult. Under the old system, 50% of Cuba’s agricultural produce was exported, with sugar cane as the main source of income. With the change, the market for the cane collapsed, and fertilizer supplies were cut by 80%. Some crops were difficult to change over to organic production. Moreover, the farmers and researchers had been educated on “Green Revolution” procedures, and so had to re-learn a lot of theory.
In order to help with the change-over, the Cuban Association of Organic Farmers was formed in the early nineties, with the aim of educating people in organic farming methods. The association is a non-governmental organization (a rarity in Cuba) which advises the government and also has a growing number of foreign members, including many US citizens and Latin American people. Among the findings of the Association are that while a cow in Cuba, grazing on 1 hectare of land, can produce 2,000 liters of milk in a year, the same hectare of land can produce 7 tons of food when it’s used to grow mixed crops, organically.
During the “special period” of the mid 1990s the Cuban diet declined rapidly as imported oil became unavailable and food could no longer be transported around the country with any degree of reliability. The Cuban response was to instigate an entirely new system of food production and one which remains unique in the world—a substantial part of the Cuban fresh food diet is now produced locally eliminating the oil dependency of the food supply chain and reducing the carbon load of the food production sector.
After an economic depression brought about by the collapse of the Iron Curtain, the Cuban economy is beginning to become healthy again, partly as a result of the shift to small-scale, organic farming.
Caroline Whyte is San Francisco correspondent for An Caorthann!, an online magazine which is a part of Tools for Change, a linked archive of resources originating in Ireland whose common theme is change—social movements from below challenging structural relationships, spiritual practices geared towards transforming ourselves and our interaction with others, and attempts at radical educational practice of various kinds. http://www.iol.ie/%7Emazzoldi/toolsforchange/index.html.
