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Title: Cuban Agriculture Author: Kevin Carson Date: August 24, 2005 Language: en Topics: Cuba, Agriculture Source: Retrieved on 3rd September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/08/cuban-agriculture.html
Until the late 1980s, Cuba’s agricultural economy was a Soviet wannabe,
based on heavy mechanization and use of chemicals; the Soviet
state-socialist model of agriculture, at least ideally, was as if
Cargill or ADM had turned the farms of an entire country into one giant
agribusiness plantation, and then the state had expropriated the
corporation and put it under a state ministry. But with the collapse of
the Soviet bloc in 1989 and of the USSR itself in 1991, and the cutoff
of their “fraternal assistance,” the Cuban economy was deprived of the
inputs necessary for a Soviet-style agricultural model. There were
drastic cutbacks in electric power and transportation, in the fuel and
spare parts for those big gee-whizzy combines, and the oil necessary for
chemical inputs. Left with an economy largely geared toward cash crops
of sugar, and deprived of the Soviet-bloc markets for that sugar at
subsidized prices, Cuba suffered something like a one-third reduction in
average daily caloric intake. Many people lost considerable weight. But
more than a decade later, Bill McKibben notices a difference:
Now, just by looking across the table, I saw that Fernando Funes had
since gained the twenty pounds back. In fact, he had a little paunch, as
do many Cuban men of a certain age. What happened was simple, if
unexpected. Cuba had learned to stop exporting sugar and instead started
growing its own food again, growing it on small private farms and
thousands of pocket-sized urban market gardens—and, lacking chemicals
and fertilizers, much of that food became de facto organic. Somehow, the
combination worked. Cubans have as much food as they did before the
Soviet Union collapsed. They’re still short of meat, and the milk supply
remains a real problem, but their caloric intake has returned to
normal—they’ve gotten that meal back.
In so doing they have created what may be the world’s largest working
model of a semi-sustainable agriculture, one that doesn’t rely nearly as
heavily as the rest of the world does on oil, on chemicals, on shipping
vast quantities of food back and forth.
I should add, I’m only interested in this at the level of technique. As
far as I’m concerned, if that works it stands on its own, independently
of Cuba’s larger social-political system. If anything, the fact that
something like this can be made to work in a state socialist prison like
Cuba should, a fortiori, be promising for large grass roots alternative
economics movements in comparatively free societies.
It’s certainly an example of how quickly a capital- and
chemical-intensive agricultural system can be decentralized and shifted
to a labor-intensive and largely organic production model in the event
of a sudden loss of inputs (can anyone say “Peak Oil”?).
Addenda: Buermann, at Flagrancy to Reason, recently posted on an Oxfam
study of Cuba’s economic transition after the Soviet aid cutoff, and
drew similar general lessons for an energy-scarce economy.