Cuba: Case Study in Food Security

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0104koont.htm

January/2005

Monthly Review

Food Security in Cuba

by Sinan Koont

Sinan Koont teaches economics and is coordinator of Latin American Studies
at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He thanks numerous friends
and colleagues in the United States and Cuba for their helpful comments on
previous drafts of this article.

For reference notes to this article contact Claude Misukiewicz at the
Monthly Review office.

In 1996, Via Campesina, the recently formed international umbrella
organization of grassroots peasant groups, introduced the term ³food
sovereignty²: the right of peoples and states to democratically decide their
own food and agricultural policies and to produce needed foods in their own
territories in a manner reinforcing the cultural values of the people while
protecting the environment.

A related but distinct concept of "food security" has been defined by the
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to include, among
other aspects: (1) the production of adequate food supplies; (2) stability
in the flow of these supplies; and (3) secure access, both physical and
economic, to available supplies for those in need of them. Recently, Cuba,
unlike most other countries in the world, has had to grapple with these
questions under circumstances that would try most people¹s souls.

In the Caribbean, neither the history of colonial domination, including
slavery and monoculture agriculture based on export crops, nor the climate,
tropical and unsuitable for feed-grain production, allow for the easy
satisfaction of food needs with local production. This has been made more
difficult by the post-1990 disintegration of the Soviet Union, which
resulted in the collapse of Cuban exports and imports and the loss of the
preferential terms of trade of Cuban sugar for Soviet oil. In addition,
during this time there has been a tighter U.S. blockade and increasing U.S.
hostility. This is the "periodo especial" (special period) announced by
Fidel Castro in 1990. By 1993, as Cuban production and imports plummeted,
the daily intake of the average Cuban citizen had descended to 1863
kilocalories, including 46 grams of protein and 26 grams of fat, all figures
well below FAO recommended minimums for a healthy diet.

It was obvious that something had to be done, and a rapid increase in
imports of foodstuffs or inputs to food production was out of the question.
The bywords for food security, by necessity, had to be self-reliance and, to
the extent possible, self-sufficiency: a tall order for any Caribbean
economy, and doubly so for an economy under a hostile blockade by a powerful
neighbor.

Cuba had to make full, efficient use of all available resources related to
agriculture to (1) produce food directly using domestic inputs, (2) earn
foreign exchange by exporting food and other cash crops (such as tobacco,
sugar, and coffee), and/or (3) produce previously imported inputs into food
production (such as petroleum) to allow the importation of indispensable
necessities such as powdered milk, thus assuring the availability of food
supplies and the stability of their flow.

A number of approaches have been used to put these overall strategies into
practice over the last decade. The first was to identify and put idle lands
to use, sometimes in ingenious ways. The second was to develop new schemes
of work organization, pricing mechanisms, and incentives to stimulate, both
quantitatively and qualitatively, the supply (and efficient use) of
agricultural labor. The third approach involved researching, introducing,
and disseminating new methods of work and technologies, including finding
ways to minimize the need for hard currency expenditures on such things as
petroleum and protein-rich animal feed. Since such dollar expenditures
cannot be totally eliminated they also increased efforts to penetrate dollar
markets with agricultural goods (food and non-food) so that these dollars at least those that end up in government hands support food production and to import goods still needed for food production
or for the direct needs of the population.

Creating "New Land"

Eighty percent of Cuba"s population is urban. The Cuban government, acting
through its Ministry of Agriculture, the Department of Urban Agriculture
(created in 1994), and the National Urban Agriculture Group established soon
thereafter, started promoting the approach of creating "new land" for
cultivation as a way of finding local solutions to the food problem in
Havana and elsewhere.

For this purpose it created three kinds of "new" land. The first of these,
termed organoponicos, were gardens consisting of raised-bed containers
filled with compost and manure-rich soil (often transported from elsewhere)
constructed on lots that had been paved over, compacted, or were otherwise
infertile.

The second form of land creation was to bring existing fertile land
currently lying fallow, in vacant lots and parks or belonging to
enterprises/collectives, into food production. Such land is usually already
in state hands, in which case it is put to use by granjas (farms) and
empresas estatales (state enterprises) to produce for the market or to
fulfill ration and other commitments by the state, or as gardens for
autoconsumo, that is, to meet the needs of the workforces associated with
various state enterprises such as factories, farms, sugar cane complexes,
schools, and hospitals.

The third form of new land included cultivating the patios and yards next to
people¹s houses.

Another innovation has been the huerto intensivo (intensive garden), which
employs intensive gardening methods to maximize yield in small areas.
Vegetables are planted close together on raised beds enriched with organic
matter to provide adequate nutrition for the plants, but without retaining
walls.

These initiatives are typically run by the state, collectives or
cooperatives. However, local governments also assign rights to land to
private individuals in the form of parcelas, so-called popular gardens, for
as long as they are kept in production. Even privately-owned land can be
assigned to would-be gardeners or farmers, unless the owner brings the land
to a productive state within six months.

Finally, there has been a proliferation of backyard gardening, the so-called
patios, propelled by campaigns led by a mass-based neighborhood civic
organization, the Committee for the Defense the Revolution (CDR), and
reminiscent of the victory gardens movement in the United States during the
Second World War. By the summer of 2003, the number of patios in production
had exceeded 300,000, with a goal for the future of over half a million
patios, primarily aimed at increases in fruit production.

By the end of 2002, the goal of providing every settlement of over fifteen
houses with its own food production capacity gardens, or individual plots hectares were being cultivated in urban agriculture in and around cities.

The full-use goal has also been pursued outside of the urban setting with
land left fallow or underutilized being given away to people willing to
work. Export crops like coffee, cacao, and tobacco and food crops such as
rice are being grown under such plans on hundreds of thousands of hectares.

There was also one more, unusual manner, in which ³new lands² became
available for food crops in 2002 half of the sugar mills, and convert the land (about 1 million hectares) to
food production and reforestation. About 246,000 hectares (including about
100,000 in 2003) will be devoted to annual crops aside from rice,
representing a 73 percent increase of the area devoted to these crops.

Using Labor More Efficiently

The reorganization of the work process and the provision of proper
incentives to workers have been the primary avenues to enhance the
efficiency of labor. In 1998, agricultural as well as other enterprises
began to take part in a new type of management process Perfeccionamiento
Empresarial (loosely translated as the System of Advanced
Management). Under this system, enterprises start by keeping improved
records. They then go through a diagnostic process of identifying current
deficiencies and the potential for their resolution. Finally, they propose
plans in the areas of labor and wage policy, management structures, and
their choice of economic and efficiency indicators to be used to evaluate
their progress.

There is a concerted effort to establish fair socialist norms of
distribution in the area of cooperative or collective production in
agriculture, where over one million Cubans work. The principle involved is
stated as "pago por los resultades finales," pay according to the final
results sector the main thrust has been in the creation of organizational forms that
make this approach possible. This was the primary reason for the 1993
program of "linking people to the land," breaking up state farms into
smaller cooperative farms.

The breakup of state farms has made individuals or small work teams
completely responsible for production on a given piece of land, thus making
it feasible to tie their incomes to the amount actually produced on that
area. Small farms worked by small groups of workers (mostly family based)
have been established within agricultural enterprises still run by the
state. These farms are directly subordinate to the director of the larger
enterprise, and workers are paid according to the results they achieve.

Having organized work around individual or small group responsibility, the
question of providing appropriate material incentives, of course, still
remains. Pay for results, certainly, but exactly how much? Prices paid for
agricultural products still constitute the primary material incentive.
Beginning in 1994, the prices of food sold to the population, outside of the
ration-book channel, were liberalized with the establishment of markets
where all suppliers their produce at whatever price the market would
bear under the given supply and demand conditions. Prices paid for
deliveries to the state have been increased for selected products, such
as milk, beans, coffee, and tobacco. Tax policy is also being used to stimulate food production and urban marketing, including tax exemptions for small farmers and preferential taxation in the farmers' markets of the city of Havana at 5 percent of
sales, compared with 15 percent in the rest of the country.

Given the dual dollar-peso Cuban economy, some workers are paid part of
their salary in dollars or given access to goods, like bicycles, work
clothes, and shoes, and various other goods that are otherwise only
available in dollar-only stores. In-kind incentives, such as better housing
and use of rest and recreation facilities, are also used to stimulate
production.

New Technologies Replace Imports

One of the serendipitous results of the Cuban crisis has been the forced
change from conventional farming practices to organic farming. Cut off from
favorable trade agreements with the Soviet Union and its allies a decade
ago, and unable to afford buying on the international market, Cuba has
become a gigantic laboratory for farming without petroleum and petroleum
derivatives. From pest control to fertilization to soil preparation,
chemistry is out and biology is in. The Crop Protection Institute operates
over 220 centers that provide cheap and plentiful beneficial insects and
microorganisms that attack plant pests. At hundreds of vermicompost centers,
worms are digging through and then excreting organic waste to produce, in
2003, one million tons of natural compost per year in which farmers are trying to improve poor quality urban and rural soil.

There are very rapid increases in the production of various types of organic
compost, the quantity of such materials jumping seven fold from 2001 to
2002, reaching fifteen million tons in 2003. The Ministry of Agriculture has
supported this process with a network of extension agents and supply stores.
By 1997, in Havana alone, there were sixty-seven extension agents and twelve
so-called seed houses. Currently in Havana, this effort is centered in the
tiendas consultario agricola (TCAs), agricultural consulting stores. The
number of TCAs is projected to rise to fifty, employing five hundred
professional extension agents and technicians. The TCAs offer technical
advice along with seeds, soil improvers, biological products, and technical
literature. The extension agent plays the key role as disseminator of
information about services offered by the TCA and communicator of
scientific-technical advice and information to the urban agriculturalists.
Across Cuba, urban agriculture employs the services of close to ten thousand
professionals and over forty thousand technicians.

Progress is also being made in the main agricultural production regions in
rural areas. Especially significant increases in production are being
achieved for potatoes and rice. A very encouraging technological development
is the introduction of a new approach to growing rice. This is called the
System of Rice Intensification (SRI) and is promoted world-wide by, among
others, the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and
Development. While its application is in its very beginning stages, where
tried, this system has doubled or even tripled rice yields in Cuba, as
elsewhere in the third world, while reducing seed, water, and petroleum
requirements. Optimistic rice experts are claiming that Cuba is potentially
on its way to self-sufficiency in rice, and, in the future, will be able to
use its excess rice production as animal feed! Potato production is another
success story tries to maintain the supply of synthetic fertilizer needed for potato
cultivation. The yields achieved have been impressive for a tropical island:
in 1999, 23 tons/hectare, which in Latin America is second only to
Argentina¹s 25­27 tons/hectare, and exceeds the European average if one
includes Russia. For comparison, Canada¹s yield is 27­28 tons/hectare. Newly
introduced technologies, such as new irrigation techniques (89 percent of
the potato crop is irrigated), and new crop varieties have helped Cuba
greatly improve potato production.

The general turn to organic agriculture and the renewed use of animal
traction power (2,400 teams of oxen labor in the City of Havana) has
produced the tremendous savings of imported energy and other products
derived from petroleum. In 2003, the Ministry of Agriculture is using less
than 50 percent of the diesel fuel it used in 1989, less than 10 percent of
the chemical fertilizers, and less than 7 percent of the synthetic
insecticides. In fact, all aspects of food production are daily
battlegrounds in the fight to save energy!

Penetrating Markets that Pay in U.S. Dollars

There are at least three mechanisms through which non-sugar agricultural
production can contribute to the dollar earnings needed to achieve food
security in Cuba dollars are needed to meet the food requirements of the population.

First, there are the stores that sell to tourists, as well as to Cubans, for
dollars. Cubans have been able to hold and circulate dollars legally since
1993. Cubans can obtain dollars either through remittances from relatives
living abroad (primarily in the United States) or by earning dollars in Cuba
(as tips from tourism, among other options). These stores are called tiendas
de recaudacion de divisa (TRDs), loosely translated as foreign exchange
capturing stores.

Food and other agricultural product sales in the TRDs surpass $200 million
per year. No stone is being left unturned in trying to capture sales first ten
months of 2000, $22,000 came through the efforts of the beekeepers
of Ciego de Avila from their sales of honey and its derivatives, including
cosmetics, in the dollar-based stores and at shops in tourist hotels.

Second, there is the provision of inputs to the tourism sector. One of the
problems of Cuba¹s burgeoning tourism industry (about 1.7 million tourists
in 2002) has been retaining the dollars that come in with the tourists. At
the beginning of the tourism push in the early 1990s, most inputs into
tourism, including food, were imported. There is in principle no reason why
the ornamental flowers, lettuce, and mangoes served in Cuban hotels could
not be grown in Cuba. The Ministry of Agriculture has had some success in
its efforts to increase the quality and reliability of food delivery to
tourist hotels, but the results remain well below potential. By 2001 only
about 61 percent of all inputs into the tourism industry were of Cuban
origin.

The last way for the state to earn dollars through sale of agricultural
products is through exports. In addition to traditional export sectors like
tobacco, coffee, and by now, citrus fruits, others such as apiculture and
the shellfish industry have begun making contributions. Lest it seem a
little odd for a country under nutritional stress to export foodstuffs in
the quest for food security, it makes good sense to export high price foods
like honey and shellfish to increase the availability of other foods. In
fact, in 2001 the food imports and exports of Cuba were almost exactly
balanced in value terms.

Access to Food

In the previous section, we surveyed Cuba¹s efforts importation sufficient
quantities to feed its people. Now, we turn to a discussion of
how Cuba tries to achieve the equally, if not more, important goal of
securing access to the available food supplies. It is, of course, not enough
for a country to produce enough food per person, on average. Each person,
individually, must receive enough food. The failure to have adequate and
fair food distribution has resulted in many examples of malnutrition or even
famine in societies that produce sufficient amounts of foodstuffs per
capita.

Cuba tries to keep food within the physical and economic reach of its
population in a number of different ways. One of the most important is the
existence of various entitlements to food. The Cuban Revolution, since its
inception, has used rationing as a means to bring social equity into its
system of food distribution. In 1998, rationing guaranteed 5 lbs. of rice, 1
lb. of beans, and 3 lbs. of sugar per person per month. Chicken, eggs, fish,
ham, and soy meal as well as potatoes, tomatoes, and vegetables were, even
if irregularly, available in small quantities at a nominal cost. It should
also be noted here, that every month, out of its agricultural production,
the state delivers 28 lbs. of food per bed to hospitals, 13 lbs. per child
to child care centers, and 10 lbs. per student to schools.

There are also voluntary redistributions of food, especially of the produce
obtained in the popular gardens or parcelas. Some of this happens
spontaneously, as productive urban farmers share their bounty with needy
neighbors (especially the elderly) out of social solidarity. Some local
governments more or less insist on ³voluntary² contributions to local
schools and hospitals, as a kind of social rent they feel justified in
charging, because the use of land was given at no charge.

In order to help keep food prices within the reach of the population, the
government has taken carefully designed actions. Although the opening and
spread of farmers' markets after 1994 provided incentives for producers and
tremendously increased the variety of produce for sale, the prices in these
markets are high enough to preclude the participation of many if not most
Cubans.

A partial solution to the problem of high prices in farmers' markets has
been the establishment of state-based competitors. In 1998, the Ministry of
Agriculture began a network of markets, supplied with production from state
enterprises. Prices at these placitas topadas (limited price) markets are
kept below those in the farmers¹ markets although the variety of products is
more limited.

The government has pursued policies that make dollars, which earlier had
been restricted to families receiving remittances from abroad and to workers
in tourism who receive tips in dollars, available to more Cubans. As an
incentive to some workers in sectors that do not regularly earn dollars
directly, the government pays part of their salary directly in dollars.
Offices have been established throughout Havana so that pesos can be changed
into dollars (and vice versa) at a fairly stable "market" rate, currently
twenty-six pesos to the dollar. As a result, the proportion of the
population having some access to the dollar, and thus able to buy consumer
goods (including food), which are not available in the peso markets, rose
from 44 percent in 1996 to 62 percent in 1999.

Finally, access to food has been facilitated by the opportunity for
cost-free access to the major means of production for food, namely, land.
This principle has enabled work collectives, from state farms and industrial
enterprises to schools and hospitals, to put nearby idle land to good use by
raising crops and animals for the consumption of the workers in work-place
cafeterias. It has also enabled individuals who are not officially
integrated into the agricultural workforce on state farms, such as retirees,
to ask for small parcels of land to produce their own food.

What is the Outcome?

What kind of fruit have all of these efforts and policies borne in Cuba?
Perhaps the one unquestionable success is to be found in the production of
vegetables and starchy tubers and plantains the pre-crisis levels of 1989.

The brightest achievements in this area no doubt belong to the essentially
crisis-created effort in urban agriculture, which, starting early in the
crisis in Havana and bursting dynamically onto the national scene in recent
years, has proved to be an outstanding contributor to food production, as
well as a valuable source of employment and income for the urban population.
In 2003, over 200,000 workers were employed in this sector, 35,000 new jobs
having been created over the previous year amounting to 22 percent of all
new jobs in the Cuban economy.

In general, there are very encouraging signs of increased production and
efficiency. In 1999, there were gains in yields for sixteen of eighteen
major crops, including not only vegetables, tubers, and plantains, but also
corn, beans, rice, fruits, and coffee. Potato, cabbage, malanga, bean, and
pepper yields are superior to those of Central America and above the average
yields in the world. All of the provinces in Cuba increased their
productions of vegetables, tubers, and plantains, and thirteen broke
historical production records. Production figures for vegetables speak for
themselves (in millions of tons): 1997, 0.1; 1999, 0.9; 2000, 1.7; and 2002,
over 3. The results for 2003 are expected to exceed this achievement, 1.7
million tons having been harvested in the first six months of the year.

As a result, by mid-2000, vegetable and fresh herb sales nationwide had
reached a level of 469 grams per day per capita, well above the FAO
recommended amount of 300 grams per day. Cienfuegos and Ciego de Avila lead
the nation with 867 and 756 grams per day respectively, while Havana reached
622 grams per day by November 2000, and Sancti Spiritus, Granma, Pinar del
Rio, Las Tunas, and Guantanamo were all above 500 grams per day. By March
2003, Havana Province was producing 943 grams per day per capita.

Of course, major problem areas remain, especially regarding milk, meat, and
eggs, which continue to require imported animal feed that Cuba cannot
afford. Rice, usually grown on large state farms, has also consistently
fallen short of planned levels of production.

Even in these areas, there is some recovery and hope for the future. In the
case of rice, for example, besides the expectations surrounding the SRI
technology mentioned above, there are promising beginnings in the ³popular
rice² movement, inspired by the successes in urban agriculture and
attempting to duplicate its results in rice cultivation. In 2003, 300,000
tons of rice will be produced in the country, up from 172,000 tons in 1999,
reducing rice imports by more than 50 percent.

In the midst of all these transformations, it is important to note, that, in
contrast to the shrinking role of the state in many third world countries in
the current neoliberal era, in Cuba, the state and other collective forms of
economic organization continue to play a major role, both in production and
in facilitation and support. The most important bottom line is that, by the
end of 2000, food availability in Cuba reached daily per capita figures of
2,600 calories and more than 68 grams of protein. The UN¹s Food and
Agriculture Organization considers 2,400 calories per day and 72 grams
protein per day to be an adequate diet. Despite the remaining problem areas,
the acute food shortage crisis is essentially over. Cuban society has
successfully made, while under considerable duress, heroic efforts to
construct its own version of food security for its population, and has
perhaps shown the way for other societies. On March 31, 2003, President Hugo
Chavez of Venezuela, in the presence of the Cuban ambassador and the FAO
representative in Venezuela, inaugurated the first Venezuelan organoponico
in the center of Caracas. Other third world countries would do well to learn
from the Cuban experience ensure an adequate diet for all their people.