The Cuban government is trying to increase the number of organic farms in a drive to feed its people. Yet the efforts are being hampered by a lack of cash flow, reports Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Like many of its Caribbean neighbors, communist-governed Cuba imports more than two-thirds of its food, despite having rich farmland and hundreds of urban farms sprouting up in old parking lots, rooftops, or other small plots of unused land.
The country spends more than $2 billion a year importing rice, meat, grains and other foods which analysts and local farmers say could be produced at home.
The government, under President Raul Castro, says it is serious about producing more food for Cuba's 11 million citizens, and some environmentalists have praised it for supporting organic urban farming, which uses no chemical pesticides or fertilizers.
But local farmers and analysts say Cuba will not achieve self-sufficiency in food in the near future, despite improved trade with the United States after Washington re-established diplomatic relations last year with its former Cold War foe.
"The government is trying to make more of these organic farms," urban farmer Antonio Loma told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "But it's a lot of work for very little money."
Organic by necessity
Loma said Cuba turned to urban agriculture because it had to.
"It's organic because we couldn't get fertilizer," he said.
Founded in 1994, the Rotondo de Cojima farm, which grows several thousand kilos a month of carrots, lettuce and root vegetables, and hundreds of others were set up after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had supplied its Cuban ally with energy, pesticides and machinery on preferential terms and paid above-market rates for Cuba's staple sugar crop.
"Organic agriculture was essentially forced upon Cuba," Sinan Koont, an economics professor at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Cuban food output plummeted and the economy shrank after the breakup of the Soviet Union. With little fuel for trucks or tractors, state-paid farmers had to start growing vegetables close to cities, using oxen and other animals to till the fields, Koont said.
The government says it is still committed to organic farming, though a wave of imported U.S. food, probably cheaper but not organic, is likely following the relaxing of a long-running trade embargo.
Cuban Economy and Planning Minister Marino Murillo pledged an additional 600 million pesos ($22.6 million) for agriculture in 2016, on top of the 9 billion pesos ($340 million) set aside for food production and other business promotion in 2015, state media reported in December.
So far local organic farmers do not seem worried about the threat to Cuba's successful urban farms from the expansion of trade with the United States, though the large government subsidies U.S. farmers receive will keep prices of imports low.
"The Americans will sell a lot of food here in the future, and that's positive," Loma said. "It will mean more food for the Cubans - and we will always be able to sell our vegetables."
Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation