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By Mary Stucky, Minnesota Public Radio
April 11, 2001
Part two of three parts
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Farmers in the United States who grow food organically - without using chemicals - are in the minority. Not so in Cuba. In past decade, that island nation turned from growing food using chemicals, heavy machinery and huge farms, in favor of small-scale organic farming and urban gardens. Production of vegetables has soared, which has attracted attention from experts in the United States and Minnesota.
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CUBAN FARMERS HAD LITTLE CHOICE about whether to embrace organic agriculture. Just seven years ago, the Cuban people faced starvation.
For Mavis Alvarez, and other Cubans, just having survived is an accomplishment. When the Soviet Union collapsed, so did Cuba's economy. Eighty percent of its trade evaporated; Cubans couldn't afford to import food, fertilizer or fuel. So the government made a drastic decision. Food would be grown without chemicals, using alternative methods. It worked, according to Mavis Alvarez, who represents an association of small farmers in Cuba.
"Now it's better, much better. We produce more roots and tubers. And in general, all production, including tobacco, sugar cane and coffee, has increased," she says.
While there are still severe shortages of meat and milk, the country's producing four times the vegetables compared to the worst year of the food crisis, and this largely without using chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
Minor Sinclair lived in Cuba in the 1990s, representing Oxfam, a British charity working on food policy. Sinclair says the Cuban commitment to organic farming is purely pragmatic.
"These things are practical, real solutions, but I think what the Cubans add on to that is that they say, 'We're not committed to 100 percent organic, we'll do 90 percent organic and then when the white flies on tomatoes get really bad, we'll spray them with chemical pesticides,'" Sinclair says.
This practical approach to organic farming involves innovations like the production of worm humus as a fertilizer in so-called vermiculture facilities, where staff regularly invite curious American farmers to visit.
A Cuban farmer explains how they feed manure or garbage to the worms, which transforms common manure into a richer, more potent fertilizer that's been used to dramatically improve yields for some crops in Cuba.
Throughout rural Cuba there are more than 200 centers for the production of natural pest controls, including bacteria that devour insect larvae - an inexpensive and largely effective alternative to chemical pesticides.
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"They're not necessarily trying to change anything. What they're trying to do is go with the flow of nature and that's very contrary to what we do. We're always trying to manage nature and here's it's all of a piece," Dodge says.
"Their solutions seems to be. 'What do we have to fix the problem,' trying to make use of their natural resources and their own human resources to make this work," says Wilcke.
Both Bill Wilcke and Diane Dodge have long heard about Cuba and wanted to gauge for themselves what's been accomplished and whether it could be of use in Minnesota.
Of special interest to Minnesota master gardener Diane Dodge were Cuba's urban gardens, in the heart of cities like Havana, which now produce more than half of the fruits and vegetables consumed in Cuba.
"I have an undying respect for that and the Cubans are evidently in the forefront," Dodge says.
Another innovation - Cuban farms are getting smaller. The Cuban government broke up enormous, inefficient state farms. Now thousands of farmers work their own land, which is the case at a tobacco farm in Pinar Del Rio Province in western Cuba.
Rahmee Ahmahdee is a Cuban who grew up in the United States and now works with a farmers group in Cuba.
"As formerly everybody worked all the land, now they're linking a particular cooperative member to particular areas of land," he says.
The individual farmer gets paid based on his productivity. There are other nods at capitalism, like a plant nursery which is run, basically, as a for-profit business.
"We are the owners of the production and the owners of the capital," says nursery president Miguel Sahlseenes.
But perhaps the most dramatic form of capitalism is in the new food markets, where farmers sell directly to consumers and charge whatever they like.
Jose Luis Castro is a former teacher who now sells papayas in one of the new private markets. "This is a job that makes good money and that's why I'm here," he says.
Organic approaches do not work for every Cuban crop. The island's big cash crop, sugar cane, is hard to grow without chemicals. But alternatives have proven to work with fruits and vegetables, according to Luis Garcia, director of the Center for Sustainable Agriculture at the Agrarian University of Havana.
"When a producer starts to have better results, produce more crops and with less cost, then nothing will convince him to go back to the other ways of producing," Garcia says.
Of course no one knows the true depth of the Cuban commitment to alternative agriculture. If the country rebounds, what would keep Cuban farmers from buying agricultural chemicals, especially if that would increase yields? And if the U.S. embargo on trade with Cuba is ever lifted, American agribusiness companies are poised to do business.
Still Cuba might continue down the alternative route, developing a valuable market for its organic products in a world increasingly worried about the quality of its food.
Part Three: The Future
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