Cuba’s urban ag miracle has feet of clay

Proponents of urban and peri-urban agriculture, ourselves included, have a poster-child: Cuba. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union as a big market for sugar exports, the Cubans became more self reliant and replaced the food they could no longer afford to import with bounteous harvests from small urban plots.

Alas, all is not quite so rosy in the organopónico. A new book, noted at HungryCity, points out that these plots supply just 5% of Cuba’s food. Furthermore, 75% of Cuban farmers use agrochemicals, and 83% would apply more if they could. Despite masses of evidence that organic land in Cuba really was more productive than conventional farms, the country is reverting to a conventional model.

I came to that post via this one at Spillway, where Will Wiles dissects the issue:

[T]he proponents of urban farming often muddle up doing it because we must (that is, we face shortages if we do not) and doing it because we should (self-reliance being a virtue, food security being desirable and so on) — necessity and desirability. And it’s the questions of necessity that tend to be the most powerful arguments: no one wants to face shortages. But if people see urban farming as only a necessity, it will only ever be seen as an emergency response to a crisis, to be rolled back when (if) more secure times return. This appears to be the condition Cuba is in. But that simply sets society back on the road to consumer-dependence of food produced invisibly elsewhere.

Moving to a more diverse and stable system of food production — including some urban farming — has to accent that is is a desirable option in good times and bad.

That makes a lot of sense to me; urban ag and greater diversity can deliver both resilience and better nutrition, health, incomes etc etc. I wish I had the skills and time to do a decent analysis of an idea that has long intrigued me. At the moment global food supply is dominated by cheap refined carbohydrates and appalling meat. People are not fools; they buy the cheapest calories they can. And that does not include good nutrition. So, why not integrate intensive (but preferably less harmful) production of storable, shippable commodities with local production of the extras that are so vital for a diverse diet that is tasty and nutritious?

There’s more at Spillway about Art and Food, but time is short today and I can’t summon the energy to unpack it or to respond. You might fare better.

2 Replies to “Cuba’s urban ag miracle has feet of clay”

  1. I just noticed this post, I haven’t been doing a good job keeping up with your blog!

    You’ve been known to criticize me for using ‘soft figures’ so to say, and I really have a hard time accepting a lot of what’s said here. Since no one seems to want to pay £60 for the book, we are all sort of discussing this in a vacuum anyway, so I’ll mention some things I’ve heard elsewhere.

    My understanding was Cuba was largely self-sufficient with it’s food needs, with two exceptions. First is feeding foreigners, who arrive to the island expecting larger amounts of more processed foods high in meat. Secondly, when a natural disaster hits like a hurricane, they can face food shortages like any country in the world could, and Cuba is located in an area that sees a lot of tropical storms and hurricanes. So just where does this fit in with the statistic ‘the nation now imports 80 percent of its food’. Is this calories? kilograms? For consumption by tourists in fast food restaurants? Is this overall, or was this figure taken in the wake of hurricane?

    My understanding too was together with mostly being self-sufficient, the number of calories consumed by the average Cuban is only slightly less than that of someone living in the west, and consists nearly entirely of unprocessed foods.

    What about this figure of organopónicos only produce 5% of Cuba’s food. Does this figure include food consumed by tourists? Is this per gram, calorie, or what? Is 5% even a bad number, if these plots are only intended to supply fresh produce while meats and other ‘commodity’ crops are produced in rural areas?

    This whole argument both here and what’s discussed on the Hungrycitybook are not really loaded with hard facts.

  2. “…urban ag and greater diversity can deliver both resilience and better nutrition, health, incomes etc…” I think it is an excellent suggestion to use this line as a mantra. Focus on the positive benefits, rather than the undesirables we wish to avoid.

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