Cuba: the goods

We asked Julia Wright, author of the study on Cuba, if she would set us straight on the various interpretations of her work that are floating around. She agreed. Thanks Julia.

Jeremy has summarized the situation pretty clearly, as I saw it. I was in Cuba from 1999 to 2001 collecting field data, during which time I interviewed over 400 people mainly from the farming sector, across the country. It was difficult to get hold of secondary hard data, partly because of paper shortages — stats weren’t being printed — but also because some just weren’t being collected, and also because I was a foreigner. I undertook this work because I had heard that Cuba was or might be organic, and I wanted to see how they did it — how their production and support systems were operating, and also the implications of this in terms of human health. So the research was curiosity driven, and I got funded through the EU Training and Mobility of Researchers programme (Marie Curie) to undertake research at Wageningen Uni in the Netherlands (I used the ‘laboratory glassware’ part of the funds to cover the flights to Cuba…).

Basically urban agriculture is mainly organic and successful – so much so that the State has maintained support for it to this day. But in rural regions, it took longer for the positive impacts of the shortfalls in fuel and agrochemicals to manifest — some farmers estimated that after about 5 years they could detect an increase in biodiversity and improvements in livestock health — and before organic could prove itself Cuba had the opportunity to start importing more industrial inputs. The sector had been forced into a low-input situation; it was not an attitudinal change. Nevertheless, much learning took place, and everyone agreed that they would not go back to the old ways of the 1980s. The same would happen in this country (England), and we can learn a lot from what worked and what didn’t.

About specific figures, well urban agriculture supplies mainly salad vegetables — lettuce and tomato, which isn’t a very popular part of the Cuban diet. Peri-urban agriculture could, according to researchers in that field, one day supply up to 70% of Havana’s food needs, so there’s an area of great potential. In terms of national self sufficiency, I’ve heard various figures being bandied about. Official international sources (often from US) estimate that 90% of foods are imported. Cuban contacts say about 50%, because of the large amount of informal campesino production that is just not being documented. In recent years, Cuba has had relatively more choice over whether to import or aim for self sufficiency, and it has tended toward the former (as has the UK). This may however be changing again with the current economic crisis.

I go back there most years, as work allows, and for the past 4 years have been supporting a project in the east of the country on drought mitigation. Industrial agriculture can’t cope with drought aside from digging deeper wells, and in fact neither can temperate organic methods, so we draw from Australia’s permaculture expertise for innovative, low-cost rainwater harvesting approaches.

I’m sorry that the book is so expensive, but if there’s sufficient demand, Earthscan will publish a softback. In the meantime, I do have some discount copies…