Category: Organic agriculture

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…

We noted a couple of weeks ago that Cuba’s urban agriculture miracle has feet of clay. That was prompted by Julia Wright’s book Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security in an Era of Oil Scarcity: Lessons from Cuba, recently published by Earthscan. One of the main conclusions of the book is that the much-lauded organoponicos, the urban organic vegetable gardens, are not quite the overwhelming success that has been claimed. Or, as the publisher’s blurb puts it:

Paradoxically, the book dispels the myth that Cuba turned to organic farming nationwide, a myth founded on the success of Cuba’s urban organic production systems which visitors to the country are most commonly exposed to. In rural regions, where the author had unique access, industrialized high-input and integrated agriculture is aspired to for the majority of domestic production, despite the ongoing fluctuations in availability of agrochemicals and fuel.

Alas, the mere suggestion that Cuba’s garden is not as rosy as we would like it to be has upset some people, who commented here and elsewhere. I’m having a little difficulty following the thrust of the objections, but there is a cry for “hard facts”. I’ve taken steps to get some more, and my own view is that the defenders of the faith are perhaps missing some important findings from the actual research. Here, for example, is an extract from a paper on Relocalizing Food Systems for Food Security: Successes and Challenges in Cuba given by Julia Wright at the International Conference on Organic Agriculture and Food Security, held at FAO in May 2007:

The research demonstrated that rural production in Cuba was not organic: 83 percent of farmers wished to use more chemical inputs when they became available and substituted with organic inputs only when availability of chemical inputs was limited. The State aimed at 70 percent high-input or integrated production of many staple crops, and the small quantity of chemicals available were allocated to specific crops and farms while others received none. This produced a patchwork of organic, integrated and industrialized approaches to agriculture at the field, farm and regional levels.

Here’s a little bit of a review from Kathy Riley, of the New Economics Foundation, published in a journal of the International Institute for the Study of Cuba at London Metropolitan University:

Wright demonstrates how the State’s approach to urban organic agriculture has been characterised both by response to people’s own experiments with organic technology, and by top-down implementation of organic policies (such as the organopónicos). In general, experiences of urban organic agriculture have been positive, although Wright reports wild variances in the literature about the percentage of fruit and vegetables supplied through these methods.

…

Wright cites the pervasiveness of the industrial farming mindset as a significant obstacle, with its embedded fears about organic methods meaning shortages (for example, in yields), and the fear of losing control (for example, over pests). Wider reflection on Cuban society would reveal that this ‘industrial mindset’ runs deep in Cuban thinking at both governmental and at local levels, with ‘development’ in all its guises strongly associated with modern methods and technologies. Within this context it seems all the more striking that Cuban policy has pushed the bounds of conventional agriculture so far.

Like I said, I’m trying to get more. In the meantime, Patrick asked one other question:

I’ve heard mostly good things about what’s going on in Cuba, and the arguments against it sound more like recent political debates in the US than anything else. Who’s paying these people to make these arguments?

Julia Wright is currently paid by Garden Organic, which I know Patrick knows well. I’m not sure who funded her PhD, and she returns to Cuba every year, supporting the Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Agricolas in their work with farmers throughout the country to promote local agricultural innovation and especially for drought mitigation. If you want to ask her about her work yourself, why not pop along to “an inspiring and visionary community event” to be held in Oxford, England, on 17th October 2009: What could a sustainable future look like? And if you do, report for us!