Dr. Pedro Sanchez and the Importance of Understanding the Cuban Food System

Cuban Market. | Image: Courtesy of Ben Kucinski/Flickr/Creative Commons License

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The UC Food Observer had the privilege of speaking with Dr. Sanchez recently about what normalizing relations with Cuba might mean for the food system in that nation and in the United States.

The U.S. is beginning the process of normalizing relations with Cuba. What is critical for Americans to understand about the Cuban food system?

Cuba is currently importing about 80% of its food at a cost of about $2B annually. This represents about 3% of the nation's GDP (Gross Domestic Product). That's a very high percentage. At the same time, Cuba has anywhere from 500,000 to one million hectares of prime quality land idled. These lands have excellent soils and are surrounded by good infrastructure, a fantastic opportunity. Cuba now has a program to transition those idle lands in the form of long-term leases to private farmers and farmer cooperatives. That's in progress.

As I understand it, a top priority of the Cuban government is now food security. Certainly importing so much food is not secure and food scarcities are common.

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What do you think America can learn from Cuba in terms of agriculture and food systems?

There is a great deal to learn from Cuba. Cuba has gone through a unique series of up and downs. Before the revolution in 1959, there was a big landowner system with many poor people in the countryside. After the revolution, all lands were confiscated and put into large state farms, which was characteristic of the communist model that was in place at that time. Cuba was strongly supported by the Soviet Union and enjoyed very favorable terms of trade as a result. For example, the price of sugar at the time was probably along the lines of 4 cents (per pound), yet the Soviet Union was buying it at 40 cents.

On my first return visit - which was in 1975 - I saw enormous state farms and enormous machinery like something out of a Terminator movie. There were excessive amounts of irrigation and fertilizers being used. This was essentially subsidized by the Soviet bloc. In 1989-90, the collapse of the Soviet Union halted these subsidies.

This caused Cuba to be on its own, isolated from most of the rest of the world. The GDP contracted by 15% the economy experienced negative growth. Cuba was not able to import fertilizers or other inputs and certainly not much food. It was a very bad situation. Cuba's response was to turn to organic production and hunker down. And this is where there can be tremendous lessons for the United States and the world. Cuba is now moving towards a market-oriented agriculture.

For most Cubans farmers, organic farming was and is not an ideological issue. The nation simply didn't have access to fertilizers. Cuba has done a tremendous amount of unique research in developing organic fertilizers, composts and so on, including how to make mycorrhizas more effective, with good effects at the farm level. One of the challenges for Cuban scientists is that they have been limited in the publications in which they can publish their work. So much excellent work has been done, but there is little in the peer-reviewed literature. There has been much long-term worthwhile research that has not yet been published.

Cuban Farmer. | Image: Courtesy of Ben Kucinski/Flickr/Creative Commons License

We've heard quite a bit about urban agriculture in Cuba. What have you seen?

When Cuba went organic, it encouraged production in and around cities. This last June (2015) I traveled to Cuba and saw two urban agricultural operations within the city limits of Havana. I was very impressed. Cuba has many high-fertility soils and producers have added tremendous amounts of organic materials to it. They are producing large amounts of vegetables and some fruits for markets in Havana. What I saw was beautiful and scientifically very exciting. Cuban producers are using new techniques that should be studied and quantified. I'm looking forward to seeing some whole life-cycle analysis on these farms. This is in contrast to Africa where most soils are depleted of their nutrients and it makes no sense to go organic on such soils.

The organic production of vegetables and fruit is without a doubt an enormous success that we can learn from. The way Cubans have organized labor, etc., is wonderful and I'm very impressed. But producing vegetables and fruits does not solve the larger issue of producing carbohydrates and protein. Cuba is now trying to extrapolate these lessons to these critical crop and livestock production areas (including rice and black beans, the staple food). I think there are some trials in progress and I'd like to see them.

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What sorts of change might we see in Cuba's food production model?

Now Cuba is looking at a more business-oriented type of agriculture. The government has given long-term leases to farmers and farmer cooperatives to grow crops as they see fit that's going on right now. The information they have provided me is that these private farms occupy about 30% of the current agricultural area and produce approximately 70% of the food. The state farms occupy about 70% of the agricultural area and produce about 30% of the food. I believe we will see more movement from the state farm model into more private enterprise models.

One of the challenges is going to be demographics. Early in the revolution people from the countryside were moved into towns and cities. There are not many people who know agriculture, except the older farmers, many of whom are in their 70s (like me). So Cuba will need to get young college students to enter careers in agriculture and m

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