“… de las 6.6 millones de hectáreas cultivables del país, sólo están en uso unas 3.1 millones de hectáreas. Se podría añadir que de esta cifra sólo unas 500 mil hectáreas están en manos de campesinos o cooperativas privadas y sin embargo son responsables del 60 por ciento de la producción agrícola de la isla.”

Por Pablo Alfonso

Publicado el 09-12-2009

Diario Las Americas - enlace al original

Los políticos y los especialistas en mercadeo tienen mucho de común. Son

gente creativa que ofertan su producto, a veces, más allá de sus propias

posibilidades. Algo semejante sucede con ciertos empresarios que se

lanzan a la conquista de objetivos comerciales.

Políticos, empresarios y cabilderos han hecho gala de una inagotable

imaginación a lo largo de la última década en el tema de las relaciones

Cuba-Estados Unidos. Algunos con lógica inexcusable, otros con sus

intereses a flor de piel y la mayoría con ingenuos argumentos que rozan

el infantilismo.

En materia de comercio no he sido nunca de los que se oponen a que el

diferendo político entre Cuba y Estados Unidos sea un obstáculo para el

negocio. Otra cosa, por supuesto, es el ángulo político del asunto. No

siempre comercio y política van de la mano, aunque sería tonto pensar

que cada uno camina por una senda diferente.

Hecha la anterior aclaración en beneficio de los ríspidos, los impolutos

y los apasionados conversos de cada lado, es tiempo de pasar al tema de

esta columna.

Se trata de una entrevista publicada la pasada semana en el semanario

cubano Opciones, una especie de periódico que pretende ser un órgano de

temas económicos y financieros; tarea difícil en un país donde la

economía y las finanzas, se acuestan en la misma cama de la ideología y

la política.

Opciones entrevistó al empresario Jay Brickman, vicepresidente de la

naviera estadounidense Crowly y algunas de sus afirmaciones fueron

sorprendentes. Confieso que no sabría clasificarlas de infantiles,

interesadas o ingenuas. Dejo esa tarea a los lectores.

“Cuba podría suministrar aguacates, cítricos, café, azúcar y otros

productos a Estados Unidos cuando cese el embargo económico”, afirmó

Brickman, quien añadió que “en un futuro, Cuba puede ofrecer ciertos

productos (…) por ejemplo a la Florida, donde muchas de las tierras

cultivables se están usando para construcciones y ha bajado la producción”.

La cita es textual.

La naviera Crowly transporta productos agropecuarios estadounidenses a

Cuba desde su venta a la isla fue autorizadaa en el 2001. Bueno, uno

puede entender el interés de Brickman de que el comercio no sea en una

sola dirección para que sus barcos no tengan que regresar vacíos a

Estados Unidos.

Pero el argumento utilizado carece de realismo. ¿Qué tan informado está

Brickman de lo que sucede en Cuba?

Si las sanciones económicas a Cuba fueran suspendidas ahora mismo sería

casi menos que imposible que el régimen cubano estuviera en capacidad de

exportar productos agrícolas a Estados Unidos.

¿Dónde están los aguacates, señor Brickman? ¿Y el azúcar, el café y los

cítricos?

Brickman parece ignorar que la agricultura cubana, al igual que la

producción general de bienes en la isla, está en bancarrota.

Habría que recordarle que, según cifras oficiales, de las 6.6 millones

de hectáreas cultivables del país, sólo están en uso unas 3.1 millones

de hectáreas. Se podría añadir que de esta cifra sólo unas 500 mil

hectáreas están en manos de campesinos o cooperativas privadas y sin

embargo son responsables del 60 por ciento de la producción agrícola de

la isla.

Con la ineficiente producción del mayoritario sector estatal es

imposible alimentar a los 12 millones de habitantes del país.

El resultado de esta ecuación es sencillo. Debería estar claro para

todos los Brickman de este mundo que para revertir esa situación, la

dictadura castrista tiene que dejar a un lado el estatismo y liberar a

las fuerzas productivas del país, poniéndolas en manos de los cubanos.

Casi nada. Todo un cambio de sistema. Cuando eso suceda, entonces Cuba

sí estaría en condiciones de vender sus excedentes agrícolas a Estados

Unidos.

Ahora mismo, si no existiera el embargo, el régimen cubano tiene muy

poco que ofrecer al mercado estadounidense. El níquel está comprometido,

al igual que el tabaco y el puñado de azúcar que produce.

Nos queda el sol, el mar y las arenas blancas de nuestras playas. Eso es

algo que no ha podido opacar la revolución castrista.

Diario Las Americas - ¿Dónde están los aguacates? (12 September 2009)

By David Adams, Times Latin America Correspondent - link to original article

In Print: Monday, August 17, 2009

AGUAS CLARAS, Cuba

Cuba’s leaders are counting on Alberto Romero’s eight cows to help turn around the island’s struggling socialist economy. Private farmers like Romero, who belongs to a 219-member cooperative near the eastern city of Holguin, were overshadowed for years by Cuba’s emphasis on large state farms. But the government recently began handing out idle state land to private farmers across the island in an effort to boost food production. “The government has put its faith in us, and we will show what we are capable of,” said Romero, whose 20-acre plot has been in his family for 103 years.

Cuba is hoping that private farmers can literally plow the island out of a huge $11 billion trade deficit this year caused by rising food import costs and falling exports. The policy marks a major shift away from inefficient state farms that once occupied the lion’s share of the island’s agricultural land.

“The land is there! Here are the Cubans. Let’s see if we work or not, if we produce or not!” exclaimed President Rául Castro last month at a rally in Holguin.

Castro has made raising food production a national security priority, noting that the area of cultivated land fell 33 percent from 1997 to 2008. He told the crowd in Holguin that Cuba’s poor agricultural output could not be blamed on the U.S. economic embargo alone.

“It’s not a question of shouting, ‘Homeland or death, down with imperialism, the embargo hurts us.’ The land is there, waiting for our sweat.”

Despite being an agricultural nation with plentiful sun, soil and rain, Cuba produces barely 30 percent of the food it needs, due to an acute lack of resources and the inefficiency of its state farm sector. About 250,000 small family farms and 1,100 cooperatives till only about one-quarter of the land, yet still manage to outperform the state farms, producing almost 60 percent of crops and livestock, according to official figures.

“The last 50 years have shown that private farmers are more socialist than the state. State farms are antisocialist. The only thing they socialized is loss-making,” said Oscar Espinosa Chepe, a former state economic adviser who is now a vocal critic of the government.

Since the redistribution of farmland began last year, Cuba says 110,000 people have submitted applications and about 80 percent have been granted, totaling 1.7 million acres. But the new program has been slow to get going. Three devastating hurricanes last year wiped out vast swaths of productive farmland.

Though milk production has risen significantly, overall agricultural production fell by 7.3 percent in the first quarter of 2009, and meat production fell by 14.7 percent.

While it may be too early to judge the results of the program, analysts say it is running into familiar problems.

“There is too much control and bureaucracy that hinders everything,” Espinosa Chepe said. “It’s impregnated with a 50-year-old operating method that is built on taking orders and is not used to decentralization.

“There need to be more incentives,” he said.

Private farmers and cooperatives manage their own land but must sell part of their produce to the state at government prices, which are generally half the market value. Private farmers also lack direct access to equipment and tools, as well as fertilizer and pesticides, all controlled by the state.

Opening the farm sector to more foreign capital would help Cuba acquire new technology and markets, analysts say. But Cuba complains that the U.S. embargo limits its access to foreign capital, as well as cheap pesticides and heavy farm equipment.

Javier Pérez, 40, a plantain grower near Guanabacoa, welcomes the state’s rekindled interest in private farmers.

“We were a bit forgotten about in the past,” he said.

He earns good money selling to farmers’ markets in Havana after he meets his government quota. In return, the state provides him with subsidized fertilizer and irrigation equipment. The adjacent land he recently obtained from the state will help him raise his production by 25 percent more. Less regulation would be better, he agrees.

“The more independent you are, the more you push yourself,” he said. “Why work harder if you don’t get any benefit?”

Cuba’s state-run newspaper Granma recently added its weighty voice to the farm debate, highlighting the success of a 100-acre cooperative farm in Bejucal, about 25 miles south of Havana.

“If the worker is not content in his job and you don’t pay him for his results, you don’t achieve anything,” cooperative president Lázaro Hernández told the paper, saying he paid his 20 employees 780 pesos a month ($32.50), more than twice the average national wage. Their wages, and share of produce, increase if they exceed production targets.

“If the salary is fixed, the worker will just show up and do his day’s work, but he won’t be interested in getting the most out of it. If he has a percentage, it all changes,” he said.

Such quasi-free-market language wasn’t heard much in Cuba until recently. But Rául Castro has shown a pragmatic streak on economic matters, trying to improve state efficiency. In July 2008 he surprised many by advocating a shift away from the orthodox socialist concept of equal pay, arguing that those who were more productive should be paid more.

Romero is optimistic. In eight years, his cooperative hopes to increase its milk output almost tenfold. But to do that, he cautioned, they need state help to buy expensive cereal feed, as well as seeds for better pasture. Artificial insemination would also improve their herds.

“If we don’t achieve it, we will be really close,” Romero said, raising a glass of aliñao, a homemade liquor of sugarcane and fruit. “We have to keep the revolution moving forward. There is no turning back.”

David Adams can be reached at dadams@sptimes.com.

POR RIGOBERTO DÍAZ/AFP

El Nuevo Herald - Domingo, 07.12.09

LA HABANA 

En una casita rodeada de corrales, Idalmis García, una cubana de 39 años, cría animales en la hectárea que le otorgó en usufructo una ley del Gobierno de Raúl Castro sobre terrenos ociosos, pero lamenta que no se atienda su petición de un área mayor.

“Pedí toda la tierra que pudieran darme, pero sólo me otorgaron 0.95 hectáreas, es poca, por eso hice otra solicitud y ahora llevo varios meses esperando la respuesta”, dijo García, quien se dedica a criar cabras y carneros en el poblado de Las Guásimas, 20 km al sur de la capital.

La mujer es uno de 78,113 cubanos beneficiados hasta junio con la nueva ley, puesta en vigor en septiembre de 2008 para incentivar la producción de alimentos, en un país con más del 60 por ciento de las áreas cultivables subutilizadas -1.6 millones de hectáreas- y que importa el 80 por ciento de sus comestibles -2,800 millones de dólares ese año-.

Muchos de esos terrenos están cubiertos de marabú, arbusto espino y leñoso, que crece en bosques tupidos muy difícil de erradicar. Todavía es frecuente apreciar en los campos áreas abandonadas, en fincas estatales y cooperativas usufructuarias del Estado.

García y su familia ocupan tierras de una antigua unidad militar, y aprovechó una barraca castrense abandonada para instalar su pequeña casa y los corrales.

Tres huracanes que afectaron a Cuba en 2008, dejaron 10,000 millones de dólares en pérdidas (según cifras oficiales) y arrasaron cultivos y granjas pecuarias. El Gobierno apresuró un mes el inicio de la entrega de tierras, cuando aún no estaba totalmente maduro el proceso.

Según el semanario Trabajadores, se han entregado 689.697 hectáreas, el 41 por ciento del total a repartir y de esa cifra “el 25.4 por ciento están en explotación o sembradas”.

La mayoría de esas tierras son estatales, pues los 100,000 campesinos privados del país son altamente productivos y no tienen marabú en sus parcelas.

García precisa mas área para incrementar su cría, y “un mayor apoyo material y asesoría del Estado”. Espera “desde hace algunos meses” permiso para comprar “cinco vacas lecheras” e iniciar la cría de cerdos y conejos.

El viceministro de la Agricultura, Alcides López, reconoció “irregularidades”, pero señaló que se estaban atendiendo.

A 3 km de la casa de García, Orlando Venegas, un ingeniero mecánico que hace tres años cultiva la tierra, espera “hace siete meses” por las dos hectáreas que pidió para ampliar su huerta, y contó, indignado, cómo la cooperativa a la que vendió su cosecha de tomate en diciembre, no le ha pagado la factura de 15,000 pesos (600 dólares).

“Eso me crea problemas, tengo que pagarle a mis trabajadores, ellos no entienden que los mecanismos creados no funcionen”, dijo Venegas. Los retrasos en los pagos a productores es un problema “crónico”, sobre el cual se pronunciaron duramente Raúl Castro y el Parlamento.

Nuevos productores, citados en marzo por el diario Juventud Rebelde, se lamentaron de la carencia de aperos e insumos agrícolas y dificultades para obtener semillas.

Tampoco es fácil conseguir ropa y zapatos de labor, pues muchos de esos artículos sólo se venden en las tiendas en divisas, a altos precios para los nuevos campesinos.

Hacinado en una caseta de ladrillos y tejas de cuatro metros cuadrados -única construcción que le permite la ley-, Rafael Echevarría, de 50 años, hace su vida en la finca de un cuñado, a la espera de ser autorizado para ampliarla, “aunque sea un poquito”.

“Tengo los materiales, pero me dicen que espere”, explicó Echevarría, quien sin embargo se declaró partidario de un estricto control, pues “muchas personas pidieron tierras con la idea de construirse una casa” y darle “el esquinazo” a los cultivos.

“Pero controlar no quiere decir que no se estudie cada caso”, apuntó.

The Associated Press - link

Friday, February 6, 2009

HAVANA: Cuba’s communist government announced Friday it has turned over to small farmers fallow land equivalent to six times the area of New York City and predicted a rebound in agricultural output this year.

In a full-page story on farming in the Communist Party newspaper Granma, officials announced the distribution of 1,827 square miles (4,730 sq. kilometers) of unused state land to Cubans with agricultural experience or other private citizens.

The newspaper previously reported that as of Jan. 22, the government had distributed 45,518 parcels of land without specifying the total area.

The land redistribution is Cuba’s biggest in decades and was designed by the government of Raul Castro, who succeeded brother Fidel Castro as head of state nearly a year ago. He is under increasing pressure to slash food imports, which cost the island more than $2 billion in 2008.

Thousands of small farmers kept their plots after Fidel Castro took power in 1959 and still grow much of Cuba’s food. But at large farms taken over by communist planners, output has dwindled. About half of the country’s arable land is now underused.

Amid agricultural reform efforts, three major hurricanes in 2008 devastated crops across the island.

Granma reported that output for this year, not including sugar carne, will increase by “12 percent, some 400,000 tons.”

According to the National Office of Statistics, however, Cuba produced 4.7 million tons of fruits and vegetables in 2008, excluding sugar cane. By that measure, a 12 percent increase for this year would require an extra 564,000 tons of produce ? quite a bit more than 400,000 tons.

The reasons for the discrepancy was not clear, and Agricultural Ministry officials were not available.

Niko Price,

Agweek - link to publication

Published: 01/12/2009

 

HAVANA — For Miladis Bouza, the global food crisis arrived two decades ago. Now, her efforts to climb out of it could serve as a model for people around the world struggling to feed their families.

 

Bouza was a research biologist, living a solidly middle-class existence, when the collapse of the Soviet Union — and the halt of its subsidized food shipments to Cuba — effectively cut her government salary to $3 a month. Suddenly, a trip to the grocery store was out of reach.

 

So she quit her job, and under a program championed by then-Defense Minister Raul Castro, asked the government for the right to farm an overgrown, half-acre lot near her Havana home. Now, her husband tends rows of tomatoes, sweet potatoes and spinach, while Bouza, 48, sells the produce at a stall on a busy street.

 

Neighbors are happy with cheap vegetables fresh from the field. Bouza never lacks for fresh produce, and she pulls in $100 to $250 a month — many times the average government salary of $19.

 

“All that money is mine,” she says. “The only thing I have to buy is protein” — meat.

 

Cuba’s urban farming program has been a stunning, and surprising, success. The farms, many of them on tiny plots like Bouza’s, now supply much of Cuba’s vegetables. They also provide 350,000 jobs nationwide with relatively high pay and have transformed eating habits in a nation accustomed to a less-than-ideal diet of rice and beans and canned goods from Eastern Europe.

 

From 1989 to ’93, Cubans went from eating an average of 3,004 calories a day to only 2,323, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, as shelves emptied of the Soviet goods that made up two-thirds of Cuba’s food. Today, they eat 3,547 calories a day — more than what the U.S. government recommends for American citizens.

 

“It’s a really interesting model looking at what’s possible in a nation that’s 80 percent urban,” says Catherine Murphy, a California sociologist who spent a decade studying farms in Havana. “It shows that cities can produce huge amounts of their own food, and you get all kinds of social and ecological benefits.”

 

Economy

 

Of course, urban farms might not be such a success in a healthy, competitive economy.

 

As it is, productivity is low at Cuba’s large, state-run farms where workers lack incentives. Government-supplied rations — mostly imported from the U.S. — provide such staples as rice, beans and cooking oil, but not fresh produce. Importers bring in only what central planners want, so the market doesn’t correct for gaps. And since most land is owned by the state, developers are not competing for the vacant lots that can become plots for vegetables.

 

Still, experts say the basic idea behind urban farming has a lot of promise.

 

“It’s land that otherwise would be sitting idle. It requires little or no transportation to get (produce) to market,” says Bill Messina, an agricultural economist at the University of Florida in Gainesville. “It’s good anyway you look at it.”

 

And with fuel prices and food shortages causing unrest and hunger across the world, many say the Cuban model should spread.

 

“There are certain issues where we think Cuba has a lot to teach the world. Urban agriculture is one of them,” says Beat Schmid, coordinator of Cuba programs for the charity Oxfam International.

 

Other countries have experimented with urban farming — Cuba’s initial steps were modeled after a green belt surrounding Shanghai. But nowhere has urban farming been used so widely to transform the way a country feeds itself.

 

“As the global food crisis receives attention, this is something that we need to be looking at,” Murphy says. “Havana is an unlikely, really successful model where no one would expect one to come from.”

 

Expansion

 

Now that Raul Castro is president, many expect him to expand the program he began as an experiment in the early 1990s.

 

One of the first plots he opened was the “organoponico” on Fifth Avenue and 44th Street in the ritzy Havana neighborhood of Miramar. The half-block farm — owned by a government agency — is surrounded by apartment buildings and houses, but also offices of foreign companies, a Spanish bank and the South African Embassy.

 

“Nobody used to eat vegetables,” says David Leon, 50. “People’s nutrition has improved a lot. It’s a lot healthier. And it tastes good.”