Farmers Plant Seeds Against Cuban Embargo
Farmers Plant Seeds Against Cuban Embargo
July 13, 2015 12:00 PM
In the first quarter of 2015, the number of organizations lobbying the federal government about the Cuban embargo doubled from the previous three months. Senate records show that in the wake of President Obama announcing the normalization of diplomatic relations with Havana, dozens of organizations—ranging from Marriott International to Royal Caribbean Cruises to Major League Baseball—rushed to send representatives to talk to members of Congress about repealing sanctions enacted against Fidel Castro’s communist regime by President Kennedy in 1962.
They were late to the party. Farmers have actively lobbied against the embargo since before 2000, when Congress passed legislation allowing humanitarian exports of agriculture and medicine. U.S. farming accounted for nearly half of all entities lobbying on Cuba from 2003-05. When hostility from the George W. Bush administration dried up exports, farmers continued their quest to end the embargo.
USDA estimates Cuba could be worth $1.1 billion to American farmers. “We have a natural advantage with our proximity, and we have excellent products,” says Justin Flaten, a wheat, pinto bean, and pea farmer and president of JM Grain in Great Falls, Mont., who started selling to Cuba 10 years ago. “It’s a great market for us. We should be in it.”
Flaten first sold pinto beans and peas to Cuba after his first business visit, in 2005. It wasn’t easy. Financing had to be done through a French bank, and shipping problems sometimes had his crops sitting for days in Port Everglades, Fla., waiting for payments to come through. The frustrations soured his taste for Cuba trade, he says. He last sold his lentils to Alimport, Cuba’s state-owned agricultural purchaser, in 2010.
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