|
Here's a quick result from a tiny look in google. If I had more time I wanted to spin I could go back farther than this, but this one will do very well: Cuba giving land to private farmers
Idea is to revolutionize farming, one tiny plot at a time
updated 4/5/2008 9:55:36 PM ET
http://msnbcmedia4.msn.com.nyud.net:8090/j/msnbc/Components/Photo_StoryLevel/080405/080405-cuba-hmed-7p.grid-6x2.jpg
A farmer collects tomatoes on a tractor in a farm in Guira de Melena,
80 miles south of Havana on Wednesday. Cuba has begun lending
unused land to private farmers and cooperatives as part of a sweeping
effort to step up agricultural production.
GUIRA DE MELENA, Cuba — In a country where almost everyone works for the communist state, dairy farmer Jesus Diaz is his own boss. He likes it that way — and so does the government.
Living on a plot of land just big enough to graze four dairy cows, Diaz produces enough milk to sell about four quarts a day to the state.
This is independent production on a tiny scale, but it has proved so efficient that Cuba has decided on a major expansion of its program to distribute underused and fallow farmland to private farmers and cooperatives.
"It's a way for the land to end up in the hands of those who want to produce. I see it as a very good thing," said Diaz, 45. He received his land and cows from the state in 1996, and now hopes to get access to more property.
The government is preparing for a "massive distribution of land," Orlando Lugo, president of Cuba's national farming association, said last week. Private farmers have begun receiving land for the cash crops of coffee and tobacco, and will soon be able to lease state land for other crops.
More:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23972774/
~~~~~
Innovation Gives Boost to Small Farmers
By Dalia Acosta
SAN ANDRÉS, Cuba, Jan 9 , 2008 (IPS) - Cuban small farmers are strengthening their traditional ties with the land through a farming project that links scientific know-how with ancestral techniques and encourages greater local autonomy in decision-making on food production.
The Programme for Local Agrarian Innovation (PIAL), in effect since 2000, could offer an alternative for the agriculture industry in Cuba, where around half of the country’s fertile land is not cultivated, even though more than 1.5 billion dollars in food products are imported annually to meet domestic demand.
"The aim is for farmers to have a say in the design of the country’s agricultural policies," PIAL director Humberto Ríos told IPS. "It’s an example that we want to give of how, when farmers have a more active voice and are the ones engaged directly in innovation, the country makes greater progress."
For Ríos, a researcher at the National Institute of Agricultural Sciences (INCA), which has promoted the initiative from the very start, "what is needed is the development of a more decentralised system of innovation, where the key actors are not us scientists, but farmers themselves."
According to Ríos, the research has been circumscribed to scientific institutes due to the lack of resources and of determination to disseminate the results and make them more widely available,
"It is assumed that an extension worker will teach the techniques to the farmers, but that doesn’t work, either in Cuba or abroad," he said.
PIAL’s experience, said the expert, has demonstrated that, "when it is the farmers themselves who design the experiments and process and make available the scientific information, the land begins to bear more fruits."
~snip~
The programme only requires a commitment to share seeds and distribute them free of charge at the so-called "diversity fairs," said Yong. "Participants have total freedom to experiment; they adopt and adapt techniques to their particular conditions - whatever brings the best results."
In seven years, PIAL has benefited, in nine of Cuba’s 14 provinces, some 8,000 farmers, who represent two percent of the country’s small and medium-sized agricultural producers. The aim is to raise that proportion to 10 percent over the next five years.
More:
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40727
~~~~~
Cuba: A Successful Case Study of Sustainable Agriculture
Posted January 13th, 2005 by Michael Manoochehri
Chapter 12, pp. 203-213, in: Hungry for Profit: The
Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food and the Environment, edited by
Fred Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster and Frederick H. Buttel (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2000).
~snip~
A Brief History
Economic development in Cuba was molded by two external
forces between the 1959 revolution and the 1989-90 collapse of trading
relations with the Soviet bloc. One was the U.S. trade embargo, part of
an effort to isolate the island economically and politically. The other
was Cuba's entry into the Soviet bloc's international trade alliance with
relatively favorable terms of trade. The U.S. embargo essentially forced
Cuba to turn to the Soviet bloc, while the terms of trade offered by the
latter opened the possibility of more rapid development on the island
than in the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Thus Cuba was able to achieve a more complete and rapid
modernization than most other developing countries. In the 1980s it ranked
number one in the region in the contribution of industry to its economy
and it had a more mechanized agricultural sector than any other Latin
American country. Nevertheless, some of the same contradictions that modernization
produced in other third world countries were apparent in Cuba, with Cuba's
development model proving ultimately to be of the dependent type. Agriculture
was defined by extensive monocrop production of export crops and a heavy
dependence on imported agrichemicals, hybrid seeds, machinery, and petroleum.
While industrialization was substantial by regional standards, Cuban industry
depended on many imported inputs.
The Cuban economy as a whole was thus characterized by
the contradiction between its relative modernity and its function in the
Soviet bloc's division of labor as a supplier of raw agricultural commodities
and minerals, and a net importer of both manufactured goods and foodstuffs.
In contrast to the situation faced by most third world countries, this
international division of labor actually brought significant benefits
to the Cuban people. Prior to the collapse of the socialist bloc, Cuba
had achieved high marks for per capita GNP, nutrition, life expectancy,
and women in higher education, and was ranked first in Latin America for
the availability of doctors, low infant mortality, housing, secondary
school enrollment, and attendance by the population at cultural events.
The Cuban achievements were made possible by a combination
of the government's commitment to social equity and the fact that Cuba
received far more favorable terms of trade for its exports than did the
hemisphere's other developing nations. During the 1980s Cuba received
an average price for its sugar exports to the Soviet Union that was 5.4
times higher than the world price. Cuba also was able to obtain Soviet
petroleum in return, part of which was re-exported to earn convertible
currency. Because of the favorable terms of trade for sugar, its production
far outweighed that of food crops. About three times as much land was
devoted to sugar in 1989 as was used for food crops, contributing to a
pattern of food dependency, with as much as 57 percent of the total calories
in the Cuban diet coming from imports.
The revolutionary government had inherited an agricultural
production system strongly focused on export crops grown on highly concentrated
land. The first agrarian reform of 1959 converted most of the large cattle
ranches and sugarcane plantations into state farms. Under the second agrarian
reform in 1962, the state took control of 63 percent of all cultivated
land.
Even before the revolution, individual peasant producers
were a small part of the agricultural scene. The rural economy was dominated
by export plantations, and the population as a whole was highly urbanized.
That pattern intensified in subsequent years, and by the late 1980s fully
69 percent of the island's population lived in urban areas. As late as
1994 some 80 percent of the nation's agricultural land consisted of large
state farms, which roughly correspond to the expropriated plantation holdings
of the pre-revolutionary era. Only 20 percent of the agricultural land
was in the hands of small farmers, split almost equally among individual
holders and cooperatives, yet this 20 percent produced more than 40 percent
of domestic food production. The state farm sector and a substantial portion
of the cooperatives were highly modernized, with large areas of monocrops
worked under heavy mechanization, fertilizer and pesticide use, and large-scale
irrigation. This style of farming, originally copied from the advanced
capitalist countries by the Soviet Union, was highly dependent on imports
of machinery, petroleum, and chemicals. When trade collapsed with the
socialist bloc, the degree to which Cuba relied on monocrop agriculture
proved to be a major weakness of the revolution.
~snip~
By mid-1993, the state was faced with a complex reality.
Imported inputs were largely unavailable, but nevertheless the small farmer
sector had effectively adapted to low input production (although a secondary
problem was acute in this sector, namely diversion of produce to the black
market). The state sector, on the other hand, was proving itself to be
an ineffective "white elephant" in the new historical conjuncture, incapable
of adjusting. The earlier success of the experimental "linking" program,
however, and the success of the peasant sector, suggested a way out. In
September 1993 Cuba began radically reorganizing its production in order
to create the small-scale management units that are essential for effective
organic-style farming. This reorganization has centered on the privatization
and cooperativization of the unwieldy state sector.
The process of linking people with the land thus culminated
in 1993, when the Cuban government issued a decree terminating the existence
of state farms, turning them into Basic Units of Cooperative Production
(UBPCs), a form of worker-owned enterprise or cooperative. The 80 percent
of all farmland that was once held by the state, including sugarcane plantations,
has now essentially been turned over to the workers.
The UBPCs allow collectives of workers to lease state
farmlands rent free, in perpetuity. Members elect management teams that
determine the division of jobs, what crops will be planted on which parcels,
and how much credit will be taken out to pay for the purchase of inputs.
Property rights remain in the hands of the state, and the UBPCs must still
meet production quotas for their key crops, but the collectives are owners
of what they produce. Perhaps most importantly, what they produce in excess
of their quotas can now be freely sold on the newly reopened farmers markets.
This last reform, made in 1994, offered a price incentive to farmers both
to sell their produce through legal channels rather than the black market,
and also to make effective use of the new technologies.
The pace of consolidation of the UBPCs has varied greatly
in their first years of life. Today one can find a range from those where
the only change is that the old manager is now an employee of the workers,
to those that truly function as collectives, to some in which the workers
are parceling the farms into small plots worked by groups of friends.
In almost all cases, the effective size of the management unit has been
drastically reduced. It is still too early to tell toward what final variety
of structures the UBPCs will evolve. But it is clear that the process
of turning previously alienated farm workers into farmers will take some
time—it simply cannot be accomplished overnight—and many UBPCs
are struggling. Incentives are a nagging problem. Most UBPCs are stuck
with state production contracts for export crops like sugar and citrus.
These still have fixed, low prices paid by state marketing agencies, in
contrast to the much higher prices that can be earned for food crops.
Typical UBPCs, not surprisingly then, have low yields in their export
crops, but also have lucrative side businesses selling food produced on
spare land or between the rows of their citrus or sugarcane.
More:
http://www.foodfirst.org/node/196 |
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(860 posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
