Alternative agriculture works: the case of Cuba

Monthly Review, July-August, 1998 by Peter M. Rosset

Our global food system is in the midst of a multifaceted crisis, with ecological, economic, and social dimensions. To overcome that crisis, political and social changes are needed to allow the widespread development of alternatives.

The current food system is productive - there should be no doubt about that - as per capita food produced in the world has increased by 15 percent over the past thirty-five years. But as that production is in ever fewer hands, and costs ever more in economic and ecological terms, it becomes harder and harder to address the basic problems of hunger and food access in the short term, let alone in a sustainable fashion. In the last twenty years the number of hungry people in the world - excluding China - has risen by 60 million (by contrast, in China the number of hungry people has fallen dramatically).

Ecologically, there are impacts of industrial-style farming on groundwater through pesticide and fertilizer runoff, on biodiversity through the spread of monoculture and a narrowing genetic base, and on the very capacity of agroecosystems to be productive into the future (see the Altieri, and Foster and Magdoff articles, this issue).

Economically, production costs rise as farmers are forced to use ever more expensive machines and farm chemicals, while crop prices continue a several-decade-long downward trend, causing a cost-price squeeze which has led to the loss of untold tens of millions of farmers worldwide to bankruptcies. Socially, we have the concentration of farmland in fewer and fewer hands as low crop prices make farming on a small scale unprofitable (despite higher per acre total productivity of small farms), and agribusiness corporations extend their control over more and more basic commodities.

Clearly the dominant corporate food system is not capable of adequately addressing the needs of people or of the environment. Yet there are substantial obstacles to the widespread adoption of alternatives. The greatest obstacles are presented by political-corporate power and vested interests, yet at times the psychological barrier to believing that the alternatives can work seems almost as difficult to overcome. The oft-repeated challenge is: "Could organic farming (or agroecology, local production, small farms, farming without pesticides) ever really feed the entire population of a country?" Recent Cuban history - the overcoming of a food crisis through self-reliance, small farms and agroecological technology - shows us that the alternatives can indeed feed a nation, and thus provides a crucial case study for the ongoing debate.

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.