Alternative agriculture works: the case of Cuba

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

In an effort to create a more intimate relationship between farm workers and the land, and to tie financial incentives to productivity, the government began several years ago to experiment with a program called "linking people with the land." This system made small work teams directly responsible for all aspects of production in a given parcel of land, allowing remuneration to be directly linked to productivity. The new system was tried before the Special Period on a number of state farms, and rapidly led to enormous increases in production. Nevertheless it was not widely implemented at the time.

In terms of technology, scale effects are very different for conventional chemical management and for low external input alternatives. Under conventional systems, a single technician can manage several thousand hectares on a "recipe" basis by simply writing out instructions for a particular fertilizer formula or pesticide to be applied with machinery on the entire area. Not so for agroecological farming. Whoever manages the farm must be intimately familiar with the ecological heterogeneity of each individual patch of soil. The farmer must know, for example, where organic matter needs to be added, and where pest and natural enemy refuges and entry points are. This partially explains the inability of the state sector to raise yields with alternative inputs. Like the productivity issue, it can only be effectively addressed through a re-linking of people with the land.

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.