Within the state-owned farms modern agricultural methods were employed, and these were based
largely around the principles of the Green revolution. Now, you may have heard about
the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution is a system of agriculture that was developed
during and after World War II that is credited with saving about a billion people from starvation.
The Green Revolution style of farming advocates large-scale, mono-culture cultivation meaning
one kind of plant over large tracts of land with heavy reliance on irrigation, scientific
management, synthetic fertilizers, hybridized seeds, and pesticide use. All associated with
the Green Revolution had a tremendous ability to feed many people after World War II. Well,
when Cuba took over these farms, when the government took over these farms they also
used Green Revolution techniques to specialize in three crops. Those were tobacco, coffee
and sugar cane. It planted tobacco, coffee and sugar cane on approximately 50% of all
of its farmland, and because this style of agriculture relies heavily on inputs, Cuba
used many fossil fuels, fertilizers and pesticides in order to make this Green Revolution possible
on the island. At the time Cuba’s primary trading partner was the Soviet Union which
was also another socialist country, and about 85% of the sugar that Cuba planted and harvested,
processed, went to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union in turn furnished about 70% of Cuba’s
imports, in particular petroleum. Cuba benefited greatly from this trade through preferential
trade prices, meaning they got very good prices for their sugar and relative low prices on
their fossil fuels. Well, by the late 1970s the reliance on outside resources was starting
to cause strain on the agricultural system. So, Cuba’s farm relying on these imports
primarily from the Soviet Union, but also from around the world in order to specialize
in these three crops. By the end of the 1970s, or by the late 1970s, Cuba was using twice
as much fertilizer per unit of land as the U.S. They had approximately four times as
much irrigation infrastructure as other countries in this region. They had about twice as much
mechanization with its associated fossil fuel needs. Cuba recognized that there were some
problems here, and some other problems associated with them, and they began to address them
through policy changes that came about 7, almost 10 years later in 1986. But, at that
point something drastic happened. In 1989 the Soviet Union and its socialist allies
dissolved, and Cuba’s global socialist support system and agricultural trading partnerships
collapsed. At the same time, the United States, which was embolden by its Cold War success
which caused the Soviet Union to collapse, increased the intensity of its embargo on
Cuba. Well, Cuba as a result of losing its trading partners immediately had a really
drastic problem. Their oil imports dropped by 53%, their food imports by 50%, and their
fertilizer imports dropped by 83%. This was because their partners throughout the world
had collapsed politically at the end of the Cold War. Well, the Cuban government declared
something called a special period during peace time of total austerity. This was sort of
a funny way of saying that they were in a panic responding to starvation which was going
on in their country. What this meant was that they were instituting an absolute minimum
amount of food rations to its people, just enough food being distributed that they could
keep their people alive given this drastic change in their agricultural situation as
a result of their geo-political partnerships collapse. Well, slowly for the next three
years the Cuban people began to starve. Food availability dropped dramatically. Per capita
food consumption dropped 35%. This is comparable to us in our world if you want to try and
put this in some sort of comparison, some sort of way for us to wrap our heads around
it, this is comparable to someone in the U.S. having to miss 7 meals per week. It’s estimated
that during this time every Cuban lost 20 pounds in this very volatile period of starvation.
Just some facts about. Tubers, so things like potatoes. The production of tubers dropped
by 96%. The production of rice dropped by 68%. The production of beef dropped by 48%.
Yet, if you look forward in time, 10 years later by the year 2000 Cuba had been able
to recover to the nutrient level that they had in 1989. The question is how did they
do it, and this challenge is at the heart of the case study of Cuba. Well, many of the
changes that Cuba undertook at that point were political and economic. Faced with collapse
the Cuban government began to regard food security and food independence as an issue
of national security and national sovereignty, something that countries don’t usually associate
food with national security. So, a quote from the "Unfinished Puzzle" says. "Not only was
the concern to provide for the nutritional needs of the population," so just getting
food to the people, "but also to avoid external dependence, especially on multinational corporations
that control global commodity markets." So, in addition to feeding their people, Cuba
wanted to be somewhat independent from the fluctuations in the global food market. Well,
subsequently drastic policy changes were put in place that elevated the prestige and the
importance of agriculture both through technical support and economic incentives, and almost
propaganda-like messages talking about the value of farmers to the general economy. "According
to the World Wildlife Fund's Living Planet Report," and this is also a quote from "Unfinished
Puzzle," "According to the World Wildlife Fund's Living Planet Report in 2006, Cuba
is the only country in the world that meets its criteria for an ecological footprint in
sustainable development." Even the World Bank, an organization whose policies are at odds
with the socialists government in Cuba, acknowledged in 2001 that Cuba is an anti-model. They have
some of the best health and education indicators in the developing world, and whether this
is a result of government policies or is a fact despite government policies is one of
those hotly debated points among the different stakeholders in Cuba’s story. Well, fundamentally
what happen during this period is that Cuba, forced to do something other than rely on
imported fertilizers and fossil fuels, rejected the Green Revolution paradigm for agriculture.
This was instituted just as a pragmatic response because they didn’t have the resources to
continue to implement the Green Revolution style agriculture. The new agricultural model
instead became based on diversification instead of monoculture meaning many different varieties
of a kind of food plant instead of one variety of a food plant. The use of organic fertilizers
as opposed to the use of produced or a petrol chemical-based fertilizers. The use of organic
pest control rather than manufactured pesticides or synthetically manufactured pesticides.
The use of local resources and local development instead of external dependencies. The decentralization
of land assignment, markets and decision making. Now, this was a little bit of a rejection
of some of the socialist principles as a necessity to get rapid response on the ground. This
was an approach taken in opposition to central control which is sort of an important part
of Cuban socialism. The last point that they adopted was food self-sufficiency instead
of relaying on imports. Well, a huge part of these changes weren’t just policy and
economic, but they were also based on implementing urban agriculture. The state provided many
avenues of support for urban agriculture, but a really pivotal one was the transformation
and redistribution of state lands to the workers in something that was called usufruct. This
became known as the 3rd Agrarian Reform in Cuba. The first one distributed large farms,
repatriated large farms. The second one repatriated or nationalized medium farms. This third one
changed the way that the farms were managed and held. In this case, usufruct was a limited
relaxation of state ownership and instead allowed private individuals to own them. It
allowed Cubans to be in charge of land, the root term being usus, U S U S, so it allowed
them to be in charge of the land, usus, and derive a profit from it. That is derived from
a concept of fructus, F R U C T U S, but did not allow them to sell it or to change its
use as a farm, and this third component is what is necessary for a Western sense of full
ownership of land. So, Cubans were allowed to be in charge of the land, they were allowed
to make a profit of the land, but they’re not allowed to change its use and they were
not allowed to sell it. Well, 60% of state lands were given to workers to farm the land
in usufruct, and the workers were allowed to set up models of urban agriculture that
were known as Basic Units of Cooperative Production. The Spanish language acronym for that is UBPC.
One of the key reasons why this approach was embraced by the population was because they
were allowed to keep what they farmed. So, this was a way to avoid the slow starvation
that was happening as a result of the lack of imports to keep the Green Revolution alive,
although the farming that they were undertaking had to be done in addition to the other state
work that they were responsible for. So subsequently they were allowed to keep the profits from
extra produce and the produce itself that they sold. So, they were allowed to keep the
food, eat it, and benefit from it. They were also allowed to sell their extra produce on
a limited free market, usually a local kind of free market. This picture here is one of
the stands in which that produce was allowed to be sold. So for comparison. Before the
collapse Cuba produced 250,000 tons of rice using high input methods, and after that collapse
it went from 250,000 tons down to 80,000 tons. That was what the collapse caused. Well, this
is a quote from unfinished business book. "In 1994 post UBPC in both rural and urban
areas a movement emerged in which people began planting rice everywhere they could, especially
on marginal land such as on roadsides, in medians. Within just four years the production
of this popular rice had surpassed the production of specialized rice by 16%. So, just to reiterate
that. In the context of collapse the Cuban people planted rice on any land that they
could find, and the result of that was this urban gorilla architecture, this urban agriculture
began producing more rice than was being produced through the formal large scale farming methods.
Currently popular rice supplies about 35% of rice consumption, so the rice grown in
all the nooks and crannies of their environment, that’s about 35% of the rice consumption
in Cuba today. Well, by 2007 urban and peri-urban agriculture, so peri-urban agriculture meaning
agriculture in a ring or the area at the edge of the city so on the outside of the cities,
that kind of agriculture, urban and peri-urban agriculture, produced more than 75% of the
fresh vegetables consumed in Cuba.