Dave's World O' Wonders

Cuban Farming, originally uploaded by davethetemp.

The picture above sums up the most extraordinary aspect of Cuban life today, the return to non-petroleum based agriculture. As to why I find this so amazing and important, I'm going to have to give some historical background.

I know, you're here for the travel bug stuff, but trust me this is good. Some of the stuff I'm writing here I remember from discussions with our guides, the rest came from a Harpers Magazine article from March of 2005 entitled "What will you be eating when the revolution comes?" Well worth tracking down if you want to know more.

Cuba in the 1980's: Despite the US blockade, agriculture in Cuba looks like North American agriculture. Lots of tractors (Russian), cattle (Canadian) and, thanks to Soviet overproduction, lots of petroleum based pesticides and fertilizers. Massive subsidies from the Soviets and sympathetic countries around the world allow Cuba to feed itself just like everyone else.

Cuba 1992: Perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union set in motion the collapse of Cuban agriculture. No more cheap fuel for tractors. No more petroleum based pesticides and fertilizers. Production plummets. The average Cuban adult male goes from 3000 Calories per day to 1900. There isn't enough grain to feed the cattle so they are slaughtered and eaten. Cubans today refer to the early and mid 1990's as "The Special Period." As the deprivation became severe, the number of people fleeing to the US skyrocketed.

Meanwhile, Cuban agronomists had been thinking about farming differently for some time. The amount of calories in fuel, pesticides, fertilizer and transportation consumed in food production always exceeded the yield.

The solution was to revert back to older food production solutions. We drove past several hundred farms in all our travels that week and never saw a working tractor in the field. Farming is manual labour. Gone were the North American cattle. In their place were the cows typical in India and Latin America, the kind with the long fold of skin hanging below their necks. They (like the oxen above) feed themselves from the grasses on the sides of the roads. Chickens run free and subsist on bugs and weeds.

The Cuban diet is back up to 3000 calories a day. I saw bags of rice from Vietnam at one of the ration stores but just about all the other food I saw was raised on the island itself.

Since North American agriculture is as dependant on plentiful, cheap oil as the old Cuban system was, I wonder sometimes if I saw a glimpse of our future on those fields.

posted by Barb and David  # 12:51 PM