Lessons from Cuba’s Urban and Sub-Urban Farming Revolution

Farmer-to-Farmer Movement, traditional knowledge sharing and the value of cooperation versus competition

By Jennifer Cockrall-King
Foodgirl.ca
May 18, 2010

Excerpt:

I’ve been to Cuba twice now, once in 2007 and just very recently (where I met and roomed with the amazing Jill Richardson, author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It, and the blogger behind La Vida Locavore). Both times, I’ve been in Cuba to research their agricultural models, especially their urban agricultural models, as I’m writing a book on the global movement of urban agriculture.

Jill and I participated in a conference and research tour from May 5 to 15, 2010, organized by the Asociacion Cubana de Tecnicos Agricolas y Forestales. and Jill is doing a mind-blowing job of chronicling our day-to-day adventures on the farms and our other wanderings on La Vida Locavore, so check it out for blow-by-blow visits to the farms.

It was good to see Cuba again as the first time was rather surperficial and overwhelming at the same time. But after my second trip, I realize that there are some models that they have created which can be (and are being) reproduced and adapted all over the world. It’s an agricultural structure that has been devised in Cuba to produce as much as 90% of the fresh food that that 11.2 Cuban citizens consume.

This stands in stark contrast to the North American food landscape where we rely on a remarkably fragile, ridiculously complex global food swap just to meet our basic food needs. Where I live in Edmonton, Alberta, we produce less 10% of the food locally that we consume, despite being an “agricultural power” on the Canadian prairies. (Hint, the American food system isn’t the only food system that is broken!)

See Food Girl’s blog here.