Organic Cuba Without Fossil Fuels - The Urban Agricultural Miracle

“Urban agriculture nationwide reduces the dependence of urban populations on rural produce. Apart from organoponicos, there are over 104 000 small plots, patios and popular gardens, very small parcels of land covering an area of over 3 600 ha, producing more than the organoponicos and intensive gardens combined [1]. There are also self-provisioning farms around factories, offices and business, more than 300 in Havana alone. Large quantities of vegetables, root crops, grains, and fruits are produced, as well as milk, meat, fish eggs and herbs. In addition, suburban farms are intensively cultivated with emphasis on efficient water use and maximum reduction of agrotoxins; these are very important in Havana, Santa Clara, Sancti Spiritus, Camaguey, and Santiago de Cuba.

Shaded cultivation and Apartment-style production allow year-round cultivation when the sun is at its most intense. Cultivation is also done with diverse soil substrate and nutrient solutions, mini-planting beds, small containers, balconies, roofs, etc. with minimal use of soil. Production levels of vegetables have double or tipled every year since 1994, and urban gardens now produce about 60 percent of all vegetables consumed in Cuba, but only 50 percent of all vegetables consumed in Havana.”

The above excerpt is from The Institute of Science in Society. The article can be found here.

The photo, titled ‘Organoponic’ is by Nelsón León Nicolau, IDRC Photo.

Caption with photo: “In the municipal Plaza de la Revolución in Havana, Cuba, at the corner of Hidalgo and Colon streets, farmers grow organic vegetables to serve the people who live in nearby neighbourhoods. Fifteen people work to cultivate a wide variety of vegetables and herbs, and another five are employed caring for the facility. Tape-recorded sounds are used to frighten away birds, and only organic products are used for pest control.”

Larger version here.

CUBA - Urban Agriculture Takes Off 

Article from the Latin American Press by Lucila Horta.  Nov 9, 2006

Small plots in the island’s cities yield fruitful harvests of vegetables, grains and even spices.
Between January and March of this year, more than 1 million tons of fresh vegetables and spices were harvested on small-scale plots tucked away in the island’s urban centers.

Cuba’s cities are home to 4,035 organic plots, 8,563 high-production gardens, and 137,000 small plots on patios and suburban farms, totaling 35,775 hectares (88,000 acres) of vegetable, tuber, banana, fresh spices and even rice crops.

The organic cultivations are sewn with a mix of organic materials and top soil that is placed in containers, beds and small fields that are installed in vacant areas in dense population centers where the soil is generally unproductive.

The state performs periodic inspections of these plots, examining not only the quantity produced but also the appropriate use and recovery of soils and other agricultural techniques.

“A temperate winter and an outstanding human effort were the deciding factors in increasing the number of provinces with good marks in the inspections,” says Adolfo Rodríguez Nodals, head of the National Urban Agriculture Group, the island’s most successful food program.

These high-turnover plots in Cuba’s cities began more than half a century ago in Chinese immigrant communities. They grew beans, lettuce and turnips. But such farming faded out, and became only a subsistence method for some of these immigrants.

The trend sprung back in 1987 on the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) bases, when Gen. Raúl Castro — Cuba’s current acting president — instroduced organic crops to complement the soldiers’ consumption.

Project’s military roots

This farming method reached civilian life in the 1990s’ economic crisis. The National Urban Agriculture Program was founded in 1994, operating under the Alejandro Humboldt Fundamental Research Institute on Tropical Agriculture, which pioneered semi-protected cultivations in Cuba. Seventeen institutions later became involved along with seven ministries.

These small, urban farms provide work to 350,000 people — 20 percent of them women. The program has provided an incentive to work for many retired Cubans and housewives, producing food in an unconventional way.
Housewife Francisca Eugenia Milanés has sold her fresh produce in a tricycle cart in Veguitas, in the southwestern province of Granma, for five years. “No one wants to buy shriveled leaves. That’s for throwing away,” Milanés says, defending her high-quality product.

Ramona Delgado Fernández tends 18 organic fields, each of them up to 10-meter- (30-foot-) long, for a branch of the Sugar Ministry. She says she is happy to see “the results of our work” in circles of children, schools and marketplaces in the town of Santa Cruz del Norte, east of Havana.

Carlos Manuel Hernández, 78, of the Melena del Sur district in Havana, came out of retirement to convert a garbage dump into a just over 1-hectare- (2.47-acre-) garden, along with three other retired residents. Óscar Alemán Pérez, now retired from the FAR, has dedicated himself to working in small gardens and orchards, and after observing the need and demand for processed products, he created a workshop for producing and preserving food.

Crops contribute to island’s food supply

The national program worked only with vegetables at first. Gradually, tubers and rice were added, and there are 27 offshoot programs in action today, including poultry and livestock raising, fruit planting and organic fertilizer production.

“In our climate, semi-protected crops are a very promising thing,” says Rodríguez Nodals. These crops are covered by nets filtering the sun radiations, which in Cuba can be very strong during the hottest months, requiring large amounts of water, something that is not always available on the scale needed.
Rodríguez Nodals says that among the advantages of urban farming is the conservation of fuel, since the goods do not need to be transported to the consumer, as they are so close by. Seventy-six percent of the Cuban population lives in cities, he notes, and these small-scale urban plots, because of their size, can withstand harsh natural conditions.

Three strong hurricanes have hit Cuba since the urban agriculture program went into effect, and damages to these plots were minimal. A severe drought, however, affected the entire country, and the effects were most damaging in the eastern provinces since 2003. As a result, electric irrigation and other machine-based methods were employed for many urban fields.

When this weakness of the system was touched upon during one of his inspections on these sites last January, Gen. Castro made a reference to a investment project for water resources, which was launched to solve the water deficit in Camaguey and the five eastern provinces, through investments in water channels and reservoirs.

While some provinces and cities are still not producing their potential yield, this system has been praised by international experts, such as professors Peter Rosset and Miguel Altieri of the University of California at Berkeley as an example of the food production within cities without the use of pesticides or chemical fertilizers and as a form of relief on the family budget.