Agroecology in Cuba | How Farmers Feed Communities Amid Crisis

Cuba is a reference point for agroecology worldwide. What started as an alternative to avoid dependence on imported materials has become a nationwide network of small farms using agroecology to try to achieve food sovereignty for Cuba. As the country’s economic crisis deepens, resources become scarce and prices of imported goods increase, agroecology in Cuba is now more important than ever.

TRANSCRIPT

We are facing a crisis in Cuba’s agri-food system.

The local food production does not meet the demand.

The great challenge is to achieve food sovereignty in the country.

Agroecology could be the way forward.

Agroecology is a science, but it is also a practice.

It’s designing a system where there is harmony between animals, plants, people and the environment.

Small farms in agroecological transition are capable of feeding eight people in calories and protein per hectare per year.

This meant that one hundred thousand farms in Cuba—which is not much—we could supply more than half of the population.

Cuba has been changing over the last 30 years. It has become one of the most interesting, massive and successful agroecology experiences in the world.

Cooperatives have played an increasingly evident role in making systems more sustainable and resilient.

Agroecology plays a very important role when it comes to producing food, because you do it in an organic way, in a natural way. 

Now we have a system that is 100% organic.

90% of the food we consume comes from this small system.

In Cuba we have very important challenges that really affect the development of agriculture.

We don’t have resources to disseminate important practices related to energy, biofertilizer production, land conservation and management, and food processing. 

There is a chronic lack of access to credit [and investment].

The U.S. economic and financial blockade must be mentioned. 

It is difficult to carry out transactions in dollars. It takes a lot of effort to keep the Cuban economy alive.

And of that economy, it’s agriculture that suffers the most. 

The transformations and evolutions of Cuba’s agriculture sector are very peculiar and different when compared to other countries.

They show a constant political coherence towards agroecological transformation and local agricultural systems sustainable and resilient. 

I think agroecology is the key to definitively abandon monocropping and to incorporate it into a way of doing agriculture for life. 

A lot can be  learned from Cuba. Many of these principles can be taken to different contexts in  Latin America and the world.

The greatest contribution we can make to Cuba and the world’s agri-food system is to demonstrate another way of coming together as a community to create ways of farming in harmony with society and the environment.