Friday 22 August
2008, San José, Costa Rica
CUBA:
Fresh Salad - No Longer
"Grass for the Chileans"
By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA (IPS) -
When leafy vegetables
like watercress or
cabbage showed up at the
local market in the
1970s and 1980s in
Alamar, a suburb east of
the Cuban capital,
locals would say "here’s
grass for the Chileans."
At the time, thousands
of exiles from the
Southern Cone of South
America lived in Alamar,
15 km from Havana. While
the solidarity extended
to them by the Cuban
people helped them
adjust to local life
after they fled the
dictatorships in their
countries, they also had
to adapt to the local
diet, which consisted
largely of roast pork,
black beans and white
rice, fried plantains --
and few fresh salads.
In that period, Cuban
agriculture was highly
mechanized and reliant
on synthetic pesticides
and fertilizers, fossil
fuels and other inputs.
It was also heavily
subsidized from abroad
and productivity levels
were low, while most
production was
concentrated in large
state farms, according
to experts.
"People were not used to
eating salads, but
things are different
now," Eva Pérez, who
lives in Alamar, which
is home to around
100,000 people, told IPS.
"People have understood
the benefits of eating
vegetables," she said,
remembering those years,
when it was impossible
to find vegetables grown
without chemical
fertilizers or
pesticides.
Pérez was looking at the
prices in the store run
by the Alamar
Organoponic Nursery, one
of Cuba’s Basic Units of
Cooperative Production (UBPCs).
In 2007, the urban
agriculture nursery
produced more than 300
tons of fresh
vegetables, 3,536 kgs of
dried spices and herbs,
3.18 million vegetable
seedlings and more than
36,000 other seedlings,
such as fruit trees.
The cooperative was
created by four local
residents on 800 square
kms in 1997. It now has
129 members -- 36 of
whom are women -- and
farms 11 hectares, and
its output and earnings
go up year by year.
For many residents of
Alamar, the biggest
benefit of the project
is that a garbage dump
was converted into
thriving farmland.
"These lots were
abandoned. I think the
idea was to build a
sports complex or
something like that, but
it never happened.
People started dumping
all kinds of garbage
there, and just look at
it now -- green
everywhere you look,"
says Ivette Barroso, 40,
who joined the
cooperative 10 years
ago.
Barroso, a chemical
technologist, left her
first job in a plastics
factory to work closer
to her home and earn a
bigger income. "Urban
agriculture has enabled
more women to take part
in this kind of work,"
she says, describing the
positive aspects of
projects like the Alamar
Nursery.
As well as providing
work for local
residents, the
cooperative helps its
customers eat a
healthier diet, she
says. "Everything grown
here is healthy, we
don't use any
chemicals," she
comments, while placing
seeds in a tray divided
in small sections filled
with organic matter.
Assistance from Welt
Hunger Hilfe/German Agro
Action, a not-for-profit
organization that works
in development
cooperation and provides
humanitarian aid in more
than 70 countries, has
given the Alamar Nursery
access to techniques and
equipment for growing
lettuce, cucumbers,
beets and beans, even
throughout the hot
summer months.
Thanks to support from
the German organization,
the cooperative has a
greenhouse, where it
grows seedlings for its
own use and for sale to
other farmers, different
forms of irrigation for
raising crops and
producing organic
fertilizer, and a
greenhouse for growing
fresh produce, part of
which is sold for hard
currency.
The foreign assistance
also financed a centre
where the members of the
Alamar Nursery receive
training and share their
experiences with other
farmers and
cooperatives, as well as
a small shop where the
cooperative sells its
produce directly to the
public, thus avoiding
middlemen who drive up
prices.
The assistance from
abroad "has given us a
decisive boost. We would
not have been able to
obtain this technology
without cooperation,
which has always been
focused on the
production needs of the
cooperative," says
Miguel Ángel Salcines,
the administrator of the
Alamar Nursery.
Active in Cuba for 15
years, German Agro
Action has bridged
geographical and
political distances to
support a number of
urban agriculture
projects, as part of its
global effort to foment
decentralized food
security.
The organization’s work
is based on the
principle of helping
people help themselves,
through projects in
which groups achieve
food solutions through
their own efforts, using
environmentally and
socially sustainable
methods. It also
provides immediate
emergency aid.
The main units of
agricultural production
in Cuba today are the
UBPCs, created in 1993,
and their predecessors,
the Credit and Services
Cooperatives (CCSs) --
dating to the 1960s --
and the Agricultural
Production Cooperatives
(CPAs) -- created in
1976.
In the CCSs, farmers
operate independently
but come together to buy
inputs and share
machinery, and in the
CPAs, farmers work the
land collectively.
The UBPCs emerged
shortly after the
collapse of the Soviet
Union and East European
socialist bloc (Cuba’s
main aid and trade
partners), as part of
reforms aimed at
enabling this Caribbean
island nation to deal
with the economic crisis
and resultant lack of
supplies of agricultural
inputs and equipment
needed to sustain the
industrialized model of
agriculture.
The members of the UBPCs
were given indefinite
use of the land
rent-free, and they
elect their own leaders,
who must periodically
provide their accounts
to the membership.
More than 2.4 million
hectares of land are
farmed by these
different kinds of
cooperative production
units, which are an
alternative to large
state farms, and by
independent farmers.
Given the pressing need
to increase food
production, the
government is
undertaking a new
restructuring of the
agriculture sector,
announcing, for example,
that it would distribute
more idle land to
producers. |
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