politics

Sustainable Agriculture -Cuban Style 30.04.07

Nick Wright interviews Humberto Rios Cabrada head of the Cuban Local Innovation Programme in Agriculture. The crisis of climate change has the power to profoundly change the way that people think about the future.

In much the same way that the Great Stink of the nineteenth century convinced even High Tory ministers of the need for public enterprise to deliver clean water and decent sanitation to London the scale of global warming is making even the most conventional of politicians think outside the box.

Once people become convinced that radical action is needed they become impatient to clear away the barriers to change. And for every rich kid who thinks, like Zac Goldsmith, that becoming Tory MP is the way to save the planet there are thousands, if not millions, who increasingly see the profit system and the big business as the main obstacles.

Some of course back away from the consequences of their own insight. You can sometimes hear a note of self-deceiving rationalisation.

“Of course monopoly capitalism, big business, the banks and imperialism are the cause of our problems… but we only have ten years to save the planet.”

Turn this on its head and we have the essence of the problem. Unless the profit system ends we cannot ensure sustainable growth.

Famously Stalin – before the Second World war - warned his comrades that they only had ten years to construct an industrial state that could withstand the an attack from the West. We may have a little more than ten years but unless the great majority of the world’s most eminent scientists are wrong we must begin to take radical steps to reduce carbon emissions now.

This raises the thorny question of what model of society is able to deliver both well being for its citizens and a sustainable pattern of growth. One tendency in the West (perhaps we should call it the global North) suggests that there is little that developed capitalist countries can do because the runaway industrialisation of India and China will rapidly outpace our efforts to develop a sustainable economic model.

Again this must be turned on its head. It is not realistic to tell countries undergoing industrialisation to forego its benefits if we do not set an example. It is a simple question of global justice and no government will willingly sacrifice its own legitimacy in this way.

There is a model of sustainable growth. And intriguingly it is analysed in a fascinating study by the World Wildlife Fund. The WWF Living Planet Report adopts a formula – the Ecological Footprint – that measures humanity’s demand on the biosphere in terms of the area of biologically productive land and sea required to provide the resources we use and to absorb our waste. It matches this against a measure of human quality of life.

The progress of each country towards the goal of sustainable development is not a subjective matter. It can be measured using the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Index (HDI). The HDI takes into account education, literacy, health indicators and per capita GDP.

For example, Asia and the Pacific and Africa use less than the world average per person biocapacity but score low on the HDI. Europe and North America score high on HDI but make great demands on resources. China and India have significantly improved their quality of life but their per person footprints remain below the global per person biocapacity.

The earth moves and the performance of countries measured against these indicators takes into account the rate at which nation’s consumption patterns, if extended throughout the globe, would overshoot, and which would not. Only Socialist Cuba met both criteria for sustainable development.

I put this to Humberto Rios Cabrada who heads the Cuban Local Innovation Programme in Agriculture. He isn’t surprised.

Cuba is a poor country he says and its development has been greatly affected by the US blockade but at the same time it has made enormous advances in education and health. His interest is in developing environmentally sustainable models of agriculture and he recognises the role necessity has played in forcing Cubans to innovate.

Working with 100 farms and 3000 farmers the programme is working to reduce the inputs into agriculture, develop greater crop diversity and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

He puts the matter simply. “We can increase yields by greater mechanisation and by more intensive use of fertiliser but the equation needs to take into account the real level of energy inputs and their environmental costs and the real level of carbon dioxide emissions.”

And alongside the Cuban experiment a parallel programme in Chiapas in Mexico involves another 4000 farmers. The Mexican experiments involve co-operation with the National institute of Agricultural Science, the National Indigenous peoples Secretary, the farm workers trade union and the Cultural Secretary for Chiapas State.

The programme sets as its objectives capacity-building in the countryside aiming to stimulate local innovation and initiative alongside modifying the farming system to limit climate change factors.

This demands a new way of thinking. “It needs a paradigm shift at every level of our agriculture” he says. “We cannot endlessly extend inputs.”

For Cubans these matters are not simply a matter of technique or methodological change but go to the heart of Cuban rural culture. For Humberto it goes even further. He argues that the complementary aims of a sustainable agriculture and measures to reduce climate change are served by mobilising the accumulated knowledge and deep cultural resources of rural communities. “Our agriculture must be a primary centre of biological diversity. Even a simple farm has an enormous capacity to innovate,” he says.

One enormous resource is the great variety of seeds. Many are specific to a particular area and farmer have strongly ingrained preferences that are not at all arbitrary he says.

The programme sponsors seed saving networks and ‘biodiversity’ events. He calls this ‘ participatory seed diffusion.’ The big advantage, he argues, lies not just in protecting bio-diversity but in strengthening confidence in the store of knowledge that many farmers have.

And as the programme has developed it has become possible to sustain high yields without the large energy and chemical inputs that earlier methods employed.

Even in Cuba, he says, some farmers have under-developed literacy skills and this is more marked in other Latin American countries. “But our farmers still hold this knowledge – which seeds are best in which fields - in their heads. Part of our job is to get them to share this knowledge so we sponsor grower groups and use songs to popularise good ideas.”

Cuban agriculture has developed to meet the specific needs of the country in very difficult economic conditions. A substantial state-owned sector is the source of much of the guaranteed minimum food ration – still not enough to meet the full dietary needs of Cubans. It is this sector, collectively owned and centrally directed, that underpins the basic element of food price control in the Cuban economy. Other sectors must deliver part of their produce to the state distribution system but part enters the market at prices determined by the market. That is high prices..

A typical smaller unit will be between 50 and 60 hectares. Both co-operative and individual forms of land ownership exist and the role of the state and mass organisations is to stimulate co-operation.

“Help with credit and marketing is essential in an economy where transport is still hobbled by fuel and vehicle shortages and where part of the harvest must be delivered to the public domain,” he says.

Any economy with shortages produces price elasticity and this results in political problems. Humberto argues that a more diverse pattern of agricultural production and a higher rural population density will help and he points out that there is a marked movement of people from cities to the countryside over the recent period.

He is frank about the political and ideological problems that Cuba faces as it confronts the US without being able to count on energy inputs from the Soviet Union. One problem he says is entrenched and sometimes dogmatic opinion among state officials and people working in the state-owned sector. And he recognises that market conditions inevitably produce an individualistic approach by some people. Market economies produce a market mentality.

Both these phenomena are natural products of the real situation he says but there are also powerful traditions that can mesh with socialist consciousness and patriotic sentiment. Traditions of self-reliance and co-operation, deep knowledge of the land and the seasons acquire a new significance when best practice is studied scientifically and popularised through education and publicity, through song and example.

Nick Wright from an Inteview with Humberto Rios Cabrada

Peter Shield

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Sustainable Agriculture -Cuban Style 30.04.07

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