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MR: The Urban Agriculture of Havana
Sinan Koont, Monthly Review
Over the last fifteen years, Cuba has developed one of the most successful examples of urban agriculture in the world. Havana, the capital of Cuba, with a population of over two million people, has played a prominent, if not dominant role, in the evolution and revolution of this type of agriculture. The phrase “urban agriculture in Cuba” has a somewhat different meaning, simultaneously more and less restrictive than might appear at a first glance. It is more inclusive, as it allows for large expanses, urban fringes, and suburban lands.
For example, the entire cultivated area of the Province of the City of Havana belongs to urban agriculture. This definition includes land that is much more rural than urban—some of the city’s municipalities (or boroughs) in the eastern and southwestern parts of the city have relatively low population densities, around 2,300 to 3,500 people per square mile versus around 50,000 to 100,000 per square mile in the densely populated parts. As a result, more than 35,000 hectares (over 87,000 acres) of land are being used in urban agriculture in Havana!1 The serious development of urban agriculture in Cuba began simultaneously with the disappearance of petrochemical inputs, such as fertilizers and pesticides, from Cuban markets. Consequently, urban production uses only biological fertilizers and biological and cultural pest control techniques. The limited quantities of petrochemicals available are employed for a few non-urban crops such as sugar, potatoes, and tobacco. In Cuba, the distinction between organic and urban is hardly worth making, as almost all urban agriculture follows organic practices.
The necessity for Cuba to turn to urban and organic agriculture in the early 1990s is both well known and understood. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the ending of trade with COMECON on rather favorable terms spelled the end of the Soviet-style, large-scale, industrial agriculture that Cuba had been practicing since at least the 1970s. Almost overnight, diesel fuel, gasoline, trucks, agricultural machinery, spare parts for trucks and machinery, as well as petrochemical-based fertilizers and pesticides, all became very scarce. In view of the severe crisis in food production, a shift to urban agriculture seemed an obvious and necessary solution: urban production minimized transportation costs and smaller-scale production minimized the need for machinery. Agro-ecological production (applying the principles of ecology to agricultural practices), in part, necessitated production sites near the living areas of large concentrations of people, and at the same time avoided the use of toxic petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides, which were no longer available.
(January 2009)
Long article just put online. Monthly Review is an independent socialist magazine, which began publication in 1949. -BA
Ben Gisin of Touch the Soil magazine (audio and transcript)
Jason Bradford, Reality Report
Ben Gisin is co-founder and publisher of Touch the Soil magazine, an agricultural magazine promoting resilient agricultural practices. He speaks with Jason Bradford about the crumbling industrial agricultural system and its close relationship with the global economy.
(17 November 2008)
Transcript just posted.
An Interview with Albert Bates
Aaron Newton, Hen and Harvest
The following is an interview with Albert Bates conducted as part of the process of writing A Nation of Farmers, by Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton which is available for pre-order now and will be published in March of 2009 by New Society Publishers. An edited version of this interview appears in the book.
…ANOF: It seems to me that when we’re talking about food production, today we’re facing two simultaneous problems. The first being that fossil fuel energy used to produce food is becoming less available and so it’s more economically expensive. But also using that fossil fuel energy to grow food is more ecologically expensive. Is food the intersection of these issues? Could it be the catalyst for a greater social change? By that I mean, peak oil and climate change the flip sides of the same coin. And so I’m wondering, because so much petroleum is necessary to continue industrial agriculture, and because burning that petroleum and the other fossil fuels used in agriculture are warming the planet causing our climate to change, because both of those are coming to bear on the same issue, that is, how we eat, could food be the issue that really puts peak oil and climate change on the map?
AB: I think that’s entirely possible. It’s hard to say exactly what’s going to put it over the top. There are 37 countries right now that are in serious food shortfall, and that’s why you’re getting riots in Haiti, Egypt and Mexico, in some places banging pots in the street and in others people actually dying in riots. They’re protesting in a lot of different places — they’re protesting in France, they’re protesting in many parts of the world, Africa and so forth. It’s true, that’s definitely coming to the fore. I’m not certain everyone makes the connection yet, however, between the shortage of food and the energy and climate crises.
We’ve got essentially four converging factors on the food supply. The first is the high cost of petroleum products, and that includes the fertilizers and chemicals, the fuel for the tractors and the combines, and the storage costs, the transportation, the drying of the grain and so on and forth…
…Now we’re seeing the second shoe fall, which is the competition over land created by alternatives to fossil fuels, specifically biofuels.You see a lot of places that are starting to switch over their corn production or their soybean production or some other things to biofuels, and that’s putting more price pressure on food. A lot of that corn and soy production was not for food anyway, but that is another story…
…The third thing is you have the whole world moving towards the American or European food standard. I have to say the US food standard, because even the Germans eat only a third of the meat in an average day that US citizens do. And so we are losing the caloric efficiency of eating lower on the food chain. Every time you move up the food chain a notch and eat something that ate something else, you’re losing about ten times the caloric efficiency. …Essentially what’s happening is we’re moving into a meat-eating culture worldwide, and because that requires a huge amount of grain, a huge amount of land and so forth, it’s putting pressure on food prices.
Also, we’re running out of food. We’ve got oceans that are running out of fish now. They’re starting to catch tuna in the Gulf of Mexico that are really just fry because they cannot meet world demand by what is left in the Atlantic. …That’s a world population issue, and a dietary fashion issue, that’s coming to bear on the food supply.
And then the final issue is the climate change issue, which is essentially saying that you’re not going to be able to grow food in places that you’re accustomed to growing food, because of the change in climate. We’ve had two revisions of the USDA planting chart here Tennessee while I’ve lived here, because they keep having to move the isotherms northward to reflect the change of seasons because of global warming…
This is part of a much longer interview. Both Astyk’s and Newton’s forthcoming new book, A Nation of Farmers, and Bates’ The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times, sound well worth checking out. KS.
(Jan 14, 2009)
