[asia-apec 1622] Food First vs. Dennis Avery on Cuba organic farming

[Anuradha Mittal]

Copyright 2000
The Montreal Gazette
October 16, 2000, Monday, FINAL

SECTION: Editorial / Op-ed; B2

LENGTH: 375 words

HEADLINE: In farming, Cuba sets good example

BYLINE:  Peter Rosset

BODY:
    I am shocked that you would publish ''Cubans big on organic 
farming - but they are starving'' by Dennis T. Avery (Comment, Oct. 
10), without bothering to either fact-check the essay or do a 
background check on the author.
Mr. Avery, the author of ''Saving the Planet With Pesticides and 
Plastic'', has made a well-funded career of attacking organic farming 
wherever it is found. It is not surprising that the anti-organic Mr. 
Avery, employed by a right-wing think tank, the Hudson Institute, 
would take on organic farming in Cuba.
At the Institute for Food and Development Policy, we have spent 25 
years researching the global food system. Over the past decade no 
country has caught our attention more, as a positive example of a 
different way of growing food, than Cuba, for the way it has overcome 
a severe food crisis through self-reliance and sustainable 
agriculture and organic practices.
While Cuba still suffers from sporadic shortages of various food 
items, that is not the fault of Cuban farmers, who today produce more 
food with far less pesticides than they did in the 1980s. Rather, 
those shortages, when they occur, are more a result of the economic 
isolation of the island nation enforced by its northern neighbour, 
the United States.

When Mr. Avery says ''Cubans are rationed each month'' to 
small-sounding quantities of various foods, he leads us to believe 
that the ration is all Cubans eat. Nothing could be farther from the 
truth. The government-provided ration provides only part of the 
average Cuban's diet, the remainder of which comes from what they 
purchase in stores, farmers' markets and roadside stands, eat at 
workplace and school cafeterias, or grow themselves.
Another example: Mr. Avery cites persistent low yields in Cuba's 
sugar crop as evidence that organic farming doesn't work. What he 
fails to mention is that sugar is one crop where the new the policies 
of production incentives and organic farming practices have yet to be 
widely implemented.
Mr. Avery's right-wing rantings do nothing to further a constructive 
debate on the directions that future food and agriculture policies 
should take.

Peter M. Rosset
Co-Director, Institute for Food and Development Policy
Oakland, Calif.

*************************************************************
The following is the original to which Peter Rosset responded
*************************************************************

Copyright 2000
The Montreal Gazette
October 10, 2000, Tuesday, FINAL

SECTION: Editorial / Op-ed; B3

LENGTH: 713 words

HEADLINE: Cubans big on organic farming - but they are starving

BYLINE: DENNIS T. AVERY

BODY:
    Cuba is being honoured as the only country trying to feed a modern 
society with organic farming. Its organic-farming association was 
awarded an ''alternative Nobel Prize'' last year in the Swedish 
parliament.

Eco- activists across the First World praise Cuban efforts to control 
pests with natural predators instead of chemicals.  Peter Rosset of 
the Food First Institute recently called Cuba ''the world's largest 
and most successful experiment in self-reliant alternative 
agriculture.''

For Cuban families, all this must have a hollow ring. Cubans are 
rationed each month to about five pounds of bread, six pounds of 
rice, one pound of beans and seven eggs. The low yields from Cuba's 
organic farms mean constant hunger
and near- malnutrition.

Most of the world's farm yields are trending upward, but the sugar 
crop, which used to finance much of Cuba's economy, yields only two- 
thirds as much as when Fidel Castro came to power 40 years ago. This 
pattern of agricultural failure can no longer be blamed on Cuba's 
state farms. In fact, Cuba has shifted about one-fourth of its 
farmland to a new pattern it calls linking the worker with an area: a 
team of four workers is given responsibility for production in a 
restricted area of about 32 acres.

They even get a percentage of the extra profits if they achieve high 
yields. (Can you say ''family farm?'') But even the new production 
teams haven't been enough to adequately nourish Cubans.

''As for the population's consumption, the main efforts are being 
made in the area of rice production,'' Agriculture Minister Alfredo 
Jordan said recently on Havana radio. ''As for tubers and vegetables, 
despite an increase in their
production, it is still not enough to meet the demand.''

Jordan added, ''Efforts are also being made to cover the population's 
animalprotein needs. This last sector is where most of the 
difficulties are found and in which recovery is slowest. It is true 
that agriculture production has increased, but it is still far from 
covering the population's needs.''

The Cuban minister tells visitors frankly he would love to have 
higher-yield fertilizers and crop protection chemicals, but Cuba is 
too broke to buy them.

The collapse of the Soviet Union ended Cuba's financial subsidies 
from the East Bloc. Cuba can't earn much cash from sugar because 
European export dumping and pervasive sugar import barriers depress 
prices.

Despite the organic focus, Cuba's agriculture still uses about $100 
million worth of fuel a year, $80 million worth of chemical 
fertilizers and $30 million worth of pesticides and other high-yield 
inputs. But it's not enough.

Agricultural failure hasn't made the Cuban government shy, of course. 
Cuba recently simultaneously hosted the Sustainable Agriculture 
Networking and Extension project of the UN Development Program and an 
international
organic-farming conference.

''It was especially moving to see the reactions of the foreign 
visitors as the Cubans showed them the enormous strides they have 
taken in overcoming the food crisis brought on by the collapse of the 
socialist bloc in Europe,'' Rosset
gushed. ''Last year, Cuba had the highest production totals in its 
entire history for almost all key food crops.''

Of course in the old days Cuba could afford to import about half of 
its food, along with all the fertilizer and crop-protection chemicals 
needed to support the crops it did grow at home. Today, the 
suppressed economy has little
earning power except for tourism and tobacco.

The mayor of Havana told Rosset a recent household survey showed 40 
per cent of the food eaten in one of the city's neighborhoods was 
grown right in the neighbourhood.

It had to be. With farm workers eating up the low yields from their 
organic fields and government rations inadequate, Havana's residents 
are desperately serious gardeners.

Of course, that means less time for relaxing, sports or hobbies. 
They've got to be pulling weeds, squashing bugs and worrying about 
the mosaic virus in their off hours from the factories.

If Cuba is the world's greatest alternative agriculture success, 
what's the second best? Ethiopia? Rwanda?

- Dennis T. Avery is director of global food issues for the Hudson 
Institute of Indianapolis.

Join the fight against hunger. For more information contact foodfirst at foodfirst.org.
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