Unfinished Puzzle- Cuban Agriculture: The Challenges, Lessons and Opportunities
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Why is the Cuban experience so unique in terms of sustainable agriculture, local development, agrarian reform, food security and food sovereignty? Is that experience replicable in other countries?
This book provides a rare view from inside Cuba of the tension between food sovereignty and the struggle for food security in the face of a 50-year U.S. embargo. The authors use statistical analysis, interviews and studies including trends in production, consumption and imports and exports from the years 1989 to 2011.
Table of Contents:
Executive Summary
Introduction
Part 1 - Cuban Agriculture Today: Realities and consequences
1.1 The current national and international context of Cuban agriculture
1.2 Dealing with climate change
1.3 Agricultural production from 1993 to 2009: An unstable recovery
1.4 Cuban food security
1.5 In search of import substitution
Part 2 - Current Cuban Agricultural Policies: The challenges of being unique
2.1 The urgency of change
2.2 Changes in land tenure: 1993 to 2009
2.3 Cuba, a country of cooperatives
2.4 Markets and equity in the agricultural sector
2.5 The restructuring of the agro-industrial sugarcane sector
2.6 Facing the agricultural labor shortage
2.7 Certified organic production
2.8 Genetically modified food and crops
2.9 The path to food sovereignty?
Part 3 - Local Development and Sustainable Agriculture: An experiment worth
replicating
3.1 National policies and local action
3.2 Accompanying the local implementation of food sovereignty
3.3 Urban, peri-urban and suburban agriculture
3.4 Ensuring gender equity in agriculture
3.5 The replicability of the Cuban experience
Conclusions
References
Appendices
Acronyms
About the authors:
May Ling Chan worked with Oxfam Hong Kong in Asia and Africa for over 12 years. She conducted research on agricultural policy, agroecology and incentive strucutres for sustainable production from 2005 to 2009 at the Agrarian University of Havana (UNAH). Eduardo Francisco Freyre Roach, PhD, has been a professor at the Agrarian University of Havana ((UNAH) for 27 years, specializing in rural sociology, sustainable agriculture and bioethics.
"The Unfinished Puzzle refers to the challenge of overcoming the Cuban agricultural paradox. Despite great agroecological advances and with over 120,000 peasants using sustainable methods--and producing most of the food on the island--why does Cuba still import substantial amounts of Food? And why is the government releasing transgenic plants such as Bt corn? Why is agroecology considered an "alternative," and only supported under scenarios of economic scarcity? This book helps to address this unfinished puzzle."
Miguel A. Altieri
President, Latin American Scientific Society of Agroecology (SOCLA)
