Cuba shows the way 10 Jun 08 (http://dailypioneer.com/indexn12.asp?main_variable=OPED&file_name=opd4%2Etxt&counter_img=4)
With food prices soaring, its urban farms could be a model for the world, reports Niko Price
For Miladis Bouza, the global food crisis arrived two decades ago. Now, her efforts to climb out of it could serve as a model for people around the world struggling to feed their families.
Ms Bouza was a research biologist, living a solidly middle-class existence, when the collapse of the Soviet Union -- and the halt of its subsidised food shipments to Cuba -- effectively cut her government salary to $ 3 a month. Suddenly, a trip to the grocery store was out of reach.
So Ms Bouza quit her job, and under a programme championed by then-Defence Minister Raul Castro, asked the Government for the right to farm an overgrown, half-acre lot near her Havana home. Now, her husband tends rows of tomatoes, sweet potatoes and spinach, while Bouza, 48, sells the produce at a stall on a busy street.
Neighbours are happy with cheap vegetables fresh from the field. Ms Bouza never lacks for fresh produce, and she pulls in between $ 100 to $ 250 a month -- many times the average Government salary of $19. "All that money is mine," she said. "The only thing I have to buy is protein" -- meat.
Cuba's urban farming programme has been a stunning, and surprising, success. The farms, many of them on tiny plots like Bouza's, now supply much of Cuba's vegetables. They also provide 350,000 jobs nationwide with relatively high pay and have transformed eating habits in a nation accustomed to a less-than-ideal diet of rice and beans and canned goods from Eastern Europe.
From 1989-93, Cubans went from eating an average of 3,004 calories a day to only 2,323, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, as shelves emptied of the Soviet goods that made up two-thirds of Cuba's food. Today, they eat 3,547 calories a day -- more than what the US Government recommends for American citizens.
"It's a really interesting model looking at what's possible in a nation that's 80 percent urban," said Ms Catherine Murphy, a California sociologist who spent a decade studying farms in Havana. "It shows that cities can produce huge amounts of their own food, and you get all kinds of social and ecological benefits."
Of course, urban farms might not be such a success in a healthy, competitive economy.
As it is, productivity is low at Cuba's large, state-run farms where workers lack incentives. Government-supplied rations -- mostly imported from the US -- provide such staples as rice, beans and cooking oil, but not fresh produce. Importers bring in only what central planners want, so the market doesn't correct for gaps. And since most land is owned by the state, developers are not competing for the vacant lots that can become plots for vegetables.
Still, experts say the basic idea behind urban farming has a lot of promise.
"It's land that otherwise would be sitting idle. It requires little or no transportation to get (produce) to market," said Mr Bill Messina, an agricultural economist at the University of Florida in Gainesville. "It's good anyway you look at it."
And with fuel prices and food shortages causing unrest and hunger across the world, many say the Cuban model should spread.
-- AP writer Andrea Rodriguez contributed to this report.
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