Reforms help farmers, but many still struggle

HAVANA (AP):

First, it was impossible to find fuel or seeds to plant. Later, his name wasn’t on a list of farmers eligible to rent tractors from the state. Now Lázaro Sánchez fears the current tropical rainy season will hinder his ability to work the land.

While Sánchez worries about trying to grow crops at his farm on the outskirts of Havana, Cubans in the cities are struggling with shortages of food and soaring prices.

To address such problems, Cuba’s socialist government last year approved a package of 63 reforms meant to make it easier and more profitable for producers to get food to consumers – measures such as allowing farmers greater freedom to choose their crops and letting them sell more freely, at higher prices.

They are the latest in a series of highly touted changes adopted over the past 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc stripped Cuba of its most important sources of aid and trade. Officials have eroded the dominance of state farms and encouraged more semi-independent co-operatives. They have given farmers greater land-use rights and loosened restrictions on sales.

But none of those efforts has yet been able to solve the island’s chronic agricultural woes.

Sánchez, for example, can now sell most of the vegetables he produces himself, instead of being forced to sell them to the state at fixed prices, though it still takes a reduced share. He could even set up his own roadside stand if he chooses. His power and water bills have been cut.

But farmers say the measures are still not sufficient to overcome obstacles. While government prices for some supplies such as local herbicides, fertilisers, wire and tools were cut, many inputs remain hard to get. The state is trying to overcome a lack of resources needed to import them.

The shortage of fruits in a tropical nation, and of pork that is basic to the Cuban diet, has become even more dire due to hardships caused by a pandemic that choked off the revenue-producing tourism industry – and by economic sanctions tightened under former US President Donald Trump.

And Sánchez said the problems he encountered mean his own farm won’t do much to solve the problem this season.

“Sadly, we are going to be affected in three or four months. The food we had to be planting we’re not going to have,” Sánchez told AP.

The 56-year-old Sánchez and his brother work a 26-hectare (64-acre) farm that usually produces crops such as squash, corn, bananas, small animals and the tuber called malanga that is widely eaten in Cuba.

The island spends about US$2 billion a year of its scarce foreign currency importing foods – though the authorities say about US$800 million of that could be produced at home under the right conditions.

Cuba’s National Statistics and census Office reported production of 2.1 million tons of tubers – such as potatoes and malanga – last year, about the same as in 2020 but short of the 2.8 million produced in 2017.

Cuba’s farms produced 1.7 million tons of vegetables – down from 2.4 million in 2017. The output of rice, corn, beans and citrus has also been stagnant or declining, as has that of milk, pork and beef.