Cuban Agriculture

CUBANS STARVE ON DIET OF LIES
BY: DENNIS T. AVERY
April 2, 2009

CHURCHVILLE, VA—The Cubans told the world they had heroically learned to feed themselves without fuel or farm chemicals after their Soviet subsidies collapsed in the early 1990s. They bragged about their “peasant cooperatives,” their biopesticides and organic fertilizers. They heralded their earthworm culture and the predator wasps they unleashed on destructive caterpillars. They boasted about the heroic ox teams they had trained to replace tractors.

Organic activists all over the world swooned. Now, a senior Ministry of Agriculture official has admitted in the Cuban press that 84 percent of Cuba’s current food consumption is imported, according to our agricultural attaché in Havana. The organic success was all a lie—a great, gaudy, Communist-style Big Lie of the type that dictators behind the Iron Curtain routinely used throughout the Cold War to hornswoggle the Free World.

This time the victims of the Big Lie are the Greens in the organic movement who want us to trust our future food supplies to their low-yield “natural farming” The Greens want us to outlaw nitrogen fertilizer, biotechnology and whatever else might save room for the planet’s wildlife through higher farm productivity.

The Cuban farming deception was aided by the “useful idiots” in the non-Communist world. The late Donnella Meadows, who wrote the stunningly-foolish book Limits to Growth in 1972, gushed over Cuban farming: “Suddenly deprived of half its food and most of its agricultural inputs, [Cuba] has not only maintained but increased its food supply in a way that creates jobs and improves the environment.”

Right, by importing 84 percent of the food. Read More

The truth is finally surfacing about agriculture in Cuba. Many people thought this was the type of food production we needed in the United States, it was looked at as almost romantic. However, after finally seeing the actual results of their effort, we find out that it was starving their population. The European Union continues to move their ag system this direction as well. Even though they can’t feed their population, it doesn’t seem to be affecting their policies toward agriculture.