Wednesday, April 17, 2024
Patricia Grogg
At the time, thousands of exiles from the Southern Cone of South America lived in Alamar, 15 km from Havana. While the solidarity extended to them by the Cuban people helped them adjust to local life after they fled the dictatorships in their countries, they also had to adapt to the local diet, which consisted largely of roast pork, black beans and white rice, fried plantains – and few fresh salads.
In that period, Cuban agriculture was highly mechanised and reliant on synthetic pesticides and fertilisers, fossil fuels and other inputs. It was also heavily subsidised from abroad and productivity levels were low, while most production was concentrated in large state farms, according to experts.
“People were not used to eating salads, but things are different now,” Eva Pérez, who lives in Alamar, which is home to around 100,000 people, told IPS.
“People have understood the benefits of eating vegetables,” she said, remembering those years, when it was impossible to find vegetables grown without chemical fertilisers or pesticides.
Pérez was looking at the prices in the store run by the Alamar Organoponic Nursery, one of Cuba’s Basic Units of Cooperative Production (UBPCs). In 2007, the urban agriculture nursery produced more than 300 tons of fresh vegetables, 3,536 kgs of dried spices and herbs, 3.18 million vegetable seedlings and more than 36,000 other seedlings, such as fruit trees.
For many residents of Alamar, the biggest benefit of the project is that a garbage dump was converted into thriving farmland.
“These lots were abandoned. I think the idea was to build a sports complex or something like that, but it never happened. People started dumping all kinds of garbage there, and just look at it now – green everywhere you look,” says Ivette Barroso, 40, who joined the cooperative 10 years ago.
Barroso, a chemical technologist, left her first job in a plastics factory to work closer to her home and earn a bigger income. “Urban agriculture has enabled more women to take part in this kind of work,” she says, describing the positive aspects of projects like the Alamar Nursery.
As well as providing work for local residents, the cooperative helps its customers eat a healthier diet, she says. “Everything grown here is healthy, we don’t use any chemicals,” she comments, while placing seeds in a tray divided in small sections filled with organic matter.
Assistance from Welt Hunger Hilfe/German Agro Action, a not-for-profit organisation that works in development cooperation and provides humanitarian aid in more than 70 countries, has given the Alamar Nursery access to techniques and equipment for growing lettuce, cucumbers, beets and beans, even throughout the hot summer months.
Thanks to support from the German organisation, the cooperative has a greenhouse, where it grows seedlings for its own use and for sale to other farmers, different forms of irrigation for raising crops and producing organic fertiliser, and a greenhouse for growing fresh produce, part of which is sold for hard currency.
The foreign assistance also financed a centre where the members of the Alamar Nursery receive training and share their experiences with other farmers and cooperatives, as well as a small shop where the cooperative sells its produce directly to the public, thus avoiding middlemen who drive up prices.
The assistance from abroad “has given us a decisive boost. We would not have been able to obtain this technology without cooperation, which has always been focused on the production needs of the cooperative,” says Miguel Ángel Salcines, the administrator of the Alamar Nursery.
Active in Cuba for 15 years, German Agro Action has bridged geographical and political distances to support a number of urban agriculture projects, as part of its global effort to foment decentralised food security.
The organisation’s work is based on the principle of helping people help themselves, through projects in which groups achieve food solutions through their own efforts, using environmentally and socially sustainable methods. It also provides immediate emergency aid.
The main units of agricultural production in Cuba today are the UBPCs, created in 1993, and their predecessors, the Credit and Services Cooperatives (CCSs) – dating to the 1960s – and the Agricultural Production Cooperatives (CPAs) – created in 1976.
In the CCSs, farmers operate independently but come together to buy inputs and share machinery, and in the CPAs, farmers work the land collectively.
The UBPCs emerged shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and East European socialist bloc (Cuba’s main aid and trade partners), as part of reforms aimed at enabling this Caribbean island nation to deal with the economic crisis and resultant lack of supplies of agricultural inputs and equipment needed to sustain the industrialised model of agriculture.
The members of the UBPCs were given indefinite use of the land rent-free, and they elect their own leaders, who must periodically provide their accounts to the membership.
More than 2.4 million hectares of land are farmed by these different kinds of cooperative production units, which are an alternative to large state farms, and by independent farmers. Given the pressing need to increase food production, the government is undertaking a new restructuring of the agriculture sector, announcing, for example, that it would distribute more idle land to producers.