By Paul Brown
When countries run short of
food, they need to find solutions fast, and one answer can be urban farming.
That was the remedy Cuba
seized with both hands 30 years ago when it was confronted with the dilemma of
an end to its vital food imports. And what worked then for Cuba could have
lessons today for the wider world, as it faces growing hunger in the face of
the climate
crisis.
When the Soviet Union collapsed
in the 1990s, most of Cuba's food supplies went with it. To stave off severe
malnutrition the people of the capital, Havana, found an imaginative answer:
urban gardening. That's now seen as a possible blueprint for the survival of
city populations in a warming world.
The Rapid Transition Alliance
has published a longer account of Cuba's very fast move towards self-sufficiency as part
of its series Stories of Change, which describes cases of large-scale, rapid
transformation that can seem difficult to achieve but which have often worked
before.
The problem of hunger for the
Cubans arose because during the Cold War they had stopped producing food of
their own and turned over most of their farmland to sugarcane plantations to
supply the Soviet Union. In return for these mountains of sugar Moscow provided
Cuba with food, chemical fertilizers and fuel oil for its cars and tractors.
U.S. Sanctions
The Soviet collapse brought
the breakdown of this trade, and food rationing for city dwellers. And Cuba
lost its main food supply while it was still coping with strict U.S. sanctions.
Reverting to conventional farming would have taken time and was in any case
difficult because the Soviet fertilizers, fuel and pesticides had also dried
up.
So the highly-educated urban
citizens, faced with rationing which reduced the average Cuban's daily calorie
intake from 2,600 in 1986 to 1,000-1,500 in 1993, organized themselves to grow
their own food in improvised urban allotments.
At first, struggling with
little know-how and without fertilizers, their yields were low, but by
producing compost and other organic growing mediums, plus introducing drip-fed
irrigation, they began to see improvements.
Short of chemicals, the
gardeners resorted to biological controls like marigolds (where opinions
today are mixed) to deter harmful insects.
By 1995 Havana alone had
25,000 allotments tended by families and urban cooperatives. The government,
realizing the potential benefits, encouraged the movement.
Soil quality was improved with
a mixture of crop residues, household wastes and animal manure to create more
compost and soil conditioners. The extra fresh vegetables and fruit this
provided quickly improved urban dwellers' calorie intake and saved many from
malnutrition.
In the Cuban climate, with
irrigation changes and soils undergoing constant improvement from added organic
matter, the allotments could produce vegetables all year round. Lettuce, chard,
radish, beans, cucumber, tomatoes, spinach and peppers were grown and traded.
There is evidence as well that
the extra exercise which these urban gardeners got from tending their
allotments, plus the time they spent outdoors in the open air, benefited their
health.
Eventually, realizing that
self-sufficiency was the only way to feed the population, the government banned
sugarcane growing altogether. Lacking fertilizer, many former plantations were
turned over to organic agriculture. The shortage of oil for tractors meant oxen
were used for ploughing.
Partial Solution
Cuba's experience of urban
agriculture inspired many environmentalists to believe that this
is at least part of the solution to the food shortages threatened by climate change. By 2008
food gardens, despite their small scale, made up 8 percent of the land in
Havana, and 3.4 percent of all urban land in Cuba, producing 90 percent of all
the fruit and vegetables consumed.
As a result the calorie intake
of the average Cuban quickly rose to match that of Europeans, relying on a diet
composed mainly of rice, beans, potatoes and other vegetables — a low-fat diet
making obesity rare.
Because of the climate,
though, wheat does not grow well in Cuba, and the island still has to import
large quantities of grain for bread. Meat is in short supply and also has to be
mainly imported.
Despite this, Cuba's
experience since the Cold War ended in the 1990s shows that large quantities of
fresh food can be grown in cities and that urban agriculture is sustainable
over decades.
For other countries vulnerable
to sudden loss of food supplies, Cuba's experience suggests that urban farming
can be one way of staving off potential famine when imports are restricted,
expensive or simply unobtainable.
