I seem to recall them having a highly sophisticated network of mutually cooperative small growers, no? Aren't they like a model of food sovereignty?
I'm guessing whoever wrote this just means "Cuba doesn't allow itself to be turned back into mass sugar plantations, therefore the poor Cubans are deprived of the right to perform grueling work for slave wages on destructive industrial farms to pad the profits of a small group of compradores entrepreneurs.
yes, they are. there's a documentary called The Accidental Revolution that has to do with the rapid land use changes that came about when the Soviet Union collapsed (making Cuba lose access to it's supply of industrial inputs like chemical fertilizers, pesticides and its access to fossil fuels driving mechanization). because Cuba guarantees food as a constitutional right, sweeping shifts in agricultural production took place with lots of land shifting from export based cropping like tobacco and sugar into fruit and vegetable production.
also the notion that they can't farm the land is patently hilarious. if you want a farm in Cuba and are a Cuban citizen, the government will grant you a significant block of land if you provide a conservation and production plan, and they will supply what they can to develop it in terms of material. education is free, agricultural education is encouraged, there is a federated farmer owned cooperative with presence in every district that organizes knowledge/resource sharing and provisions for insectaries to release and provide beneficial insects to growers. it should be stated by someone who knows, there is nothing like this in the united states. we have commercial insectaries for beneficials, but they are at the bush league circlejerk stage and nowhere near scaled up to cuba's geographic and per-farm level. and they are expensive, whereas Cuba has basically modeled this as a public service. there is a lot more going on there too, with like publicly available agricultural research for plant variety breeding and development which transfers immediately to the grower rather than the US model of some asshole professor developing some plant genetic profile with publicly supported research, spinning it off into their own private company, and then licensing it through some biotech giant using it to make billions off of growers/tenant farmers who are going bankrupt and committing suicide.
if you are a grower down there, with fuel and industrial inputs are at a premium, so your plan is going to be reliant on your own labor/occasionally draft animal power and agroecological production practices like compost, crop rotation, cover cropping, and biologically derived pest controls. due to the former presence of high levels of mechanization, there are not a small amount of cobbled together wind power dynamos too for like water pumping to fill gravity tanks and other "work".
within the larger sustainable agriculture movement, Cuba is recognized as a model for what is likely to be the future for many countries facing a "hard" transition to non-fossil fuel based agriculture.
Running a small farm in the US takes tens of thousands of dollars in capital, and it probably won't be profitable. An actual farm that you can raise a family on is a multi-million dollar business.
I seem to recall them having a highly sophisticated network of mutually cooperative small growers, no? Aren't they like a model of food sovereignty?
I'm guessing whoever wrote this just means "Cuba doesn't allow itself to be turned back into mass sugar plantations, therefore the poor Cubans are deprived of the right to perform grueling work for slave wages on destructive industrial farms to pad the profits of a small group of
compradoresentrepreneurs.yes, they are. there's a documentary called The Accidental Revolution that has to do with the rapid land use changes that came about when the Soviet Union collapsed (making Cuba lose access to it's supply of industrial inputs like chemical fertilizers, pesticides and its access to fossil fuels driving mechanization). because Cuba guarantees food as a constitutional right, sweeping shifts in agricultural production took place with lots of land shifting from export based cropping like tobacco and sugar into fruit and vegetable production.
also the notion that they can't farm the land is patently hilarious. if you want a farm in Cuba and are a Cuban citizen, the government will grant you a significant block of land if you provide a conservation and production plan, and they will supply what they can to develop it in terms of material. education is free, agricultural education is encouraged, there is a federated farmer owned cooperative with presence in every district that organizes knowledge/resource sharing and provisions for insectaries to release and provide beneficial insects to growers. it should be stated by someone who knows, there is nothing like this in the united states. we have commercial insectaries for beneficials, but they are at the bush league circlejerk stage and nowhere near scaled up to cuba's geographic and per-farm level. and they are expensive, whereas Cuba has basically modeled this as a public service. there is a lot more going on there too, with like publicly available agricultural research for plant variety breeding and development which transfers immediately to the grower rather than the US model of some asshole professor developing some plant genetic profile with publicly supported research, spinning it off into their own private company, and then licensing it through some biotech giant using it to make billions off of growers/tenant farmers who are going bankrupt and committing suicide.
if you are a grower down there, with fuel and industrial inputs are at a premium, so your plan is going to be reliant on your own labor/occasionally draft animal power and agroecological production practices like compost, crop rotation, cover cropping, and biologically derived pest controls. due to the former presence of high levels of mechanization, there are not a small amount of cobbled together wind power dynamos too for like water pumping to fill gravity tanks and other "work".
within the larger sustainable agriculture movement, Cuba is recognized as a model for what is likely to be the future for many countries facing a "hard" transition to non-fossil fuel based agriculture.
Running a small farm in the US takes tens of thousands of dollars in capital, and it probably won't be profitable. An actual farm that you can raise a family on is a multi-million dollar business.