[getsmart-l] Cuba's urban farming program a stunning success

[23 Skidoo]

Since we've overdeveloped and paved over most of our best class 1, 2 and 3 agricultural lands here in the GTA or are on the long road to finish off whats left.... Here is a possible solution we might look favourably upon when we get a choice between eating cement or cake...
 
Film at 11:00
***Cuba's urban farming program a stunning success 
By NIKO PRICE HAVANA (AP) --  For Miladis Bouza, the global food crisis arrived two decades ago. Now, her efforts to climb out of it could serve as a model for people around the world struggling to feed their families. 
Bouza was a research biologist, living a solidly middle-class existence, when the collapse of the Soviet Union -- and the halt of its subsidized food shipments to Cuba --  effectively cut her government salary to $3 a month. Suddenly, a trip to the grocery store was out of reach. 
So she quit her job, and under a program championed by then-Defense Minister Raul Castro, asked the government for the right to farm an overgrown, half-acre lot near her Havana home. Now, her husband tends rows of tomatoes, sweet potatoes and spinach, while Bouza, 48, sells the produce at a stall on a busy street. 
Neighbors are happy with cheap vegetables fresh from the field. Bouza never lacks for fresh produce, and she pulls in between $100 to $250 a month --  many times the average government salary of $19. 
"All that money is mine," she said. "The only thing I have to buy is protein" [the AP story asserts it's "meat" and not legumes or nuts or other veg. source, without quoting her..] 
Cuba's urban farming program has been a stunning, and surprising, success. The farms, many of them on tiny plots like Bouza's, now supply much of Cuba's vegetables. They also provide 350,000 jobs nationwide with relatively high pay and have transformed eating habits in a nation accustomed to a less-than-ideal diet of rice and beans and canned goods from Eastern Europe. 
>From 1989-93, Cubans went from eating an average of 3,004 calories a day to only 2,323, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, as shelves emptied of the Soviet goods that made up two-thirds of Cuba's food. Today, they eat 3,547 calories a day -- more than what the U.S. government recommends for American citizens. 
[this is probably an unhealthy number of calories per day..! but that's another story -ED] 
"It's a really interesting model looking at what's possible in a nation that's 80 percent urban," said Catherine Murphy, a California sociologist who spent a decade studying farms in Havana. "It shows that cities can produce huge amounts of their own food, and you get all kinds of social and ecological benefits." 
Of course, urban farms might not be such a success in a healthy, competitive economy. [The AP writer apparently thinks of US-government subsidized mega-corporations of Agri-Biz as "competitive" -ED] 
As it is, productivity is low at Cuba's large, state-run farms where workers lack incentives. Government-supplied rations -- mostly imported from the U.S. -- provide such staples as rice, beans and cooking oil, but not fresh produce. Importers bring in only what central planners want, so the market doesn't correct for gaps [the same market "genius" that was unable to prepare for Peak Oil and for Climate Destabilization and whose perverse incentives mess up so many aspects of quality of life? -ED] And since most land is owned by the state, developers are not competing for the vacant lots that can become plots for vegetables. 
Still, experts say the basic idea behind urban farming has a lot of promise. 
"It's land that otherwise would be sitting idle. It requires little or no transportation to get (produce) to market," said Bill Messina, an agricultural economist at the University of Florida in Gainesville. "It's good anyway you look at it." 
And with fuel prices and food shortages causing unrest and hunger across the world, many say the Cuban model should spread. 
"There are certain issues where we think Cuba has a lot to teach the world. Urban agriculture is one of them," said Beat Schmid, coordinator of Cuba programs for the charity Oxfam International. 
Other countries have experimented with urban farming -- Cuba's initial steps were modeled after a green belt surrounding Shanghai. But nowhere has urban farming been used so widely to transform the way a country feeds itself. 
"As the global food crisis receives attention, this is something that we need to be looking at," Murphy said. "Havana is an unlikely, really successful model where no one would expect one to come from." 
Now that Raul Castro is president, many expect him to expand the program he began as an experiment in the early 1990s. 
One of the first plots he opened was the "organoponico" on Fifth Avenue and 44th Street in the ritzy Havana neighborhood of Miramar. The half-block farm  -- owned by a government agency --  is surrounded by apartment buildings and houses, but also offices of foreign companies, a Spanish bank and the South African Embassy. 
Long troughs brim with arugula, spinach, radishes and basil, and few of the 20,000 square feet are wasted. 
One technician tends compost that serves as natural fertilizer, while another handles natural protection from pests, surrounding delicate spinach shoots with strong-smelling celery to ward off insects. Such measures have ecological benefits but were born of necessity: Neither commercial fertilizer nor herbicide is reliably available. [and with Peak Oil and Peak Natural Gas artificial persticides and artificial chemical fertilizers are likely to become more and more expensive. Google for "peak oil" see also postcarbon.org and globalpublicmedia.com -ED] 
Three workers tend the crops and another three sell them from a brightly painted stall. 
Key to the operation is something once unheard of in Cuba: 80 percent of the profits go straight to the workers' pockets, providing them an average of $71 a month. 
"Those salaries are higher than doctors, than lawyers," said Roberto Perez, the 58-year-old agronomist who runs the farm. "The more they produce, the more they make. That's fundamental to get high productivity." [you can be sure AP is selective with its quotes, and is less often going to qutoe a Cuban giving examples of Cubans, or for that matter, the many examples of Americans, and others throughout history, who have without any self-profit motive been extremely inventive, extremely productive, extremely clever, and helpful to their fellow citizens..but we're in the capitalist equivalent of Maoist Doctrine here and the writer, already treading on thin ice by daring to say anything nice about Cuba in a mainstream article, must do some CYA, so we understand the quote, whatever the context may or may not have been for that quote.. -ED] 
Customers say the farm has given them not only access to affordable food, but also a radical change in their cuisine. 
"Nobody used to eat vegetables," said David Leon, 50, buying two pounds of Swiss chard. "People's nutrition has improved a lot. It's a lot healthier. And it tastes good." 
Associated Press Writer Andrea Rodriguez contributed to this report. 
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ji-wFIKtfqHlfc5z3QQyZDgRB1zwD9160QN80 
Google for "Permaculture" see also GlobalPublicMedian and PostCarbon links above, and also see www.communitysolution.org which covered this basic story long before this AP story -ED 
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