Cuban agriculture reform faces challenges

The Cuban government has turned over nearly one million hectares of previously state-owned land to individual farmers, but half of it still lies fallow or is underutilised, highlighting the tremendous challenges facing an agricultural reform programme that President Raul Castro has trumpeted as key to the island's future.

Economy Minister Marino Murillo disclosed the figures in a speech closing out a gathering of small-scale farmers in Havana May 17. The session was closed to foreign media, but his words were reprinted in the Communist Party newspaper Granma.

Murillo said some 920,000 hectares (2.3 million acres) had been turned over to private farmers since Raul Castro announced the program in 2008, shortly after formally taking over Cuba's leadership from his ailing brother, Fidel.

At the time, Raul Castro said that turning over fallow land to farmers was a matter of "maximum national security," and was necessary to breathe new life into an agricultural sector hobbled by decades of government mismanagement.

But the land reform has failed so far to bring the game-changing surge in production that Castro had hoped for.

While national statistics have not been released, a trickle of recent data has shown an inability to meet agricultural targets, sometimes by eye-popping margins.

In the region of Havana, for instance, production during the first two months of 2010 was 40 per cent below the government's goal. Granma cited government ineptitude as a main cause of the shortfall.

The 2010 sugar harvest was the worst in more than a century, prompting the firing of the minister in charge.

And the government warned last week against hoarding rice, a key staple of the Cuban diet. Cuba produces only about 40 per cent of its rice needs, importing the rest at great cost.

Murillo said that "about half" of the land assigned under the agricultural reform "remains fallow or insufficiently utilised," and he cautioned that farmers who have received government fields will lose them unless they find a way to increase productivity.

"This situation needs to be changed as soon as possible," Murillo said. "And if any producers are not able to do it, we will have to transfer these lands to others who can."

A red-letter headline on the front page of Monday's Granma made the challenge clear: "The Number One Mission of Our Farmers," it said: "Produce for The People."

Murillo did not say why so much of the land is yet unused, but many farmers complain that they have been hamstrung by a lack of equipment, seeds and fertiliser, and victimised by incompetent local officials.

The 920,000 hectares - roughly the size of Yellowstone National Park in the United States - is about one-seventh of Cuba's arable land, and nearly a third of the fallow state-owned land targeted for private distribution, according to 2008 National Statistics Office figures.

Even so, the program has had successes. Cuban state-run media have highlighted individual farmers who have turned once-barren land into productive fields.

And Murillo said private farmers now produce 70 per cent of the island's food, despite only controlling 41 percent of the arable land.

Murillio is also vice-president of Cuba's Council of Ministers, the country's Cabinet.

He also said the government plans a new tax system for agriculture, but gave no details, and he outlined the basics of a plan to import less food, let farmers buy supplies without going through the government and increase dependence on organic fertiliser by 2015.

Cuba's state-dominated economy has always been weak, but it has been beset in recent years by a laundry list of hardships that would be difficult for any country to shake off.

Three major hurricanes did more than US$10 billion in damage in 2008, the global economic crisis dampened tourism profits and a drop in commodities prices hurt nickel sales for much of 2009.

Increasing domestic production is key as the government tightens its belt, importing far less from top trading partners like the United States, Venezuela, China and Spain.

Food is exempted from America's 48-year trade embargo on Cuba, and the US remains this island's top food exporter.

But economic woes have left Cuba unable to pay.

Imports of American food were down 26 per cent in 2009, according to the New York-based US-Cuba Economic Trade Council, which provides non-partisan commercial and economic information about the island and claims to have no position on policy.

- AP