Cuba imports about 70-80 percent of its food, spending roughly $2 billion annually, but it has enormous potential to produce far more on its own and even export high-value crops to the U.S., due to its incredibly rich soils, says Pedro Sanchez, a renowned tropical soils specialist at the University of Florida.
Winner of the World Food Prize in 2002, Sanchez grew up on a farm in Cuba and immigrated to the U.S. in 1960 to attend school. Through the years that he has worked on agriculture in developing nations, he has kept in touch with agricultural scientists in Cuba. Recently, he toured farms on the island nation and said it has about 0.5-1 million hectares (1.25-2.5 million acres) of fertile land that is currently fallow. In total, its farmland covers 6 million hectares (14.8 million acres).
“It’s a great opportunity,” he said at a lecture at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, describing the soils as the “most fertile of any tropical country” in the Western hemisphere. Cuba hasn’t heavily depleted its farmland soils like countries in Africa nor has it suffered the vast deforestation of nearby Haiti.
Cuba went through a few distinct periods of agricultural development, focusing on sugar production in the post-World War II era, transitioning to Soviet-style, large-scale farms 1960-1989, and developing urban organic agriculture at the turn of the 21st century, after the Soviet Union collapsed and subsidies ended. Now it’s slowly shifting to a more market-based system, but is suffering under the weight of inefficient machinery, inferior seed varieties and minimal investment in agricultural research.
Despite the attention it has received, he said that urban organic agriculture represented less than 1 percent of overall cropland in Cuba. The vast majority of farms in the countryside still practiced conventional methods, relying on chemical fertilizers and herbicides, but still lagged behind in production. Yields for staple crops like corn, for example, are below those of sub-Saharan Africa. Only three crops – plantains, potatoes and beans – yield above the global average.
Meanwhile, Cuba imports a vast amount of food: 100 percent of its wheat, 68 percent of its corn, 72 percent of its beans, 46 percent of its rice, 36 percent of its milk, and 81 percent of its poultry. But it wants alter that picture. In June, Agriculture Minister Gustavo Rodriguez Rollero said that Cuba wants to expand farm output dramatically, in part to feed the increasing stream of tourists to the island. “We want to produce at least 50 percent,” Rodriguez said.
The U.S. accounts for the vast majority of poultry, corn and soybeans that reach the island and the ag industry in the U.S. has been eager to open up more trade with Cuba. That appeared in reach with the normalization of relations under President Obama, but is now far from certain with President-elect Donald Trump who said he wants “a better deal” with Cuba.
Sanchez said it was crucial for the country to improve its seed stock, and hoped it would work more closely with public breeding institutions. He also said companies like Dupont and Monsanto were unlikely to be welcomed in Cuba, since the country has deep memories of domination by sugar companies in the last century. “We don’t need GMOs now, we just need better seed varieties,” he said.
As for growth industries, he saw opportunities for Cuba to export specialty crops like mango, avocado and guava to the U.S. But right now, Cuba was stymied by a lack of capital, the inability to accept foreign investment and farm machinery that, like its cars, is decades old. Plus, the nation was cautious: “They want to do business with the States [the U.S.] but they don’t want to be dominated by the States,” he said.