{"id":19244,"date":"2016-03-28T13:12:36","date_gmt":"2016-03-28T18:12:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19244"},"modified":"2016-03-28T13:13:22","modified_gmt":"2016-03-28T18:13:22","slug":"cubas-sustainable-agriculture-at-risk-in-u-s-thaw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19244","title":{"rendered":"Cuba\u2019s sustainable agriculture at risk in U.S. thaw"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n
\n

Cuba\u2019s sustainable agriculture at risk in U.S.\u00a0thaw<\/a><\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"\"
Organic farm, Alamar.\u00a0Melanie Lukesh Reed\/Flickr<\/a>,\u00a0CC BY-NC-ND<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n

President Obama\u2019s trip to Cuba this week accelerated the warming of U.S.-Cuban relations. Many people in both countries believe that normalizing relations will spur investment that can help Cuba develop its economy and improve life for its citizens.<\/p>\n

But in agriculture, U.S. investment could cause harm instead.<\/p>\n

For the past 35 years I have studied agroecology in most countries in Central and South America. Agroecology is an approach to farming that developed in the late 1970s in Latin America as\u00a0a reaction against the top-down, technology-intensive and environmentally destructive strategy<\/a>that characterizes modern industrial agriculture. It encourages local production by small-scale farmers, using sustainable strategies and combining Western knowledge with traditional expertise.<\/p>\n

Cuba took this approach out of necessity when its economic partner, the Soviet bloc, dissolved in the early 1990s. As a result, Cuban farming has become a leading example of ecological agriculture.<\/p>\n

But if relations with U.S. agribusiness companies are not managed carefully, Cuba could revert to an industrial approach that relies on mechanization, transgenic crops and agrochemicals, rolling back the revolutionary gains that its\u00a0campesinos<\/em>\u00a0have achieved.<\/p>\n

The shift to peasant agroecology<\/strong><\/p>\n

For several decades after Cuba\u2019s 1959 revolution, socialist bloc countries accounted for nearly all of its foreign trade.<\/p>\n

The government\u00a0devoted 30 percent of agricultural land to sugarcane for export, while importing 57 percent of Cuba\u2019s food supply<\/a>. Farmers relied on tractors, massive amounts of pesticide and fertilizer inputs, all supplied by Soviet bloc countries. By the 1980s\u00a0agricultural pests were increasing, soil quality was degrading and yields of some key crops like rice had begun to decline<\/a>.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cuba\u2019s sustainable agriculture at risk in U.S.\u00a0thaw Organic farm, Alamar.\u00a0Melanie Lukesh Reed\/Flickr,\u00a0CC BY-NC-ND President Obama\u2019s trip to Cuba this week accelerated the warming of U.S.-Cuban relations. Many people in both countries believe that normalizing relations will spur investment that can help Cuba develop its economy and improve life for its citizens. But in agriculture, U.S. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[20,6511,1983,1912,928,13143,1635,13144],"class_list":["post-19244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-agriculture","tag-agroecology","tag-cuba","tag-food-production","tag-food-supply","tag-miguel-altieri","tag-sustainable-agriculture","tag-us-agribusiness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19244"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19246,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19244\/revisions\/19246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}