[Reader-list] harpers article

[aarti at sarai.net]

interesting article in harpers about the cuban model of agriculture.


http://www.harpers.org/TheCubaDiet.html

The Cuba Diet
What will you be eating when the revolution comes?
Posted on Monday, June 6, 2005. Originally from April 2005. By Bill McKibben.
Sources

The pictures hanging in Havana’s Museum of the Revolution document the
rise (or, depending on your perspective, the fall) of Cuba in the years
after Castro’s revolt, in 1959. On my visit there last summer, I walked
through gallery after gallery, gazing upon the stock images of socialist
glory: “anti-imperialist volunteers” fighting in Angola, Cuban boxers
winning Olympic medals, five patients at a time undergoing eye surgery
using a “method created by Soviet academician Fyodorov.” Mostly,
though, I saw pictures of farm equipment. “Manual operation is replaced
by mechanized processes,” read the caption under a picture of some heavy
Marxist metal cruising a vast field. Another caption boasted that by 1990,
seven bulk sugar terminals had been built, each with a shipping capacity of
75,000 tons a day. In true Soviet style, the Cubans were demonstrating a
deeply held (and to our eyes now almost kitschy) socialist belief that
salvation lay in the size of harvests, in the number of tractors, and in
the glorious heroic machinery that would straighten the tired backs of an
oppressed peasantry—and so I learned that day that within thirty years of
the people’s uprising, the sugarcane industry alone employed 2,850
sugarcane lifting machines, 12,278 tractors, 29,857 carts, and 4,277
combines.

Such was communism. But then I turned a corner and the pictures changed.
The sharply focused shots of combines and Olympians now were muddied, as if
Cubans had forgotten how to print photos or, as was more likely the case,
had run short of darkroom chemicals. I had reached the gallery of the
“Special Period.” That is to say, I had reached the point in Cuban
history where everything came undone. With the sudden collapse of the
Soviet Union, Cuba fell off a cliff of its own. All those carts and
combines had been the products of an insane “economics” underwritten by
the Eastern bloc for ideological purposes. Castro spent three decades
growing sugar and shipping it to Russia and East Germany, both of which
paid a price well above the world level, and both of which sent the ships
back to Havana filled with wheat, rice, and more tractors. When all that
disappeared, literally almost overnight,

Cuba had nowhere to turn. The United States, Cuba’s closest neighbor,
enforced a strict trade embargo (which it strengthened in 1992, and again
in 1996) and Cuba had next to no foreign exchange with anyone
else—certainly the new Russia no longer wanted to pay a premium on Cuban
sugar for the simple glory of supporting a tropical version of its Leninist
past.

In other words, Cuba became an island. Not just a real island, surrounded
by water, but something much rarer: an island outside the international
economic system, a moon base whose supply ships had suddenly stopped
coming. There were other deeply isolated places on the planet—North
Korea, say, or Burma—but not many. And so most observers waited
impatiently for the country to collapse. No island is an island, after all,
not in a global world. The New York Times ran a story in its Sunday
magazine titled “The Last Days of Castro’s Cuba”; in its editorial
column, the paper opined that “the Cuban dictator has painted himself
into his own corner. Fidel Castro’s reign deserves to end in home-grown
failure.” Without oil, even public transportation shut down—for many,
going to work meant a two-hour bike trip. Television shut off early in the
evening to save electricity; movie theaters went dark. People tried to
improvise their ways around shortages. “For drinking glasses we’d get
beer bottles and cut the necks off with wire,” one professor told me.
“We didn’t have razor blades, till someone in the city came up with a
way to resharpen old ones.”

But it’s hard to improvise food. So much of what Cubans had eaten had
come straight from Eastern Europe, and most of the rest was grown
industrial-style on big state farms. All those combines needed fuel and
spare parts, and all those big rows of grain and vegetables needed
pesticides and fertilizer—none of which were available. In 1989,
according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the
average Cuban was eating 3,000 calories per day. Four years later that
figure had fallen to 1,900. It was as if they suddenly had to skip one meal
a day, every day, week after month after year. The host of one cooking show
on the shortened TV schedule urged Cubans to fry up “steaks” made from
grapefruit peels covered in bread crumbs. “I lost twenty pounds
myself,” said Fernando Funes, a government agronomist.

Now, just by looking across the table, I saw that Fernando Funes had since
gained the twenty pounds back. In fact, he had a little paunch, as do many
Cuban men of a certain age. What happened was simple, if unexpected. Cuba
had learned to stop exporting sugar and instead started growing its own
food again, growing it on small private farms and thousands of pocket-sized
urban market gardens—and, lacking chemicals and fertilizers, much of that
food became de facto organic. Somehow, the combination worked. Cubans have
as much food as they did before the Soviet Union collapsed. They’re still
short of meat, and the milk supply remains a real problem, but their
caloric intake has returned to normal—they’ve gotten that meal back.

In so doing they have created what may be the world’s largest working
model of a semi-sustainable agriculture, one that doesn’t rely nearly as
heavily as the rest of the world does on oil, on chemicals, on shipping
vast quantities of food back and forth. They import some of their food from
abroad—a certain amount of rice from Vietnam, even some apples and beef
and such from the United States. But mostly they grow their own, and with
less ecological disruption than in most places. In recent years organic
farmers have visited the island in increasing numbers and celebrated its
accomplishment. As early as 1999 the Swedish parliament awarded the Organic
Farming Group its Right Livelihood Award, often styled the “alternative
Nobel,” and Peter Rosset, the former executive director of the American
advocacy group Food First, heralded the “potentially enormous
implications” of Cuba’s new agricultural system.

The island’s success may not carry any larger lesson. Cuban agriculture
isn’t economically competitive with the industrial farming exemplified by
a massive food producer across the Caribbean, mostly because it is highly
labor-intensive. Moreover, Cuba is a one-party police state filled with
political prisons, which may have some slight effect on its ability to
mobilize its people—in any case, hardly an “advantage” one would want
to emulate elsewhere.

There’s always at least the possibility, however, that larger sections of
the world might be in for “Special Periods” of their own. Climate
change, or the end of cheap oil, or the depletion of irrigation water, or
the chaos of really widespread terrorism, or some other malign force might
begin to make us pay more attention to the absolute bottom-line question of
how we get our dinner (a question that only a very few people, for a very
short period of time, have ever been able to ignore). No one’s predicting
a collapse like the one Cuba endured—probably no modern economy has ever
undergone such a shock. But if things got gradually harder? After all, our
planet is an island, too. It’s somehow useful to know that someone has
already run the experiment.

* * *

Villa Alamar was a planned community built outside Havana at the height of
the Soviet glory days; its crumbling, precast-concrete apartments would
look at home (though less mildewed) in Ljubljana or Omsk. Even the names
there speak of the past: a central square, for instance, is called Parque
Hanoi. But right next to the Parque Hanoi is the Vivero Organopónico
Alamar.

Organopónico is the Cuban term for any urban garden. (It seems that before
the special period began, the country had a few demonstration hydroponic
gardens, much bragged about in official propaganda and quickly abandoned
when the crisis hit. The high-tech-sounding name stuck, however, recycled
to reflect the new, humbler reality.) There are thousands of organopónicos
in Cuba, more than 200 in the Havana area alone, but the Vivero
Organopónico Alamar is especially beautiful: a few acres of vegetables
attached to a shady yard packed with potted plants for sale, birds in
wicker cages, a cafeteria, and a small market where a steady line of local
people come to buy tomatoes, lettuce, oregano, potatoes—twenty-five crops
were listed on the blackboard the day I visited—for their supper.
Sixty-four people farm this tiny spread. Their chief is Miguel Salcines
López, a tall, middle-aged, intense, and quite delightful man.

“This land was slated for a hospital and sports complex,” he said,
leading me quickly through his tiny empire. “But when the food crisis
came, the government decided this was more important,” and they let
Salcines begin his cooperative. “I was an agronomic engineer before
that,” he said. “I was fat, a functionary. I was a bureaucrat.” Now
he is not. Most of his farm is what we would call organic—indeed,
Salcines showed off a pyramidal mini-greenhouse in which he raises
seedlings, in the belief that its shape “focuses energy.” Magnets on
his irrigation lines, he believes, help “reduce the surface tension” of
the water—give him a ponytail and he’d fit right in at the Marin
farmers’ market. Taking a more “traditional” organic approach,
Salcines has also planted basil and marigolds at the row ends to attract
beneficial insects, and he rotates sweet potato through the rows every few
plantings to cleanse the soil; he’s even got neem trees to supply natural
pesticides. But Salcines is not obsessive even about organicity. Like
gardeners everywhere, he has trouble with potato bugs, and he doesn’t
hesitate to use man-made pesticide to fight them. He doesn’t use
artificial fertilizer, both because it is expensive and because he
doesn’t need it—indeed, the garden makes money selling its own compost,
produced with the help of millions of worms (“California Reds”) in a
long series of shaded trenches.

While we ate rice and beans and salad and a little chicken, Salcines laid
out the finances of his cooperative farm. For the last six months, he said,
the government demanded that the organopónico produce 835,000 pesos’
worth of food. They actually produced more than a million pesos’ worth.
Writing quickly on a piece of scrap paper, Salcines predicted that the
profit for the whole year would be 393,000 pesos. Half of that he would
reinvest in enlarging the farm; the rest would go into a profit-sharing
plan. It’s not an immense sum when divided among sixty-four
workers—about $150—but for Cuban workers this is considered a good job
indeed. A blackboard above the lunch line reminded employees what their
monthly share of the profit would be: depending on how long they’d been
at the farm, and how well they produced, they would get 291 pesos this
month, almost doubling their base salary. The people worked hard, and if
they didn’t their colleagues didn’t tolerate them.

What is happening at the Vivero Organopónico Alamar certainly isn’t
unfettered capitalism, but it’s not exactly collective farming either.
Mostly it’s incredibly productive—sixty-four people earn a reasonable
living on this small site, and the surrounding neighbors get an awful lot
of their diet from its carefully tended rows. You see the same kind of
production all over the city—every formerly vacant lot in Havana seems to
be a small farm. The city grew 300,000 tons of food last year, nearly its
entire vegetable supply and more than a token amount of its rice and meat,
said Egidio Páez Medina, who oversees the organopónicos from a small
office on a highway at the edge of town. “Tens of thousands of people are
employed. And they get good money, as much as a thousand pesos a month.
When I’m done with this job I’m going to start farming myself—my pay
will double.” On average, Páez said, each square meter of urban farm
produces five kilograms of food a year. That’s a lot. (And it’s not
just cabbage and spinach; each farm also seems to have at least one row of
spearmint, an essential ingredient for the mojito.)

So Cuba—happy healthy miracle. Of course, Human Rights Watch, in its most
recent report, notes that the government “restricts nearly all avenues of
political dissent,” “severely curtails basic rights to free
expression,” and that “the government’s intolerance of dissenting
voices intensified considerably in 2003.” It’s as if you went to Whole
Foods and noticed a guy over by the soymilk with a truncheon. Cuba is a
weird political system all its own, one that’s been headed by the same
guy for forty-five years. And the nature of that system, and that guy, had
something to do with the way the country responded to its crisis.

For one thing, Castro’s Cuba was so rigidly (and unproductively)
socialist that simply by slightly loosening the screws on free enterprise
it was able to liberate all kinds of pent-up energy. Philip Peters, a Cuba
analyst at the conservative Lexington Institute, has documented how the
country redistributed as much as two thirds of state lands to cooperatives
and individual farmers and, as with the organopónico in Alamar, let them
sell their surplus above a certain quota. There’s no obvious name for
this system. It’s a lot like sharecropping, and it shares certain key
features with, say, serfdom, not to mention high feudalism. It is not free
in any of the ways we use the word—who the hell wants to say thank you to
the government for “allowing” you to sell your “surplus”? But
it’s also different from monolithic state communism.

In 1995, as the program geared up, the markets were selling 390 million
pounds of produce; sales volume tripled in the next three years. Now the
markets bustle, stacked deep with shiny heaps of bananas and dried beans,
mangos and tomatoes. But the prices, though they’ve dropped over the
years, are still beyond the reach of the poorest Cubans. And the
government, which still sells every citizen a basic monthly food ration for
just a few pesos, has also tried to reregulate some of the trade at the
farmers’ markets, fearing they were creating a two-tier system. “It’s
not reform like you’ve seen in China, where they’re devolving a lot of
economic decision making out to the private sector,” Peters said. “They
made a decision to graft some market mechanisms onto what remains a fairly
statist model. It could work better. But it has worked.”

* * *

Fidel Castro, as even his fiercest opponents would admit, has almost from
the day he took power spent lavishly on the country’s educational system.
Cuba’s ratio of teachers to students is akin to Sweden’s; people who
want to go to college go to college. Which turns out to be important,
because farming, especially organic farming, especially when you’re not
used to doing it, is no simple task. You don’t just tear down the fence
around the vacant lot and hand someone a hoe, quoting him some Maoist
couplet about the inevitable victory of the worker. The soil’s no good at
first, the bugs can’t wait to attack. You need information to make a go
of it. To a very large extent, the rise of Cuba’s semi-organic
agriculture is almost as much an invention of science and technology as the
high-input tractor farming it replaced, which is another thing that makes
this story so odd.

“I came to Havana at the time of the revolution, in 1960, to start
university,” said Fernando Funes, who now leads the national Pasture and
Forage Research Unit. “We went from 18,000 university students before the
revolution to 200,000 after, and a big proportion were in agricultural
careers. People specialized in soil fertility, or they specialized in
pesticides. They were very specialized. Probably too specialized. But
yields were going up.” Yields were going up because of the wildly
high-input farming. In the town of Nuevo Gerona, for instance, there is a
statue of a cow named White Udder, descended from a line of Canadian
Holsteins. In the early 1980s she was the most productive cow on the face
of the earth, giving 110 liters of milk a day, 27,000 liters in a single
lactation. Guinness certified her geysers of milk. Fidel journeyed out to
the countryside to lovingly stroke her hide. She was a paragon of
scientific management, with a carefully controlled diet of grain
concentrates. Most of that grain, however, came from abroad (“this is too
hot to be good grain country,” Funes said). White Udder was a kept woman.
To anyone with a ledger book her copious flow was entirely uneconomic, a
testimony to the kinky economics of farm subsidies.

“In that old system, it took ten or fifteen or twenty units of energy to
produce one unit of food energy,” Funes said. “At first we didn’t
care so much about economics—we had to produce no matter what.” Even in
the salad days of Soviet-backed agriculture, however, some of the local
agronomists were beginning to think the whole system was slightly insane.
“We were realizing just how inefficient it was. So a few of us were
looking for other ways. In cattle we began to look at things like using
legumes to fix nitrogen in the pasture so we could cut down on
fertilizer,” Funes said. And Cuba was inefficient in more than its use of
energy. Out at the Agrarian University of Havana on the city’s outskirts,
agriculture professor Nilda Pérez Consuegra remembers how a few of her
colleagues began as early as the 1970s to notice that the massive
“calendar spraying” of pesticides was breeding insect resistance. They
began working on developing strains of bacteria and experimenting with
raising beneficial insects.

They could do nothing to forestall the collapse of the early 1990s, though.
White Udder’s descendants simply died in the fields, unable to survive on
the tropical grasses that had once sustained the native cattle. “We lost
tens of thousands of animals. And even if they survived, they couldn’t
produce anything like the same kind of milk once there was no more
grain—seven or eight liters a day if we were lucky,” Funes said. Fairly
quickly, however, the agricultural scientists began fanning out around the
country to help organize a recovery. They worked without much in the way of
resources, but they found ways.

* * *

One afternoon, near an organopónico in central Havana, I knocked on the
door of a small two-room office, the local Center for Reproduction of
Entomophages and Entomopathogens. There are 280 such offices spread around
the country, each manned by one or two agronomists. Here, Jorge Padrón, a
heavyset and earnest fellow, was working with an ancient Soviet
refrigerator and autoclave (the writing on the gauges was in Cyrillic) and
perhaps three hundred glass beakers with cotton gauze stoppers. Farmers and
backyard gardeners from around the district would bring him sick plants,
and he’d look at them under the microscope and tell them what to do.
Perhaps he’d hand them a test tube full of a trichoderma fungus, which
he’d grown on a medium of residue from sugarcane processing, and tell
them to germinate the seed in a dilute solution; maybe he’d pull a vial
of some natural bacteria—verticillium lecanii or beauveria
bassiana—from a rusty coffee can. “It is easier to use chemicals. You
see some trouble in your tomatoes, and chemicals take care of it right
away,” he said. Over the long run, though, thinking about the whole
system yields real benefits. “Our work is really about preparing the
fields so plants will be stronger. But it works.” It is the reverse, that
is, of the Green Revolution that spread across the globe in the 1960s, an
industrialization of the food system that relied on irrigation, oil (both
for shipping and fertilization), and the massive application of chemicals
to counter every problem.

The localized application of research practiced in Cuba has fallen by the
wayside in countries where corporate agriculture holds sway. I remember
visiting a man in New Hampshire who was raising organic apples for his
cider mill. Apples are host to a wide variety of pests and blights, and if
you want advice about what chemical to spray on them, the local
agricultural extension agent has one pamphlet after another with the
answers, at least in part, because pesticide companies like Monsanto fund
huge amounts of the research that goes on at the land-grant universities.
But no one could tell my poor orchardist anything about how to organically
control the pests on his apples, even though there must have been a huge
body of such knowledge once upon a time, and he ended up relying on a
beautifully illustrated volume published in the 1890s. In Cuba, however,
all the equivalents of Texas A&M or the University of Nebraska are filled
with students looking at antagonist fungi, lion-ant production for sweet
potato weevil control, how to intercrop tomatoes and sesame to control the
tobacco whitefly, how much yield grows when you mix green beans and cassava
in the same rows (60 percent), what happens to plantain production when you
cut back on the fertilizer and substitute a natural bacterium called A.
chroococcum (it stays the same), how much you can reduce fertilizer on
potatoes if you grow a rotation of jack beans to fix nitrogen (75 percent),
and on and on and on. “At first we had all kinds of problems,” said a
Japanese-Cuban organoponicist named Olga Oye Gómez, who grows two acres of
specialty crops that Cubans are only now starting to eat: broccoli,
cauliflower, and the like. “We lost lots of harvests. But the engineers
came and showed us the right biopesticides. Every year we get a little
better.”

Not every problem requires a Ph.D. I visited Olga’s farm in midsummer,
when her rows were under siege from slugs, a problem for which the Cuban
solution is the same as in my own New England tomato patch: a saucer full
of beer. In fact, since the pressure is always on to reduce the use of
expensive techniques, there’s a premium on old-fashioned answers.
Consider the question of how you plow a field when the tractor that you
used to use requires oil you can’t afford and spare parts you can’t
obtain. Cuba—which in the 1980s had more tractors per hectare than
California, according to Nilda Pérez—suddenly found itself relying on
the very oxen it once had scorned as emblems of its peasant past. There
were perhaps 50,000 teams of the animals left in Cuba in 1990, and maybe
that many farmers who still knew how to use them. “None of the large
state farms or even the mechanized cooperatives had the necessary
infrastructure to incorporate animal traction,” wrote Arcadio Ríos, of
the Agricultural Mechanization Research Institute, in a volume titled
Sustainable Agriculture and Resistance. “Pasture and feed production did
not exist on site; and at first there were problems of feed
transportation.” Veterinarians were not up on their oxen therapy.

But that changed. Ríos’s institute developed a new multi-plow for
plowing, harrowing, riding, and tilling, specially designed not “to
invert the topsoil layer” and decrease fertility. Harness shops were set
up to start producing reins and yokes, and the number of blacksmith shops
quintupled. The ministry of agriculture stopped slaughtering oxen for food,
and “essentially all the bulls in good physical condition were selected
and delivered to cooperative and state farms.” Oxen demonstrations were
held across the country. (The socialist love of exact statistics has not
waned, so it can be said that in 1997 alone, 2,344 oxen events took place,
drawing 64,279 participants.) By the millennium there were 400,000 oxen
teams plying the country’s fields. And one big result, according to a
score of Ph.D. theses, is a dramatic reduction in soil compaction, as
hooves replaced tires. “Across the country we see dry soils turning
healthier, loamier,” Professor Pérez said. Soon an ambitious young Cuban
will be able to get a master’s degree in oxen management.

* * *

One question is: How resilient is the new Cuban agriculture? Despite ever
tougher restrictions on U.S. travel and remittances from relatives, the
country has managed to patch together a pretty robust tourist industry in
recent years: Havana’s private restaurants fill nightly with Canadians
and Germans. The government’s investment in the pharmaceutical industry
appears to be paying off, too, and now people who are fed by ox teams are
producing genetically engineered medicines at some of the world’s more
advanced labs. Foreign exchange is beginning to flow once more; already
many of the bicycles in the streets have been replaced by buses and
motorbikes and Renaults. Cuba is still the most unconsumer place I’ve
ever been—there’s even less to buy than in the old Soviet Union—but
sooner or later Castro will die. What then?

Most of the farmers and agronomists I interviewed professed conviction that
the agricultural changes ran so deep they would never be eroded. Pérez,
however, did allow that there were a lot of younger oxen drivers who
yearned to return to the cockpits of big tractors, and according to news
reports some of the country’s genetic engineers are trying to clone White
Udder herself from leftover tissue. If Cuba simply opens to the world
economy—if Castro gets his professed wish and the U.S. embargo simply
disappears, replaced by a free-trade regime—it’s very hard to see how
the sustainable farming would survive for long. We use pesticides and
fertilizers because they make for incredibly cheap food. None of that
dipping the seedling roots in some bacillus solution, or creeping along the
tomato rows looking for aphids, or taking the oxen off to be shoed. Our
industrial agriculture—at least as heavily subsidized by Washington as
Cuba’s farming once was subsidized by Moscow—simply overwhelms its
neighbors. For instance, consider Mexico and corn. Not long ago the
journalist Michael Pollan told the story of what happened when NAFTA opened
that country’s markets to a flood of cheap, heavily subsidized U.S.
maize: the price fell by half, and 1.3 million small farmers were put out
of business, forced to sell their land to larger, more corporate farms that
could hope to compete by mechanizing (and lobbying for subsidies of their
own). A study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace enumerated
the environmental costs: fertilizer runoff suffocating the Sea of Cortéz,
water shortages getting worse as large-scale irrigation booms. Genetically
modified corn varieties from the United States are contaminating the
original strains of the crop, which began in southern Mexico.

Cuba already buys a certain amount of food from the United States, under an
exemption from the embargo passed during the Clinton Administration. So
far, though, the buying is mostly strategic, spread around the country in
an effort to build political support for a total end to the embargo. No one
ever accused the Cubans of being dumb, said Peters of the Lexington
Institute. “They know the congressional district that every apple, every
chicken leg, every grain of wheat, comes from.” But that trickle, in a
free-trading, post-Castro Cuba, would likely become, as in Mexico and
virtually every other country on earth, a torrent, and one that would wash
away much of the country’s agricultural experiment.

* * *

You can also ask the question in reverse, though: Does the Cuban experiment
mean anything for the rest of the world? An agronomist would call the
country’s farming “low-input,” the reverse of the Green Revolution
model, with its reliance on irrigation, oil, and chemistry. If we’re
running out of water in lots of places (the water table beneath China and
India’s grain-growing plains is reportedly dropping by meters every
year), and if the oil and natural gas used to make fertilizer and run our
megafarms are changing the climate (or running out), and if the pesticides
are poisoning farmers and killing other organisms, and if everything at the
Stop & Shop has traveled across a continent to get there and tastes pretty
much like crap, might there be some real future for low-input farming for
the rest of us? Or are its yields simply too low? Would we all starve
without the supermarket and the corporate farm?

It’s not a question academics have devoted a great deal of attention
to—who would pay to sponsor the research? And some clearly think the
question isn’t even worth raising. Dennis Avery, director of global-food
issues at the conservative Hudson Institute, compared Cuba with China
during the Great Leap Forward: “Instead of building fertilizer factories,
Mao told farmers to go get leaves and branches from the hillsides to mulch
the rice paddies. It produced the worst soil erosion China has seen.”
Raising the planet’s crops organically would mean “you’d need the
manure from seven or eight billion cattle; you’d lose most of the
world’s wildlife because you’d have to clear all the forests.”

But strict organic agriculture isn’t what the Cubans practice (remember
those pesticides for the potato bugs). “If you’re going to grow
irrigated rice, you’ll almost always need some fertilizer,” said Jules
Pretty, a professor at the University of Essex’s Department of Biological
Sciences, who has looked at sustainable agriculture in fields around the
world. “The problem is being judicious and careful.” It’s very clear,
he added, “that Cuba is not an anomaly. All around the world small-scale
successes are being scaled up to regional level.” Farmers in northeast
Thailand, for instance, suffered when their rice markets disappeared in the
Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. “They’d borrowed money to
invest in ‘modern agriculture,’ but they couldn’t get the price they
needed. A movement emerged, farmers saying, ‘Maybe we should just
concentrate on local markets, and not grow for Bangkok, not for other
countries.’ They’ve started using a wide range of sustainability
approaches—polyculture, tree crops and agroforestry, fish ponds. One
hundred and fifty thousand farmers have made the shift in the last three
years.”

Almost certainly, he said, such schemes are as productive as the
monocultures they replaced. “Rice production goes down, but the
production of all sorts of other things, like leafy vegetables, goes up.”
And simply cutting way down on the costs of pesticides turns many bankrupt
peasants solvent. “The farmer field schools began in Indonesia, with rice
growers showing one another how to manage their paddies to look after
beneficial insects,” just the kinds of predators the Cubans were growing
in their low-tech labs. “There’s been a huge decrease in costs and not
much of a change in yields.”

And what about the heartlands of industrial agriculture, the U.S. plains,
for instance? “So much depends on how you measure efficiency,” Pretty
said. “You don’t get something for nothing.” Cheap fertilizer and
pesticide displace more expensive labor and knowledge—that’s why 219
American farms have gone under every day for the last fifty years and yet
we’re producing ever more grain and a loaf of bread might as well be
free. On the other hand, there are those bereft Midwest counties. And the
plumes of pesticide poison spreading through groundwater. And the dead zone
in the Gulf of Mexico into which the tide of nitrogen washes each planting
season. And the cloud of carbon dioxide that puffs out from the top of the
fertilizer factories. If you took those things seriously, you might decide
that having one percent of your population farming was not such a wondrous
feat after all.

* * *

The American model of agriculture is pretty much what people mean when they
talk about the Green Revolution: high-yielding crop varieties, planted in
large monocultures, bathed in the nurturing flow of petrochemicals, often
supported by government subsidy, designed to offer low-priced food in
sufficient quantity to feed billions. Despite its friendly moniker, many
environmentalists and development activists around the planet have grown to
despair about everything the Green Revolution stands for. Like Pretty, they
propose a lowercase greener counterrevolution: endlessly diverse, employing
the insights of ecology instead of the brute force of chemistry, designed
to feed people but also keep them on the land. And they have some allies
even in the rich countries—that’s who fills the stalls at the
farmers’ markets blooming across North America.

But those farmers’ markets are still a minuscule leaf on the giant stalk
of corporate agribusiness, and it’s not clear that, for all the paeans to
the savor of a local tomato, they’ll ever amount to much more. Such
efforts are easily co-opted—when organic produce started to take off, for
instance, industrial growers soon took over much of the business, planting
endless monoculture rows of organic lettuce that in every respect, save the
lack of pesticides, mirrored all the flaws of conventional agriculture. (By
some calculations, the average bite of organic food at your supermarket has
traveled even farther than the 1,500-mile journey taken by the average bite
of conventional produce.) That is to say, in a world where we’re eager
for the lowest possible price, it’s extremely difficult to do anything
unconventional on a scale large enough to matter.

And it might be just as hard in Cuba were Cuba free. I mean, would Salcines
be able to pay sixty-four people to man his farm or would he have to
replace most of them with chemicals? If he didn’t, would his customers
pay higher prices for his produce or would they prefer lower-cost lettuce
arriving from California’s Imperial Valley? Would he be able to hold on
to his land or would there be some more profitable use for it? For that
matter, would many people want to work on his farm if they had a real range
of options? In a free political system, would the power of, say, pesticide
suppliers endanger the government subsidy for producing predatory insects
in local labs? Would Cuba not, in a matter of several growing seasons, look
a lot like the rest of the world? Does an organopónico depend on a fixed
ballot?

There’s clearly something inherently destructive about an authoritarian
society—it’s soul-destroying, if nothing else. Although many of the
Cubans I met were in some sense proud of having stood up to the Yanquis for
four decades, Cuba was not an overwhelmingly happy place. Weary, I’d say.
Waiting for a more normal place in the world. And poor, much too poor. Is
it also possible, though, that there’s something inherently destructive
about a globalized free-market society—that the eternal race for
efficiency, when raised to a planetary scale, damages the environment, and
perhaps the community, and perhaps even the taste of a carrot? Is it
possible that markets, at least for food, may work better when they’re
smaller and more isolated? The next few decades may be about answering that
question. It’s already been engaged in Europe, where people are really
debating subsidies for small farmers, and whether or not they want the
next, genetically modified, stage of the Green Revolution, and how much
it’s worth paying for Slow Food. It’s been engaged in parts of the
Third World, where in India peasants threw out the country’s most
aggressive free-marketeers in the last election, sensing that the shape of
their lives was under assault. Not everyone is happy with the set of
possibilities that the multinational corporate world provides. People are
beginning to feel around for other choices. The world isn’t going to look
like Cuba—Cuba won’t look like Cuba once Cubans have some say in the
matter. But it may not necessarily look like Nebraska either.

* * *

The choices are about values,” Pretty said. Which is true, at least for
us, at least for the moment. And when the choices are about values, we
generally pick the easiest and cheapest way, the one that requires thinking
the least. Inertia is our value above all others. Inertia was the one
option the Cubans didn’t have; they needed that meal a day back, and
given that Castro was unwilling to let loose the reins, they had a limited
number of choices about how to get it. “In some ways the special period
was a gift to us,” said Funes, the forage expert, the guy who lost twenty
pounds, the guy who went from thinking about White Udder to thinking about
oxen teams. “It made it easier because we had no choice. Or we did, but
the choice was will we cry or will we work. There was a strong desire to
lie down and cry, but we decided to do things instead.”