Fascinating article on Cuba's green revolution

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I found this article great,

it shows that the closer to a Vegan diet you get the closer TRUE sustainability becomes

enjoy

Craig

 

 

Harper's Magazine via Enrionmental Observatory - Apr 19, 2005http://www.environmentalobservatory.org/headlines.cfm?refID=72460Harper's - April 2005 p. 61-69 (9 pp.)THE CUBA DIETTHIS ONE-PARTY POLICE STATE MAY HAVE CREATED THE WORLD'S LARGESTWORKING MODEL OF A SEMI-SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTUREby Bill McKibbenWhat will you be eating when the revolution comes?The pictures hanging in Havana's Museum of the Revolution document therise (or, depending on your perspective, the fall) of Cuba in the yearsafter Castro's revolt, in 1959. On my visit there last summer, I walkedthrough gallery after gallery, gazing upon the stock images of socialistglory: "anti- imperialist volunteers" fighting in Angola, Cuban boxerswinning Olympic medals, five patients at a time undergoing eye surgeryusing a "method created by Soviet academician Fyodorov." Mostly, though, Isaw pictures of farm equipment. "Manual operation is replaced bymechanized processes," read the caption under a picture of some heavyMarxist metal cruising a vast field. Another caption boasted that by 1990,seven bulk sugar terminals had been built, each with a shipping capacityof 75,000 tons a day. In true Soviet style, the Cubans were demonstratinga deeply held (and to our eyes now almost kitschy) socialist helief thatsalvation lay in the size of harvests, in the number of tractors, and inthe glorious heroic machinery that would straighten the tired backs of anoppressed peasantry-and so I learned that day that within thirty years ofthe people's uprising, the sugarcane industry alone employed 2,850sugarcane lifting machines, 12,278 tractors, 29,857 carts, and 4,277combines.Such was communism. But then I turned a corner and the pictureschanged. The sharply focused shots of combines and Olympians now weremuddied, as if Cubans had forgotten how to print photos or, as was morelikely the case, had run short of darkroom chemicals. I had reached thegallery of the "Special Period." That is to say, I had reached the pointin Cuban history where everything came undone. With the sudden collapse ofthe Soviet Union, Cuba fell off a cliff of its own. All those carts andcombines had been the products of an insane "economics" underwritten bythe Eastern bloc for ideological purposes. Castro spent three decadesgrowing sugar and shipping it to Russia and East Germany, both of whichpaid a price well above the world level, and both of which sent the shipsback to Havana filled with wheat, rice, and more tractors. When all thatdisappeared, literally almost overnight, Cuba had nowhere to turn. TheUnited States, Cuba's closest neighbor, enforced a strict trade embargo(which it strengthened in 1992, and again in 1996) and Cuba had next to noforeign exchange with anyone else-certainly the new Russia no longerwanted to pay a premium on Cuban sugar for the simple glory of supportinga 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 theinternational economic system, a moon base whose supply ships had suddenlystopped coming. There were other deeply isolated places on theplanet-North Korea, say, or Burma-but not many. And so most observerswaited 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 itsSunday magazine titled "The Last Days of Castro's Cuba"; in its editorialcolumn, the paper opined that "the Cuban dictator has painted himself intohis own corner. Fidel Castro's reign deserves to end in homegrownfailure." Without oil, even public transportation shut down-for many,going to work meant a two-hour bike trip. Television shut off early in theevening to save electricity; movie theaters went dark. People tried toimprovise their ways around shortages. "For drinking glasses we'd get beerbottles and cut the necks off with wire," one professor told me. "Wedidn't have razor blades, till someone in the city came up with a way toresharpen old ones."But it's hard to improvise food. So much of what Cubans had eaten hadcome straight from Eastern Europe, and most of the rest was grownindustrial-style on big state farms. All those combines needed fuel andspare parts, and all those big rows of grain and vegetables neededpesticides and fertilizer-none of which were available. In 1989, accordingto the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the average Cubanwas eating 3,000 calories per day. Four years later that figure had fallento 1,900. It was as if they suddenly had to skip one meal a day, everyday, week after month after year. The host of one cooking show on theshortened TV schedule urged Cubans to fry up "steaks" made from grapefruitpeels covered in bread crumbs. "I lost twenty pounds myself," saidFernando Funes, a government agronomist.Now, just by looking across the table, I saw that Fernando Funes hadsince gained the twenty pounds back. In fact, he had a little paunch, asdo many Cuban men of a certain age. What happened was simple, ifunexpected. Cuba had learned to stop exporting sugar and instead startedgrowing its own food again, growing it on small private farms andthousands of pocket-sized urban market gardens-and, lacking chemicals andfertilizers, much of that food became de facto organic. Somehow, thecombination worked. Cubans have as much food as they did before the SovietUnion collapsed. They're still short of meat, and the milk supply remainsa real problem, but their caloric intake has returned to normal-they'vegotten that meal back.In so doing they have created what may be the world's largest workingmodel of a semi-sustainable agriculture, one that doesn't rely nearly asheavily as the rest of the world does on oil, on chemicals, on shippingvast quantities of food back and forth. They import some of their foodfrom abroad-a certain amount of rice from Vietnam, even some apples andbeef and such from the United States. But mostly they grow their own, andwith less ecological disruption than in most places. In recent yearsorganic farmers have visited the island in increasing numbers andcelebrated its accomplishment. As early as 1999 the Swedish parliamentawarded the Organic Farming Group its Right Livelihood Award, often styledthe "alternative Nobel," and Peter Rosset, the former executive directorof the American advocacy group Food First, heralded the "potentiallyenormous implications" of Cuba's new agricultural system.The island's success may not carry any larger lesson. Cubanagriculture isn't economically competitive with the industrial farmingexemplified by a massive food producer across the Caribbean, mostlybecause it is highly labor- intensive. Moreover, Cuba is a one-partypolice state filled with political prisons, which may have some slighteffect 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 sectionsof the world might be in for "Special Periods" of their own. Climatechange, or the end of cheap oil, or the depletion of irrigation water, orthe chaos of really widespread terrorism, or some other malign force mightbegin to make us pay more attention to the absolute bottom-line questionof how we get our dinner (a question that only a very few people, for avery short period of time, have ever been able to ignore). No one'spredicting a collapse like the one Cuba endured-probably no modern economyhas ever undergone such a shock. But if things got gradually harder? Afterall, our planet is an island, too. It's somehow useful to know thatsomeone has already run the experiment.Villa Alamar was a planned community built outside Havana at theheight of the Soviet glory days; its crumbling, precast-concreteapartments would look at home (though less mildewed) in Ljubljana or Omsk.Even the names there speak of the past: a central square, for instance, iscalled Parque Hanoi. But right next to the Parque Hanoi is the ViveroOrganopónico Alamar.Organopónico is the Cuban term for any urban garden. (It seems thatbefore the special period began, the country had a few demonstrationhydroponic gardens, much bragged about in official propaganda and quicklyabandoned when the crisis hit. The high-tech-sounding name stuck, however,recycled to reflect the new, humbler reality.) There are thousands oforganopónicos in Cuba, more than 200 in the Havana area alone, but theVivero Organoponico Alamar is especially beautiful: a few acres ofvegetables attached to a shady yard packed with potted plants for sale,birds in wicker cages, a cafeteria, and a small market where a steady lineof local people come to buy tomatoes, lettuce, oregano,potatoes-twenty-five crops were listed on the blackboard the day Ivisited-for their supper. Sixty-four people farm this tiny spread. Theirchief is Miguel Salcines López, a tall, middle-aged, intense, and quitedelightful man."This land was slated for a hospital and sports complex," he said,leading me quickly through his tiny empire. "But when the food crisiscame, the government decided this was more important," and they letSalcines hegin 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 offa pyramidal mini-greenhouse in which he raises seedlings, in the beliefthat its shape "focuses energy." Magnets on his irrigation lines, hebelieves, help "reduce the surface tension" of the water- give him aponytail and he'd fit right in at the Marin farmers' market. Taking a more"traditional" organic approach, Salcines has also planted basil andmarigolds at the row ends to attract beneficial insects, and he rotatessweet potato through the rows every few plantings to cleanse the soil;he's even got neem trees to supply natural pesticides. But Salcines is notobsessive even about organicity. Like gardeners everywhere, he has troublewith potato bugs, and he doesn't hesitate to use man-made pesticide tofight them. He doesn't use artificial fertilizer, both because it isexpensive and because he doesn't need it-indeed, the garden makes moneyselling 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, Salcineslaid out the finances of his cooperative farm. For the last six months, hesaid, 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 theprofit for the whole year would he 393,000 pesos. Half of that he wouldreinvest in enlarging the farm; the rest would go into a profit-sharingplan. 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. Ablackboard above the lunch line reminded employees what their monthlyshare of the profit would be: depending on how long they'd been at thefarm, and how well they produced, they would get 291 pesos this month,almost doubling their base salary. The people worked hard, and if theydidn't their colleagues didn't tolerate them.What is happening at the Vivero Organoponico Alamar certainly isn'tunfettered capitalism, but it's not exactly collective farming either.Mostly it's incredibly productive-sixty-four people earn a reasonableliving on this small site, and the surrounding neighbors get an awful lotof their diet from its carefully tended rows. You see the same kind ofproduction all over the city- every formerly vacant lot in Havana seems tobe a small farm. The city grew 300,000 tons of food last year, nearly itsentire vegetable supply and more than a token amount of its rice and meat,said Egidio Páez Medina, who oversees the organopónicos from a smalloffice on a highway at the edge of town. "Tens of thousands of people areemployed. 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 willdouble." On average, Páez said, each square meter of urban farm producesfive kilograms of food a year. That's a lot. (And it's not just cabbageand 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 itsmost recent report, notes that the government "restricts nearly allavenues of political dissent,severely curtails basic rights to freeexpression," and that "the government's intolerance of dissenting voicesintensified considerably in 2003." It's as if you went to Whole Foods andnoticed a guy over by the soymilk with a truncheon. Cuba is a weirdpolitical system all its own, one that's been headed by the same guy forforty-five years. And the nature of that system, and that guy, hadsomething 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 enterpriseit was able to liberate all kinds of pent-up energy. Philip Peters, a Cubaanalyst at the conservative Lexington Institute, has documented how thecountry redistributed as much as two thirds of state lands to cooperativesand individual farmers and, as with the organoponko in Alamar, let themsell their surplus above a certain quota. There's no obvious name for thissystem. It's a lot like sharecropping, and it shares certain key featureswith, say, serfdom, not to mention high feudalism. It is not free in anyof the ways we use the word-who the hell wants to say thank you to thegovernment for "allowing" you to sell your "surplus"? But it's alsodifferent from monolithic state communism.In 1995, as the program geared up, the markets were selling 390million pounds of produce; sales volume tripled in the next three years.Now the markets bustle, stacked deep with shiny heaps of bananas and driedbeans, mangos and tomatoes. But the prices, though they've dropped overthe years, are still beyond the reach of the poorest Cubans. And thegovernment, which still sells every citizen a basic monthly food rationfor just a few pesos, has also tried to reregulate some of the trade atthe farmers' markets, fearing they were creating a two-tier system. "It'snot reform like you've seen in China, where they're devolving a lot ofeconomic decision making out to the private sector," Peters said. "Theymade a decision to graft some market mechanisms onto what remains a fairlystatist model. It could work better. But it has worked."Fidel Castro, as even his fiercest opponents would admit, has almostfrom the day he took power spent lavishly on the country's educationalsystem. Cuba's ratio of teachers to students is akin to Sweden's; peoplewho want to go to college go to college. Which turns out to be important,because farming, especially organic farming, especially when you're notused to doing it, is no simple task. You don't just tear down the fencearound the vacant lot and hand someone a hoe, quoting him some Maoistcouplet about the inevitable victory of the worker. The soil's no good atfirst, the bugs can't wait to attack. You need information to make a go ofit. To a very large extent, the rise of Cuba's semiorganic agriculture isalmost as much an invention of science and technology as the high-inputtractor farming it replaced, which is another thing that makes this storyso odd."I came to Havana at the time of the revolution, in 1960, to startuniversity," said Fernando Funes, who now leads the national Pasture andForage Research Unit. "We went from 18,000 university students before therevolution to 200,000 after, and a big proportion were in agriculturalcareers. People specialized in soil fertility, or they specialized inpesticides. They were very specialized. Probably too specialized. Butyields were going up." Yields were going up because of the wildlyhigh-input farming. In the town of Nuevo Gerona, for instance, there is astatue of a cow named White Udder, descended from a line of CanadianHolsteins. In the early 1980s she was the most productive cow on the faceof the earth, giving 110 liters of milk a day, 27,000 liters in a singlelactation. Guinness certified her geysers of milk. Fidel journeyed out tothe countryside to lovingly stroke her hide. She was a paragon ofscientific management, with a carefully controlled diet of grainconcentrates. Most of that grain, however, came from abroad ("this is toohot 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, atestimony to the kinky economics of farm subsidies."In that old system, it took ten or fifteen or twenty units of energyto produce one unit of food energy," Funes said. "At first we didn't careso much about economics-we had to produce no matter what." Even in thesalad days of Soviet-backed agriculture, however, some of the localagronomists were beginning to think the whole system was slightly insane."We were realizing just how inefficient it was. So a few of us werelooking for other ways. In cattle we began to look at things like usinglegumes to fix nitrogen in the pasture so we could cut down onfertilizer," Funes said. And Cuba was inefficient in more than its use ofenergy. Out at the Agrarian University of Havana on the city's outskirts,agriculture professor Nilda Pérez Consuegra remembers how a few of hercolleagues began as early as the 1970s to notice that the massive"calendar spraying" of pesticides was breeding insect resistance. Theybegan working on developing strains of bacteria and experimenting withraising 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 tosurvive on the tropical grasses that had once sustained the native cattle."We lost tens of thousands of animals. And even if they survived, theycouldn't produce anything like the same kind of milk once there was nomore grain-seven or eight liters a day if we were lucky," Funes said.Fairly quickly, however, the agricultural scientists began fanning outaround the country to help organize a recovery. They worked without muchin the way of resources, but they found ways.One afternoon, near an organopónico in central Havana, I knocked onthe door of a small two-room office, the local Center for Reproduction ofEntomophages and Entomopathogens. There are 280 such offices spread aroundthe country, each manned by one or two agronomists. Here, Jorge Padrón, aheavyset and earnest fellow, was working with an ancient Sovietrefrigerator and autoclave (the writing on the gauges was in Cyrillic) andperhaps three hundred glass beakers with cotton gauze stoppers. Farmersand backyard gardeners from around the district would bring him sickplants, and he'd look at them under the microscope and tell them what todo. Perhaps he'd hand them a test tube full of a trichoderma fungus, whichhe'd grown on a medium of residue from sugarcane processing, and tell themto germinate the seed in a dilute solution; maybe he'd pull a vial of somenatural bacteria-verticillium lecanii or beauveria bassiana-from a rustycoffee can. "It is easier to use chemicals. You see some trouble in yourtomatoes, and chemicals take care of it right away," he said. Over thelong 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 thatspread across the globe in the 1960s, an industrialization of the foodsystem that relied on irrigation, oil (both for shipping andfertilization), and the massive application of chemicals to counter everyproblem.The localized application of research practiced in Cuba has fallen bythe wayside in countries where corporate agriculture holds sway. Iremember visiting a man in New Hampshire who was raising organic applesfor his cider mill. Apples are host to a wide variety of pests andblights, and if you want advice about what chemical to spray on them, thelocal agricultural extension agent has one pamphlet after another with theanswers, at least in part, because pesticide companies like Monsanto fundhuge amounts of the research that goes on at the land-grant universities.But no one could tell my poor orchardist anything about how to organicallycontrol the pests on his apples, even though there must have been a hugebody of such knowledge once upon a time, and he ended up relying on abeautifully illustrated volume published in the 1890s. In Cuba, however,all the equivalents of Texas A & M or the University of Nebraska are filledwith students looking at antagonist fungi, lion-ant production for sweetpotato weevil control, how to intercrop tomatoes and sesame to control thetobacco whitefly, how much yield grows when you mix green beans andcassava in the same rows (60 percent), what happens to plantain productionwhen you cut back on the fertilizer and substitute a natural bacteriumcalled A. chroococcum (it stays the same), how much you can reducefertilizer on potatoes if you grow a rotation of jack beans to fixnitrogen (75 percent), and on and on and on. "At first we had all kinds ofproblems," said a Japanese-Cuban organoponicist named Olga Oye Gómez, whogrows two acres of specialty crops that Cubans are only now starting toeat: broccoli, cauliflower, and the like. "We lost lots of harvests. Butthe engineers came and showed us the right biopesticides. Every year weget 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 Cubansolution is the same as in my own New England tomato patch: a saucer fullof beer. In fact, since the pressure is always on to reduce the use ofexpensive techniques, there's a premium on old-fashioned answers. Considerthe question of how you plow a held when the tractor that you used to userequires oil you can't afford and spare parts you can't obtain. Cuba-whichin the 1980s had more tractors per hectare than California, according toNilda Pérez-suddenly found itself relying on the very oxen it once hadscorned as emblems of its peasant past. There were perhaps 50,000 teams ofthe animals left in Cuba in 1990, and maybe that many farmers who stillknew how to use them. "None of the large state farms or even themechanized cooperatives had the necessary infrastructure to incorporateanimal traction," wrote Arcadio Ríos, of the Agricultural MechanizationResearch Institute, in a volume titled Sustainable Agriculture andResistance. "Pasture and feed production did not exist on site; and atfirst there were problems of feed transportation." Veterinarians were notup on their oxen therapy.But that changed. Ríos's institute developed a new multi-plow forplowing, harrowing, riding, and tilling, specially designed not "to invertthe topsoil layer" and decrease fertility. Harness shops were set up tostart producing reins and yokes, and the number of blacksmith shopsquintupled. The ministry of agriculture stopped slaughtering oxen forfood, and "essentially all the bulls in good physical condition wereselected and delivered to cooperative and state farms." Oxendemonstrations were held across the country. (The socialist love of exactstatistics has not waned, so it can be said that in 1997 alone, 2,344 oxenevents took place, drawing 64,279 participants.) By the millennium therewere 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 soilcompaction, as hooves replaced tires. "Across the country we see dry soilsturning healthier, loamier," Professor Pérez said. Soon an ambitious youngCuban will be able to get a master's degree in oxen management,One question is: How resilient is the new Cuban agriculture? Despiteever tougher restrictions on U.S. travel and remittances from relatives,the country has managed to patch together a pretty robust tourist industryin recent years: Havana's private restaurants fill nightly with Canadiansand Germans. The government's investment in the pharmaceutical industryappears to be paying off, too, and now people who are fed by ox teams areproducing genetically engineered medicines at some of the world's moreadvanced labs. Foreign exchange is beginning to flow once more; alreadymany of the bicycles in the streets have been replaced by buses andmotorbikes and Renaults. Cuba is still the most unconsumer place I've everbeen-there's even less to buy than in the old Soviet Union-but sooner orlater Castro will die. What then?Most of the farmers and agronomists I interviewed professed convictionthat the agricultural changes ran so deep they would never be eroded.Pérez, however, did allow that there were a lot of younger oxen driverswho yearned to return to the cockpits of big tractors, and according tonews reports some of the country's genetic engineers are trying to cloneWhite Udder herself from leftover tissue. If Cuba simply opens to theworld economy-if Castro gets his professed wish and the U.S. embargosimply disappears, replaced by a free-trade regime-it's very hard to seehow the sustainable farming would survive for long. We use pesticides andfertilizers because they make for incredibly cheap food. None of thatdipping the seedling roots in some bacillus solution, or creeping alongthe tomato rows looking for aphids, or taking the oxen off to be shoed.Our industrial agriculture-at least as heavily subsidized by Washington asCuba's farming once was subsidized by Moscow-simply overwhelms itsneighbors. For instance, consider Mexico and corn. Not long ago thejournalist Michael Pollan told the story of what happened when NAFTAopened 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 outof business, forced to sell their land to larger, more corporate farmsthat could hope to compete by mechanizing (and lobbying for subsidies oftheir own). A study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peaceenumerated the environmental costs: fertilizer runoff suffocating the Seaof Cortéz, water shortages getting worse as large-scale irrigation booms.Genetically modified corn varieties from the United States arecontaminating the original strains of the crop, which began in southernMexico.Cuba already buys a certain amount of food from the United States,under an exemption from the embargo passed during the ClintonAdministration. So far, though, the buying is mostly strategic, spreadaround the country in an effort to build political support for a total endto the embargo. No one ever accused the Cubans of being dumb, said Petersof the Lexington Institute. "They know the congressional district thatevery apple, every chicken leg, every grain of wheat, comes from." Butthat trickle, in a freetrading, post-Castro Cuba, would likely become, asin Mexico and virtually every other country on earth, a torrent, and onethat would wash away much of the country's agricultural experiment.You can also ask the question in reverse, though: Does the Cubanexperiment mean anything for the rest of the world? An agronomist wouldcall the country's farming "low-input," the tevetse of the GreenRevolution model, with its reliance on irrigation, oil, and chemistry. Ifwe're running out of water in lots of places (the water table beneathChina and India's grain-growing plains is reportedly dropping by metersevery year), and if the oil and natural gas used to make fertilizer andrun our megafarms are changing the climate (or running out), and if thepesticides are poisoning farmers and killing other organisms, and ifeverything at the Stop & Shop has traveled across a continent to get thereand tastes pretty much like crap, might there be some real future forlow-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 attentionto-who would pay to sponsor the research? And some clearly think thequestion isn't even worth raising. Dennis Avery, director of globalfoodissues at the conservative Hudson Institute, compared Cuba with Chinaduring the Great Leap Forward: "Instead of building fertilizer factories,Mao told farmers to go get leaves and branches from the hillsides to mulchthe rice paddies. It produced the worst soil erosion China has seen."Raising the planet's crops organically would mean "you'd need the manurefrom seven or eight billion cattle; you'd lose most of the world'swildlife 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 growirrigated rice, you'll almost always need some fertilizer," said JulesPretty, a professor at the University of Essex's Department of BiologicalSciences, who has looked at sustainable agriculture in fields around theworld. "The problem is being judicious and careful." It's very clear, headded, "that Cuba is not an anomaly. All around the world small-scalesuccesses are being scaled up to regional level." Farmers in northeastThailand, for instance, suffered when their rice markets disappeared inthe Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. "They'd borrowed money toinvest in 'modern agriculture,' but they couldn't get the price theyneeded. A movement emerged, farmers saying, 'Maybe we should justconcentrate on local markets, and not grow for Bangkok, not for othercountries.' They've started using a wide range of sustainabilityapproaches- polyculture, tree crops and agroforestry, fish ponds. Onehundred and fifty thousand farmers have made the shift in the last threeyears."Almost certainly, he said, such schemes are as productive as themonocultures they replaced. "Rice production goes down, but the productionof all sorts of other things, like leafy vegetables, goes up." And simplycutting way down on the costs of pesticides turns many bankrupt peasantssolvent. "The farmer field schools began in Indonesia, with rice growersshowing one another how to manage their paddies to look after beneficialinsects," just the kinds of predators the Cubans were growing in theirlow-tech labs. "There's been a huge decrease in costs and not much of achange 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 andpesticide displace more expensive labor and knowledge-that's why 219American farms have gone under every day for the last fifty years and yetwe'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 plumesof pesticide poison spreading through groundwater. And the dead zone inthe Gulf of Mexico into which the tide of nitrogen washes each plantingseason. And the cloud of carbon dioxide that puffs out from the top of thefertilizer factories. If you took those things seriously, you might decidethat having one percent of your population farming was not such a wondrousfeat after all.The American model of agriculture is pretty much what people mean whenthey talk about the Green Revolution: high-yielding crop varieties,planted in large monocultures, bathed in the nurturing flow ofpetrochemicals, often supported by government subsidy, designed to offerlow-priced food in sufficient quantity to feed billions. Despite itsfriendly moniker, many environmentalists and development activists aroundthe planet have grown to despair about everything the Green Revolutionstands for. Like Pretty, they propose a lowercase greenercounterrevolution: endlessly diverse, employing the insights of ecologyinstead of the brute force of chemistry, designed to feed people but alsokeep them on the land. And they have some allies even in the richcountries-that's who fills the stalls at the farmers' markets bloomingacross North America.But those farmers' markets are still a minuscule leaf on the giantstalk of corporate agribusiness, and it's not clear that, for all thepaeans 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 everyrespect, save the lack of pesticides, mirrored all the flaws ofconventional agriculture. (By some calculations, the average bite oforganic food at your supermarket has traveled even farther than the1,500-mile journey taken by the average bite of conventional produce.)That is to say, in a world where we're eager for the lowest possibleprice, it's extremely difficult to do anything unconventional on a scalelarge enough to matter.And it might be just as hard in Cuba were Cuba free. I mean, wouldSalcines be able to pay sixty-four people to man his farm or would he haveto replace most of them with chemicals? If he didn't, would his customerspay higher prices for his produce or would they prefer lower-cost lettucearriving from California's Imperial Valley? Would he be able to hold on tohis land or would there be some more profitable use for it? For thatmatter, would many people want to work on his farm if they had a realrange of options? In a free political system, would the power of, say,pesticide suppliers endanger the government subsidy for producingpredatory insects in local labs? Would Cuba not, in a matter of severalgrowing seasons, look a lot like the rest of the world? Does anorganopónico depend on a fixed ballot?There's clearly something inherently destructive about anauthoritarian society-it's soul-destroying, if nothing else. Although manyof the Cubans I met were in some sense proud of having stood up to theYanquis 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 somethinginherently destructive about a globalized free-market society-that theeternal race for efficiency, when raised to a planetary scale, damages theenvironment, and perhaps the community, and perhaps even the taste of acarrot? Is it possible that markets, at least for food, may work betterwhen they're smaller and more isolated? The next few decades may be aboutanswering that question. It's already been engaged in Europe, where peopleare really debating subsidies for small farmers, and whether or not theywant the next, genetically modified, stage of the Green Revolution, andhow much it's worth paying for Slow Food. It's been engaged in parts ofthe Third World, where in India peasants threw out the country's mostaggressive free-marketeers in the last election, sensing that the shape oftheir lives was under assault. Not everyone is happy with the set ofpossibilities that the multinational corporate world provides. People arebeginning to feel around for other choices. The world isn't going to looklike Cuba-Cuba won't look like Cuba once Cubans have some say in thematter. But it may not necessarily look like Nebraska either.The choices are about values," Pretty said. Which is true, at leastfor us, at least for the moment. And when the choices are about values, wegenerally pick the easiest and cheapest way, the one that tequiresthinking the least. Inertia is our value above all others. Inertia was theone option the Cubans didn't have; they needed that meal a day back, andgiven that Castro was unwilling to let loose the reins, they had a limitednumber of choices about how to get it. "In some ways the special periodwas a gift to us," said Funes, the forage expert, the guy who lost twentypounds, the guy who went from thinking about White Udder to thinking aboutoxen teams. "It made it easier because we had no choice. Or we did, butthe choice was will we cry or will we work. There was a strong desire tolie down and cry, but we decided to do things instead."[bill McKibben, a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, is theauthor of many books, including The End of Nature and Wandering Home: ALong Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape, Vermont's ChamplainValley and New York's Adirondacks. His last article for Harper's Magazine,"Small World," appeared in the December 2003 issue.]

[Guest guest]

Thanks Craig.

 

Jo

 

-

Craig Dearth

001 999 Screamers

Tuesday, May 03, 2005 1:25 PM

Fascinating article on Cuba's green revolution

 

I found this article great,

it shows that the closer to a Vegan diet you get the closer TRUE sustainability becomes

enjoy

Craig

 

 

Harper's Magazine via Enrionmental Observatory - Apr 19, 2005http://www.environmentalobservatory.org/headlines.cfm?refID=72460Harper's - April 2005 p. 61-69 (9 pp.)THE CUBA DIETTHIS ONE-PARTY POLICE STATE MAY HAVE CREATED THE WORLD'S LARGESTWORKING MODEL OF A SEMI-SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTUREby Bill McKibbenWhat will you be eating when the revolution comes?The pictures hanging in Havana's Museum of the Revolution document therise (or, depending on your perspective, the fall) of Cuba in the yearsafter Castro's revolt, in 1959. On my visit there last summer, I walkedthrough gallery after gallery, gazing upon the stock images of socialistglory: "anti- imperialist volunteers" fighting in Angola, Cuban boxerswinning Olympic medals, five patients at a time undergoing eye surgeryusing a "method created by Soviet academician Fyodorov." Mostly, though, Isaw pictures of farm equipment. "Manual operation is replaced bymechanized processes," read the caption under a picture of some heavyMarxist metal cruising a vast field. Another caption boasted that by 1990,seven bulk sugar terminals had been built, each with a shipping capacityof 75,000 tons a day. In true Soviet style, the Cubans were demonstratinga deeply held (and to our eyes now almost kitschy) socialist helief thatsalvation lay in the size of harvests, in the number of tractors, and inthe glorious heroic machinery that would straighten the tired backs of anoppressed peasantry-and so I learned that day that within thirty years ofthe people's uprising, the sugarcane industry alone employed 2,850sugarcane lifting machines, 12,278 tractors, 29,857 carts, and 4,277combines.Such was communism. But then I turned a corner and the pictureschanged. The sharply focused shots of combines and Olympians now weremuddied, as if Cubans had forgotten how to print photos or, as was morelikely the case, had run short of darkroom chemicals. I had reached thegallery of the "Special Period." That is to say, I had reached the pointin Cuban history where everything came undone. With the sudden collapse ofthe Soviet Union, Cuba fell off a cliff of its own. All those carts andcombines had been the products of an insane "economics" underwritten bythe Eastern bloc for ideological purposes. Castro spent three decadesgrowing sugar and shipping it to Russia and East Germany, both of whichpaid a price well above the world level, and both of which sent the shipsback to Havana filled with wheat, rice, and more tractors. When all thatdisappeared, literally almost overnight, Cuba had nowhere to turn. TheUnited States, Cuba's closest neighbor, enforced a strict trade embargo(which it strengthened in 1992, and again in 1996) and Cuba had next to noforeign exchange with anyone else-certainly the new Russia no longerwanted to pay a premium on Cuban sugar for the simple glory of supportinga 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 theinternational economic system, a moon base whose supply ships had suddenlystopped coming. There were other deeply isolated places on theplanet-North Korea, say, or Burma-but not many. And so most observerswaited 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 itsSunday magazine titled "The Last Days of Castro's Cuba"; in its editorialcolumn, the paper opined that "the Cuban dictator has painted himself intohis own corner. Fidel Castro's reign deserves to end in homegrownfailure." Without oil, even public transportation shut down-for many,going to work meant a two-hour bike trip. Television shut off early in theevening to save electricity; movie theaters went dark. People tried toimprovise their ways around shortages. "For drinking glasses we'd get beerbottles and cut the necks off with wire," one professor told me. "Wedidn't have razor blades, till someone in the city came up with a way toresharpen old ones."But it's hard to improvise food. So much of what Cubans had eaten hadcome straight from Eastern Europe, and most of the rest was grownindustrial-style on big state farms. All those combines needed fuel andspare parts, and all those big rows of grain and vegetables neededpesticides and fertilizer-none of which were available. In 1989, accordingto the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the average Cubanwas eating 3,000 calories per day. Four years later that figure had fallento 1,900. It was as if they suddenly had to skip one meal a day, everyday, week after month after year. The host of one cooking show on theshortened TV schedule urged Cubans to fry up "steaks" made from grapefruitpeels covered in bread crumbs. "I lost twenty pounds myself," saidFernando Funes, a government agronomist.Now, just by looking across the table, I saw that Fernando Funes hadsince gained the twenty pounds back. In fact, he had a little paunch, asdo many Cuban men of a certain age. What happened was simple, ifunexpected. Cuba had learned to stop exporting sugar and instead startedgrowing its own food again, growing it on small private farms andthousands of pocket-sized urban market gardens-and, lacking chemicals andfertilizers, much of that food became de facto organic. Somehow, thecombination worked. Cubans have as much food as they did before the SovietUnion collapsed. They're still short of meat, and the milk supply remainsa real problem, but their caloric intake has returned to normal-they'vegotten that meal back.In so doing they have created what may be the world's largest workingmodel of a semi-sustainable agriculture, one that doesn't rely nearly asheavily as the rest of the world does on oil, on chemicals, on shippingvast quantities of food back and forth. They import some of their foodfrom abroad-a certain amount of rice from Vietnam, even some apples andbeef and such from the United States. But mostly they grow their own, andwith less ecological disruption than in most places. In recent yearsorganic farmers have visited the island in increasing numbers andcelebrated its accomplishment. As early as 1999 the Swedish parliamentawarded the Organic Farming Group its Right Livelihood Award, often styledthe "alternative Nobel," and Peter Rosset, the former executive directorof the American advocacy group Food First, heralded the "potentiallyenormous implications" of Cuba's new agricultural system.The island's success may not carry any larger lesson. Cubanagriculture isn't economically competitive with the industrial farmingexemplified by a massive food producer across the Caribbean, mostlybecause it is highly labor- intensive. Moreover, Cuba is a one-partypolice state filled with political prisons, which may have some slighteffect 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 sectionsof the world might be in for "Special Periods" of their own. Climatechange, or the end of cheap oil, or the depletion of irrigation water, orthe chaos of really widespread terrorism, or some other malign force mightbegin to make us pay more attention to the absolute bottom-line questionof how we get our dinner (a question that only a very few people, for avery short period of time, have ever been able to ignore). No one'spredicting a collapse like the one Cuba endured-probably no modern economyhas ever undergone such a shock. But if things got gradually harder? Afterall, our planet is an island, too. It's somehow useful to know thatsomeone has already run the experiment.Villa Alamar was a planned community built outside Havana at theheight of the Soviet glory days; its crumbling, precast-concreteapartments would look at home (though less mildewed) in Ljubljana or Omsk.Even the names there speak of the past: a central square, for instance, iscalled Parque Hanoi. But right next to the Parque Hanoi is the ViveroOrganopónico Alamar.Organopónico is the Cuban term for any urban garden. (It seems thatbefore the special period began, the country had a few demonstrationhydroponic gardens, much bragged about in official propaganda and quicklyabandoned when the crisis hit. The high-tech-sounding name stuck, however,recycled to reflect the new, humbler reality.) There are thousands oforganopónicos in Cuba, more than 200 in the Havana area alone, but theVivero Organoponico Alamar is especially beautiful: a few acres ofvegetables attached to a shady yard packed with potted plants for sale,birds in wicker cages, a cafeteria, and a small market where a steady lineof local people come to buy tomatoes, lettuce, oregano,potatoes-twenty-five crops were listed on the blackboard the day Ivisited-for their supper. Sixty-four people farm this tiny spread. Theirchief is Miguel Salcines López, a tall, middle-aged, intense, and quitedelightful man."This land was slated for a hospital and sports complex," he said,leading me quickly through his tiny empire. "But when the food crisiscame, the government decided this was more important," and they letSalcines hegin 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 offa pyramidal mini-greenhouse in which he raises seedlings, in the beliefthat its shape "focuses energy." Magnets on his irrigation lines, hebelieves, help "reduce the surface tension" of the water- give him aponytail and he'd fit right in at the Marin farmers' market. Taking a more"traditional" organic approach, Salcines has also planted basil andmarigolds at the row ends to attract beneficial insects, and he rotatessweet potato through the rows every few plantings to cleanse the soil;he's even got neem trees to supply natural pesticides. But Salcines is notobsessive even about organicity. Like gardeners everywhere, he has troublewith potato bugs, and he doesn't hesitate to use man-made pesticide tofight them. He doesn't use artificial fertilizer, both because it isexpensive and because he doesn't need it-indeed, the garden makes moneyselling 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, Salcineslaid out the finances of his cooperative farm. For the last six months, hesaid, 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 theprofit for the whole year would he 393,000 pesos. Half of that he wouldreinvest in enlarging the farm; the rest would go into a profit-sharingplan. 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. Ablackboard above the lunch line reminded employees what their monthlyshare of the profit would be: depending on how long they'd been at thefarm, and how well they produced, they would get 291 pesos this month,almost doubling their base salary. The people worked hard, and if theydidn't their colleagues didn't tolerate them.What is happening at the Vivero Organoponico Alamar certainly isn'tunfettered capitalism, but it's not exactly collective farming either.Mostly it's incredibly productive-sixty-four people earn a reasonableliving on this small site, and the surrounding neighbors get an awful lotof their diet from its carefully tended rows. You see the same kind ofproduction all over the city- every formerly vacant lot in Havana seems tobe a small farm. The city grew 300,000 tons of food last year, nearly itsentire vegetable supply and more than a token amount of its rice and meat,said Egidio Páez Medina, who oversees the organopónicos from a smalloffice on a highway at the edge of town. "Tens of thousands of people areemployed. 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 willdouble." On average, Páez said, each square meter of urban farm producesfive kilograms of food a year. That's a lot. (And it's not just cabbageand 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 itsmost recent report, notes that the government "restricts nearly allavenues of political dissent,severely curtails basic rights to freeexpression," and that "the government's intolerance of dissenting voicesintensified considerably in 2003." It's as if you went to Whole Foods andnoticed a guy over by the soymilk with a truncheon. Cuba is a weirdpolitical system all its own, one that's been headed by the same guy forforty-five years. And the nature of that system, and that guy, hadsomething 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 enterpriseit was able to liberate all kinds of pent-up energy. Philip Peters, a Cubaanalyst at the conservative Lexington Institute, has documented how thecountry redistributed as much as two thirds of state lands to cooperativesand individual farmers and, as with the organoponko in Alamar, let themsell their surplus above a certain quota. There's no obvious name for thissystem. It's a lot like sharecropping, and it shares certain key featureswith, say, serfdom, not to mention high feudalism. It is not free in anyof the ways we use the word-who the hell wants to say thank you to thegovernment for "allowing" you to sell your "surplus"? But it's alsodifferent from monolithic state communism.In 1995, as the program geared up, the markets were selling 390million pounds of produce; sales volume tripled in the next three years.Now the markets bustle, stacked deep with shiny heaps of bananas and driedbeans, mangos and tomatoes. But the prices, though they've dropped overthe years, are still beyond the reach of the poorest Cubans. And thegovernment, which still sells every citizen a basic monthly food rationfor just a few pesos, has also tried to reregulate some of the trade atthe farmers' markets, fearing they were creating a two-tier system. "It'snot reform like you've seen in China, where they're devolving a lot ofeconomic decision making out to the private sector," Peters said. "Theymade a decision to graft some market mechanisms onto what remains a fairlystatist model. It could work better. But it has worked."Fidel Castro, as even his fiercest opponents would admit, has almostfrom the day he took power spent lavishly on the country's educationalsystem. Cuba's ratio of teachers to students is akin to Sweden's; peoplewho want to go to college go to college. Which turns out to be important,because farming, especially organic farming, especially when you're notused to doing it, is no simple task. You don't just tear down the fencearound the vacant lot and hand someone a hoe, quoting him some Maoistcouplet about the inevitable victory of the worker. The soil's no good atfirst, the bugs can't wait to attack. You need information to make a go ofit. To a very large extent, the rise of Cuba's semiorganic agriculture isalmost as much an invention of science and technology as the high-inputtractor farming it replaced, which is another thing that makes this storyso odd."I came to Havana at the time of the revolution, in 1960, to startuniversity," said Fernando Funes, who now leads the national Pasture andForage Research Unit. "We went from 18,000 university students before therevolution to 200,000 after, and a big proportion were in agriculturalcareers. People specialized in soil fertility, or they specialized inpesticides. They were very specialized. Probably too specialized. Butyields were going up." Yields were going up because of the wildlyhigh-input farming. In the town of Nuevo Gerona, for instance, there is astatue of a cow named White Udder, descended from a line of CanadianHolsteins. In the early 1980s she was the most productive cow on the faceof the earth, giving 110 liters of milk a day, 27,000 liters in a singlelactation. Guinness certified her geysers of milk. Fidel journeyed out tothe countryside to lovingly stroke her hide. She was a paragon ofscientific management, with a carefully controlled diet of grainconcentrates. Most of that grain, however, came from abroad ("this is toohot 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, atestimony to the kinky economics of farm subsidies."In that old system, it took ten or fifteen or twenty units of energyto produce one unit of food energy," Funes said. "At first we didn't careso much about economics-we had to produce no matter what." Even in thesalad days of Soviet-backed agriculture, however, some of the localagronomists were beginning to think the whole system was slightly insane."We were realizing just how inefficient it was. So a few of us werelooking for other ways. In cattle we began to look at things like usinglegumes to fix nitrogen in the pasture so we could cut down onfertilizer," Funes said. And Cuba was inefficient in more than its use ofenergy. Out at the Agrarian University of Havana on the city's outskirts,agriculture professor Nilda Pérez Consuegra remembers how a few of hercolleagues began as early as the 1970s to notice that the massive"calendar spraying" of pesticides was breeding insect resistance. Theybegan working on developing strains of bacteria and experimenting withraising 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 tosurvive on the tropical grasses that had once sustained the native cattle."We lost tens of thousands of animals. And even if they survived, theycouldn't produce anything like the same kind of milk once there was nomore grain-seven or eight liters a day if we were lucky," Funes said.Fairly quickly, however, the agricultural scientists began fanning outaround the country to help organize a recovery. They worked without muchin the way of resources, but they found ways.One afternoon, near an organopónico in central Havana, I knocked onthe door of a small two-room office, the local Center for Reproduction ofEntomophages and Entomopathogens. There are 280 such offices spread aroundthe country, each manned by one or two agronomists. Here, Jorge Padrón, aheavyset and earnest fellow, was working with an ancient Sovietrefrigerator and autoclave (the writing on the gauges was in Cyrillic) andperhaps three hundred glass beakers with cotton gauze stoppers. Farmersand backyard gardeners from around the district would bring him sickplants, and he'd look at them under the microscope and tell them what todo. Perhaps he'd hand them a test tube full of a trichoderma fungus, whichhe'd grown on a medium of residue from sugarcane processing, and tell themto germinate the seed in a dilute solution; maybe he'd pull a vial of somenatural bacteria-verticillium lecanii or beauveria bassiana-from a rustycoffee can. "It is easier to use chemicals. You see some trouble in yourtomatoes, and chemicals take care of it right away," he said. Over thelong 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 thatspread across the globe in the 1960s, an industrialization of the foodsystem that relied on irrigation, oil (both for shipping andfertilization), and the massive application of chemicals to counter everyproblem.The localized application of research practiced in Cuba has fallen bythe wayside in countries where corporate agriculture holds sway. Iremember visiting a man in New Hampshire who was raising organic applesfor his cider mill. Apples are host to a wide variety of pests andblights, and if you want advice about what chemical to spray on them, thelocal agricultural extension agent has one pamphlet after another with theanswers, at least in part, because pesticide companies like Monsanto fundhuge amounts of the research that goes on at the land-grant universities.But no one could tell my poor orchardist anything about how to organicallycontrol the pests on his apples, even though there must have been a hugebody of such knowledge once upon a time, and he ended up relying on abeautifully illustrated volume published in the 1890s. In Cuba, however,all the equivalents of Texas A & M or the University of Nebraska are filledwith students looking at antagonist fungi, lion-ant production for sweetpotato weevil control, how to intercrop tomatoes and sesame to control thetobacco whitefly, how much yield grows when you mix green beans andcassava in the same rows (60 percent), what happens to plantain productionwhen you cut back on the fertilizer and substitute a natural bacteriumcalled A. chroococcum (it stays the same), how much you can reducefertilizer on potatoes if you grow a rotation of jack beans to fixnitrogen (75 percent), and on and on and on. "At first we had all kinds ofproblems," said a Japanese-Cuban organoponicist named Olga Oye Gómez, whogrows two acres of specialty crops that Cubans are only now starting toeat: broccoli, cauliflower, and the like. "We lost lots of harvests. Butthe engineers came and showed us the right biopesticides. Every year weget 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 Cubansolution is the same as in my own New England tomato patch: a saucer fullof beer. In fact, since the pressure is always on to reduce the use ofexpensive techniques, there's a premium on old-fashioned answers. Considerthe question of how you plow a held when the tractor that you used to userequires oil you can't afford and spare parts you can't obtain. Cuba-whichin the 1980s had more tractors per hectare than California, according toNilda Pérez-suddenly found itself relying on the very oxen it once hadscorned as emblems of its peasant past. There were perhaps 50,000 teams ofthe animals left in Cuba in 1990, and maybe that many farmers who stillknew how to use them. "None of the large state farms or even themechanized cooperatives had the necessary infrastructure to incorporateanimal traction," wrote Arcadio Ríos, of the Agricultural MechanizationResearch Institute, in a volume titled Sustainable Agriculture andResistance. "Pasture and feed production did not exist on site; and atfirst there were problems of feed transportation." Veterinarians were notup on their oxen therapy.But that changed. Ríos's institute developed a new multi-plow forplowing, harrowing, riding, and tilling, specially designed not "to invertthe topsoil layer" and decrease fertility. Harness shops were set up tostart producing reins and yokes, and the number of blacksmith shopsquintupled. The ministry of agriculture stopped slaughtering oxen forfood, and "essentially all the bulls in good physical condition wereselected and delivered to cooperative and state farms." Oxendemonstrations were held across the country. (The socialist love of exactstatistics has not waned, so it can be said that in 1997 alone, 2,344 oxenevents took place, drawing 64,279 participants.) By the millennium therewere 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 soilcompaction, as hooves replaced tires. "Across the country we see dry soilsturning healthier, loamier," Professor Pérez said. Soon an ambitious youngCuban will be able to get a master's degree in oxen management,One question is: How resilient is the new Cuban agriculture? Despiteever tougher restrictions on U.S. travel and remittances from relatives,the country has managed to patch together a pretty robust tourist industryin recent years: Havana's private restaurants fill nightly with Canadiansand Germans. The government's investment in the pharmaceutical industryappears to be paying off, too, and now people who are fed by ox teams areproducing genetically engineered medicines at some of the world's moreadvanced labs. Foreign exchange is beginning to flow once more; alreadymany of the bicycles in the streets have been replaced by buses andmotorbikes and Renaults. Cuba is still the most unconsumer place I've everbeen-there's even less to buy than in the old Soviet Union-but sooner orlater Castro will die. What then?Most of the farmers and agronomists I interviewed professed convictionthat the agricultural changes ran so deep they would never be eroded.Pérez, however, did allow that there were a lot of younger oxen driverswho yearned to return to the cockpits of big tractors, and according tonews reports some of the country's genetic engineers are trying to cloneWhite Udder herself from leftover tissue. If Cuba simply opens to theworld economy-if Castro gets his professed wish and the U.S. embargosimply disappears, replaced by a free-trade regime-it's very hard to seehow the sustainable farming would survive for long. We use pesticides andfertilizers because they make for incredibly cheap food. None of thatdipping the seedling roots in some bacillus solution, or creeping alongthe tomato rows looking for aphids, or taking the oxen off to be shoed.Our industrial agriculture-at least as heavily subsidized by Washington asCuba's farming once was subsidized by Moscow-simply overwhelms itsneighbors. For instance, consider Mexico and corn. Not long ago thejournalist Michael Pollan told the story of what happened when NAFTAopened 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 outof business, forced to sell their land to larger, more corporate farmsthat could hope to compete by mechanizing (and lobbying for subsidies oftheir own). A study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peaceenumerated the environmental costs: fertilizer runoff suffocating the Seaof Cortéz, water shortages getting worse as large-scale irrigation booms.Genetically modified corn varieties from the United States arecontaminating the original strains of the crop, which began in southernMexico.Cuba already buys a certain amount of food from the United States,under an exemption from the embargo passed during the ClintonAdministration. So far, though, the buying is mostly strategic, spreadaround the country in an effort to build political support for a total endto the embargo. No one ever accused the Cubans of being dumb, said Petersof the Lexington Institute. "They know the congressional district thatevery apple, every chicken leg, every grain of wheat, comes from." Butthat trickle, in a freetrading, post-Castro Cuba, would likely become, asin Mexico and virtually every other country on earth, a torrent, and onethat would wash away much of the country's agricultural experiment.You can also ask the question in reverse, though: Does the Cubanexperiment mean anything for the rest of the world? An agronomist wouldcall the country's farming "low-input," the tevetse of the GreenRevolution model, with its reliance on irrigation, oil, and chemistry. Ifwe're running out of water in lots of places (the water table beneathChina and India's grain-growing plains is reportedly dropping by metersevery year), and if the oil and natural gas used to make fertilizer andrun our megafarms are changing the climate (or running out), and if thepesticides are poisoning farmers and killing other organisms, and ifeverything at the Stop & Shop has traveled across a continent to get thereand tastes pretty much like crap, might there be some real future forlow-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 attentionto-who would pay to sponsor the research? And some clearly think thequestion isn't even worth raising. Dennis Avery, director of globalfoodissues at the conservative Hudson Institute, compared Cuba with Chinaduring the Great Leap Forward: "Instead of building fertilizer factories,Mao told farmers to go get leaves and branches from the hillsides to mulchthe rice paddies. It produced the worst soil erosion China has seen."Raising the planet's crops organically would mean "you'd need the manurefrom seven or eight billion cattle; you'd lose most of the world'swildlife 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 growirrigated rice, you'll almost always need some fertilizer," said JulesPretty, a professor at the University of Essex's Department of BiologicalSciences, who has looked at sustainable agriculture in fields around theworld. "The problem is being judicious and careful." It's very clear, headded, "that Cuba is not an anomaly. All around the world small-scalesuccesses are being scaled up to regional level." Farmers in northeastThailand, for instance, suffered when their rice markets disappeared inthe Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. "They'd borrowed money toinvest in 'modern agriculture,' but they couldn't get the price theyneeded. A movement emerged, farmers saying, 'Maybe we should justconcentrate on local markets, and not grow for Bangkok, not for othercountries.' They've started using a wide range of sustainabilityapproaches- polyculture, tree crops and agroforestry, fish ponds. Onehundred and fifty thousand farmers have made the shift in the last threeyears."Almost certainly, he said, such schemes are as productive as themonocultures they replaced. "Rice production goes down, but the productionof all sorts of other things, like leafy vegetables, goes up." And simplycutting way down on the costs of pesticides turns many bankrupt peasantssolvent. "The farmer field schools began in Indonesia, with rice growersshowing one another how to manage their paddies to look after beneficialinsects," just the kinds of predators the Cubans were growing in theirlow-tech labs. "There's been a huge decrease in costs and not much of achange 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 andpesticide displace more expensive labor and knowledge-that's why 219American farms have gone under every day for the last fifty years and yetwe'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 plumesof pesticide poison spreading through groundwater. And the dead zone inthe Gulf of Mexico into which the tide of nitrogen washes each plantingseason. And the cloud of carbon dioxide that puffs out from the top of thefertilizer factories. If you took those things seriously, you might decidethat having one percent of your population farming was not such a wondrousfeat after all.The American model of agriculture is pretty much what people mean whenthey talk about the Green Revolution: high-yielding crop varieties,planted in large monocultures, bathed in the nurturing flow ofpetrochemicals, often supported by government subsidy, designed to offerlow-priced food in sufficient quantity to feed billions. Despite itsfriendly moniker, many environmentalists and development activists aroundthe planet have grown to despair about everything the Green Revolutionstands for. Like Pretty, they propose a lowercase greenercounterrevolution: endlessly diverse, employing the insights of ecologyinstead of the brute force of chemistry, designed to feed people but alsokeep them on the land. And they have some allies even in the richcountries-that's who fills the stalls at the farmers' markets bloomingacross North America.But those farmers' markets are still a minuscule leaf on the giantstalk of corporate agribusiness, and it's not clear that, for all thepaeans 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 everyrespect, save the lack of pesticides, mirrored all the flaws ofconventional agriculture. (By some calculations, the average bite oforganic food at your supermarket has traveled even farther than the1,500-mile journey taken by the average bite of conventional produce.)That is to say, in a world where we're eager for the lowest possibleprice, it's extremely difficult to do anything unconventional on a scalelarge enough to matter.And it might be just as hard in Cuba were Cuba free. I mean, wouldSalcines be able to pay sixty-four people to man his farm or would he haveto replace most of them with chemicals? If he didn't, would his customerspay higher prices for his produce or would they prefer lower-cost lettucearriving from California's Imperial Valley? Would he be able to hold on tohis land or would there be some more profitable use for it? For thatmatter, would many people want to work on his farm if they had a realrange of options? In a free political system, would the power of, say,pesticide suppliers endanger the government subsidy for producingpredatory insects in local labs? Would Cuba not, in a matter of severalgrowing seasons, look a lot like the rest of the world? Does anorganopónico depend on a fixed ballot?There's clearly something inherently destructive about anauthoritarian society-it's soul-destroying, if nothing else. Although manyof the Cubans I met were in some sense proud of having stood up to theYanquis 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 somethinginherently destructive about a globalized free-market society-that theeternal race for efficiency, when raised to a planetary scale, damages theenvironment, and perhaps the community, and perhaps even the taste of acarrot? Is it possible that markets, at least for food, may work betterwhen they're smaller and more isolated? The next few decades may be aboutanswering that question. It's already been engaged in Europe, where peopleare really debating subsidies for small farmers, and whether or not theywant the next, genetically modified, stage of the Green Revolution, andhow much it's worth paying for Slow Food. It's been engaged in parts ofthe Third World, where in India peasants threw out the country's mostaggressive free-marketeers in the last election, sensing that the shape oftheir lives was under assault. Not everyone is happy with the set ofpossibilities that the multinational corporate world provides. People arebeginning to feel around for other choices. The world isn't going to looklike Cuba-Cuba won't look like Cuba once Cubans have some say in thematter. But it may not necessarily look like Nebraska either.The choices are about values," Pretty said. Which is true, at leastfor us, at least for the moment. And when the choices are about values, wegenerally pick the easiest and cheapest way, the one that tequiresthinking the least. Inertia is our value above all others. Inertia was theone option the Cubans didn't have; they needed that meal a day back, andgiven that Castro was unwilling to let loose the reins, they had a limitednumber of choices about how to get it. "In some ways the special periodwas a gift to us," said Funes, the forage expert, the guy who lost twentypounds, the guy who went from thinking about White Udder to thinking aboutoxen teams. "It made it easier because we had no choice. Or we did, butthe choice was will we cry or will we work. There was a strong desire tolie down and cry, but we decided to do things instead."[bill McKibben, a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, is theauthor of many books, including The End of Nature and Wandering Home: ALong Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape, Vermont's ChamplainValley and New York's Adirondacks. His last article for Harper's Magazine,"Small World," appeared in the December 2003 issue.]To send an email to -