Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

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pushes peasants from hillside subsistence farms to search for work in Portau-Prince,
where the concentration of desperate people in slums contributes
to the country’s tragic history of civil strife.
In Haiti, the majority of peasants own their own small farms. So small
farms per se are not the answer to stopping erosion. When farms become
so small that it is hard to make a living from them, it becomes hard to practice
soil conservation. In Cuba, fifty miles from Haiti across the Windward
Passage, the collapse of the Soviet Union set up a unique agricultural
experiment. Before the 1959 Cuban revolution, the handful of people who
controlled four-fifths of the land operated large export-oriented plantations,
mostly growing sugar. Although small subsistence farms were still
common on the remaining fifth of the land, Cuba produced less than half
its own food.
After the revolution, in line with its vision of socialist progress, the new
government continued sponsoring large-scale, industrial monoculture
focused on export crops—primarily sugar, which accounted for threequarters
of Cuba’s export income. Cuba’s sugar plantations were the most
mechanized agricultural operations in Latin America, more closely resembling
those in California’s Central Valley than on Haiti’s hillsides. Farm
equipment, the oil to run them, fertilizers, pesticides, and more than half
of Cuba’s food were imported from the island’s socialist trading partners.
The end of Soviet support and an ongoing U.S. trade embargo plunged
Cuba into a food crisis. Unable to import food or fertilizer, Cuba saw the
calories and protein in the average diet drop by almost a third, from 3,000
calories a day to 1,900 calories between 1989 and 1994.
The Soviet collapse resulted in an almost 90 percent drop in Cuba’s
external trade. Fertilizer and pesticide imports fell by 80 percent and oil
imports fell by 50 percent. Parts to repair farm machinery were unobtainable.
The New York Times editorial page predicted the imminent collapse
of Castro’s regime. Formerly one of the best-fed nations in Latin America,
Cuba was not quite at the level of Haiti—but not much above it. Isolated
and facing the loss of a meal a day for everyone on the island, Cuban agriculture
needed to double food production using half the inputs required
by conventional agriculture.
Faced with this dilemma, Cuba began a remarkable agricultural experiment,
the first nation-scale test of alternative agriculture. In the mid-1980s,
the Cuban government directed state-run research institutions to begin
investigating alternative methods to reduce environmental impacts,
improve soil fertility, and increase harvests. Within six months of the
islands in time