CubaTrade-April2017-FLIPBOOK

AGRICULTURE
Urban farming: The Alamar Organic Nursery, located in the Havana suburb of Alamar
Organic Growth
In suburban Havana, Cuba’s organic
farming sector thrives
By Michael Deibert
Photos by Jon Braeley
Dotted with stark Soviet-style apartment
complexes built years ago to house workers
and advisers from Cuba’s Cold War
patrons, the Havana suburb of Alamar is
better known as the birthplace of Cuban
hip-hop than for any bucolic attributes.
It is nonetheless a hotbed of the urban
organic farming movement.
Alamar is home to the Organoponico
Vivero Alamar (The Alamar Organic
Nursery), organized as a Unidad Básica
de Producción Cooperativa (Basic Unit
of Cooperative Production), a type of
agricultural co-op in Cuba that has been
instrumental in instigating the organic
farming boom taking place on the island
over the last 25 years. Borne out of necessity
during the período especial (the “special
period” in the early 1990s when subsidies
from Cuba’s former patron the Soviet
Union evaporated), the practice has now
become a key component of the island’s
drive towards economic self-sufficiency.
“We have two goals with this enterprise,”
says Miguel Angel Salcines Lópe,
one of the farm’s founders, as he strolls
along neatly-tended rows of mushrooms,
brilliant green lettuce, and other vegetables.
“The first is to supply food, to provide
organic products at tolerable prices. The
second is to create employment. Here
there are 125 people working on 25 acres
We have a lot of women and elderly
people, who have a lot of knowledge and
experience.”
The devastation caused by the loss
of Soviet support (the country’s Gross
Domestic Product dropped by 34 percent)
is what pushed Cuban agriculture
from one dependent on fertilizer and
diesel-powered machinery to one based on
sustainable organic practices. At the same
time, food rationing and a break down of
distribution systems led to an explosion
of urban agronomy. The result is that,
according to Cuban government estimates,
there are today some 10,000 organic urban
farms in cities across the country.
The Alamar Organic farm, founded
at the end of the “special period” in 1997,
started as a mere 8,000-square-foot plot.
It now harvests 300 tons of vegetables annually.
The farm also provides subsidized
meals to workers, who toil 7 hours a day
and are entitled to take 1.5 pounds of food
home with them at the end of each shift.
“I think what happened was there was
already a group of scientists and certainly
farmers who were seeing the negative impact
of the highly intensive, industrialized
agriculture system that Cuba had in the
1980s,” says Margarita Fernandez, the Executive
Director of the Burlington-based
Vermont Caribbean Institute. “They were
seeing a lot of negative impacts, and they
were looking at the more holistic approach
to grow food. The crisis allowed the political
space for their vision to spread.”
Organic farming—a type of farming
APRIL 2017
CUBATRADE
47