Doug’s Dynamic Drivel

With all the fuss going on about Fidel Castro’s health and possible demise there’s much to consider about what will happen when he is gone. Coincidentally there was a very interesting episode of David Suzuki’s “The Nature of Things” tonight that focussed on Cuba and it’s agricultural revolution that may have great importance for the rest of the world in the not too distant future.

After the revolution in 1959 Cuba forged tight ties with the Soviet bloc and became completely dependent on it for petrtoleum products. Cuba turned the old plantations into large government owned farms that grew primarily sugar cane and tobacco. It traded the sugar to the Soviet bloc for food a petrochemicals. When the Soviet union collapsed in ‘89 Cuba entered what it now calls its “Special Time.”

The Special Time meant almost no petrochemicals (oil, gas, fertilizer, pesticides etc) were being imported and Cuban agriculture fell apart. Until then they were operating just like we do in North America; farming with large fuel guzzling machines and using prodigious amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides the modus operandi. No longer able to maintain those procedures Cuba was forced to find a new way to feed its population, and find it they did.

In first world countries the average caloric cost for food production, taking into account all the energy needed to produce everything required to produce the food and get it to market, is 12 calories in for every calorie out. Cuba no longer had that much energy available to dedicate to agriculture and was forced to find “new” ways of growing the food they desperately needed. In doing so they reversed the caloric equation and got 12 calories out for each calorie put in.

How did they do this you might ask? Well I didn’t put new in quotations marks above for nothing. Mostly they went back to older, organic, sustainable methods of farming with some new twists. Methods the campesinos had used for centuries.

• Plowing fields with oxen instead of tractors. Added benefit, oxen don’t compact the sopil the way multi-ton tractors do which leads to better soil preservation and higher yields due to better aeration.
• forgoing monoculture and growing a wide variety of crops on each farm, and rotating those crops.
• Using natural biological pest controls. Bugs that eat bugs and chemical extracts from plants like garlic and tobacco for spraying. Plants, such as sunflowers, that attract beneficial insects, and others, such as marigiolds, that repel insects.
• composting all organic material and returning the compost to the land to build up soil
• growing plants that are native to the climate and getting the farmers involved in selecting the best seeds and trading them amongst themselves.
• privatizing, in the form of employee owned co-operatives, farms and allowing the employees to sell the produce that exceeds their government imposed quotas (yes capitalism is rearing its head in Cuba)
• Bringing agriculture into the cities by converting vacant lots and other open spaces into urban gardens

That’s what I can remember from the documentary. Peak oil is either upon us or soon will be. Global agriculture in developed countries will take a big hit in the near future. The ability to affordably grow and transport food will be severely impaired, economies will completely collapse and chaos will reign. Millions will die of starvation if no alternative sources of food appear. This is not in the far future it is in the easly forseeable future, a matter of two or three decades. Global warming will add to this problem.

Hopefully we can learn from what Cuba has gone through. Hopefully when Castro dies Cuba will stay the course and the greedy, immoral corporations won’t , with the backing of the US government and military, take over the country and turn back the clock to the abuses of the Batista government. Days when 5% of the country was literate instead of the 100% today, days when the campasinos were essentiually slaves to the plantation owners, days when only the wealthy could afford medical care, days when a person not of the ruling elite had no hope of bettering their placed in their short life.

Cuba is no paradise, it is a dictatorship where opposition to the government is simply not allowed. Nevertheless I don’t think the people will roll over for western capitalism. I think the US is in for a surprise. The exiles in Florida, who have such influence in Washington, are primarily from the families of the wealthy elite who want their old Batista lifestyle back or from those who opposed the dictatorship for a variety of reasons. The people of Cuba know they are, despite the hardships and the loss of freedoms, much better off today than they were under Batista and the momories of those days are still fresh for many of them. Vivo la Revolución

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