Grassroots initiatives for urban allotment gardens selling fresh fruit, vegetables, and medicinal herbs cheaply in their immediate locales without transportation or intermediary companies and ensuring food sovereignty, while fostering community solidarity and climate awareness
Context
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba’s supply of wheat, beans, and oil vanished. Up until then, Cuba had been importing 90% of its fertiliser and pesticides, which it used to support its industrialised agriculture. This agricultural infrastructure was based on a plantation system developed during the colonial era and continued with Soviet support. When the United States ceased trade deals with Cuba in 1962, Cuba signed agreements with the Soviet Union which limited its production to monoculture cash crops including sugar and citrus. Large plantations that preexisted the revolution became state-run farms using industrial methods. By 1989, 60% of Cuba’s planted land was used for sugarcane, bought by the Soviet Union at an inflated price. Up until its collapse, the Soviet Union was providing 85% of Cuba’s imports and receiving 80% of its exports. Losing all this in 1991, Cuba plunged into a food crisis, with its plantations unable to operate without oil for its machinery.
Cuba’s extraordinary context combines three factors: an accumulated power base of Cuban state and Soviet control, industrialised monoculture plantations using fossil-fuel dependent fertilisers leading to degraded soil systems, and a failure to anticipate the consequences of ceasing an international trade dependency. Although in some ways unique, this context resonates with contemporary challenges posed by fuel shortages and the impact of industrialised farming elsewhere.
Practice
Surviving on extreme rations during Cuba’s “Special Period” of austerity after 1991, many urban Cubans began using surrounding parcels of empty land to grow food for themselves. From 1996 Fidel Castro’s government encouraged urban farming through the Organopónico programme. In the 1990s and 2000s, Havana’s residents converted 135 square miles (35,000 hectares) into agriculturally productive land. By the early 2000s, over half of the fruits and vegetables consumed in Havana were produced within the city.
Part of the programme’s success derives from its combination of government backing and grassroots commitment. The programme appealed to many who identified an opportunity to make money independently of a government job. In Havana, Cienfuegos, and Trinidad, three of Cuba’s largest urban areas, organopónicos still thrive today. For example, Havana’s Raquel Perez organopónico is a cooperative run by a group of residents and overseen by Cuba’s Ministry of Agriculture. This combination of local and national support helps bolster the programme while maintaining its situated specificity. Besides granting long-term land leases for farming, the Ministry offers resident farmers support through educational pamphlets on best practices, and information on how to start new organopónicos elsewhere.
Another important aspect of the programme is its resourcefulness of land. In Cienfuegos, La Calzada organopónico was built on a former rubbish dump; others were built on empty lots and ruined sites. Today La Calzada is a thriving fresh market where people can purchase fruit and vegetables at prices five times cheaper than in an agromercado (a market selling vegetables brought in from larger farms in the countryside). This stark price difference is because there is no transportation cost or intermediary company involved. Beyond resourcefulness in siting their organopónicos, Cubans are also adept at adapting to a site’s particular climatic conditions. At Havana’s San Isidro organopónico, nearby high-rise buildings cast extensive shade, and a water pipe access issue meant that growing a reliable crop of fruit or vegetables was impossible. In response, the community began growing medicinal plants such as Aloe Vera, which require less light and water. By now the organopónico’s medicinal products are sought across the city.
Not only are organopónicos different from plantations in their immediate location, many are also different in their approach to agricultural practice. At Havana’s Alamar organopónico, for example, cows are kept to provide manure for compost, rather than meat as one might expect in an industrial regime. Alamar’s founder, Miguel Salcines uses the motto “bugs not chemicals” to encapsulate this organic approach to farming. The aim is to “complement the soil, not push it,” he explains. By now, Alamar employs 150 people, all of whom share its profits.
While Cuba has faced some unusual contexts, the potential of a government-supported system of urban agriculture is significant, and global. Organoponico-style infrastructures have the potential to not only to introduce productive farming at an urban scale worldwide—a transition from industrialised to localised food production systems—but also demonstrate how systemic change in the face of climate breakdown can be intersectional by bringing together carbon, community, biodiversity, and local supply chains.