23rd January 2023
Granma has published an interview that suggests that Cuba will be hard pressed in the coming years to achieve its objective of producing domestically over 0.6mn tons of rice. This is the volume it requires if it is to deliver from domestic production alone enough rice to cover the regulated family food basket and for social consumption.
The official communist party publication quoted Oslando Linares, the Director of the Rice Technology Division of the state-owned Grupo Empresarial Agrícola attached to the Ministry of Agriculture, as saying that the country’s Comprehensive Rice Development Programme intended to achieve self-sufficiency by 2030 was now unlikely to meet its objective.
Linares told Granma that until 2018, the programme had been satisfactory with records being broken for rice production, reaching the historic high that year of 304,000 tons. However, since then, production has declined falling to 246,700 tons in 2019, he said, because of a “general lack of inputs, as well as spare parts for rice combines.”
The report quoted him as saying without indicating the actual production figure for 2022 that last year volumes decreased significantly, driven in part by “the loss of the supply chain.” Linares attributed this to the pandemic, the tightening US embargo, and the war in Ukraine. These, he said, variously impacted on the cost of herbicides, pesticides, energy and fuel, and agricultural aviation.
Granma quoted Linares as saying the plan for 2023 has been set at around 40% of what was originally intended under the sector’s original development programme resulting in just 68,000 hectares planned this year, “a really poor figure.”
Asked by the publication about how and when the current situation could be reversed, Linares affirmed that recovery might begin in 2023 but would require three years for production to be consolidated, Better use would be made, he noted, of “the nation’s scientific and creative thought to support the nearly 25,000 cereal producers on the island.”
Linares told the publication that to try to achieve this, plenary sessions were being held to identify best and worst practice, and to promote “a group of endogenous technologies that allow us to take off, without the extensive demand for resources that we do not have.” This he said involved using the proven expertise of some producers and “should influence the rise in agricultural yields and the quality of the grain.”
Linares also emphasised the potential of the sector’s seed development programme which is receiving support from Vietnam and Japan involving long, medium, and short cycle varieties, some of which have low input requirements
“We rice farmers have to get used to the new working conditions, to using fewer chemical products and using a considerably greater number of bioproducts,” he told Granma.
Cuba’s original objective in achieving self-sufficiency was to plant 0.2mn hectares, obtaining a yield of six tons per hectare, and wet cereal production of 1.2mn tons to provide the 0.6mn tons planned.
Rice is a cultural and nutritional staple in the Cuban diet. The failure of the plan and the absence of any production figures for 2022 suggest that for the foreseeable future the island will have to rely on imports from the US, Latin America, the Far East and elsewhere, placing further strains on the country’s budget and the timely delivery of the basic food basket.
Photo by Sandy Ravaloniaina
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