The only information there is about the agricultural output between January and June, which was reported by the Agricultural Sector of the National Office of Statistics and Information in its Selected Indicators January-June 2015, August 2015 edition, is that production amounted to 2,706,300 tons.
Analyzing official data one can see the setback that the agricultural production in Cuba has had in recent years.
According to the ONEI (Panorama of land use. Cuba 2013, March 2014 edition) the agricultural industry only cultivated 3289,584 hectares of the 1,851,600 hectares it owns, i.e. 17.8% of their lands. Despite having more resources, these companies didn’t work 1,522,016 hectares.
Meanwhile, 3,407 agricultural cooperatives and farmers have 4,480,900 hectares. Of these, they work 3,691,519 hectares (82.2%) while 799,381 hectares are not being used.
The 1,754 Basic Units of Cooperative Production (UBPC) in the country are the productive entities that have the best arable land after the state farming industry. They have 1,677,500 hectares and have crops in 540,155 hectares. 1,137,345 hectares remain idle.
The UBPCs have well-known serious problems of inefficiency, lack of control and poor job since their inception in 1993.
The ONEI’s agricultural production report for January to June provides very general data. It doesn’t specify which lands are owned by state farms and which are managed by agricultural cooperatives and farmers. It only states that 449,900 hectares of the 572,000 hectares available for production were planted, and that only 334,100 hectares could be harvested. That is, 124,100 hectares were not cultivated and 113,800 hectares were not harvested for unknown reasons.
In total, the agricultural industries, agricultural cooperatives, and the UBPCs have reported there are 3,458,742 hectares of uncultivated land, which represents 54% of the total arable land in Cuba reported.
Additional to the unjustified reduction of land used for growing, the poor performance of agricultural enterprises, and the increasingly critical situation of the UBPCs, agricultural cooperatives and farmers have problems purchasing inputs -despite lowering prices- and have issues with the inputs’ poor quality.
Difficulties persist to get the crops out of the fields in a timely manner because of a lack of transportation, causing much of the production to be used as food for pigs.
Despite these difficulties, the production of the first half of the year was mainly produced by the cooperatives and farmers, who produced 88.1% of the country’s tubers and vegetables and 93.4% of the 450,000 tons of fruits collected.
The cooperatives and farmers, who bear the burden of production, sell at high prices because of the expenses arising in planting, crop care, harvesting the collection and sending their products to the market. Brokers and resellers double and triple prices of the products they sell to the owners of the outlets and retailers. Thus, the population is forced to pay astronomical prices for their food.
Prices continue to rise and they could decrease if the state farms produced more, but everything indicates that this is currently impossible as they only produced between 6 and 11% of the total reported in the first half of this year.
Source: diariodecuba.com