A Cow and Garden in Every Yard

by Patricia Grogg

More and more gardens have been cropping up in yards, empty lots, terraces and even barrels and buckets in the towns and cities of this Caribbean island nation in the past few years. By year's end, the sector is expected to satisfy 13.7 percent of the minimum nutritional requirements set by international bodies like the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

According to government estimates, Cuba's urban gardens produced 690 tons of fresh vegetables and spices in the first half of the year -- a figure that ministry of agriculture authorities hope will have doubled in the second half of the year.

"One of the challenges of urban agriculture is to continue growing, in both quantity and quality," said Adolfo Rodr’guez, the ministry of agriculture official in charge of the urban gardening program. He predicted that city gardens would be producing 2.3 million tons of vegetables by 2005.

FAO recommends that people consume a daily average of 300 grams of fresh vegetables in order to guarantee the vitamins and minerals necessary to good health.

If projections hold true, urban garden plots will produce more than that this year, providing an average of 342 grams a day per person for Cuba's population of more than 11 million.

There were just over 2,500 gardens in Cuba's towns and cities in 1997, a number that had climbed to almost 7,100 by late 1999, with 840 in Havana, up from half that two years earlier.

But experts in agriculture say there are many areas in the capital that could be used to grow produce, and they stress that gardening must continue to be encouraged in order to reduce dependence on food grown in other parts of the island.

A commission made up of provincial and municipal officials and ministry of agriculture functionaries is in charge of implementing the program aimed at encouraging urban farming efforts, which include the raising of small livestock or dairy cows for home consumption or sale in neighborhood farmers' markets.

A network of government stores was opened in Havana especially for the purpose of supplying implements, seeds and other farming inputs.

Experts say urban farming is well-suited to the conditions in today's Cuba, "which is in need of forms of production which, with few resources and a bit of ingenuity, can provide fast solutions to the food shortage."

Food production was hit hard from 1990 to 1994, the years immediately following the break-up of the Soviet Union, Cuba's main source of agricultural inputs and equipment.

At the peak of the recession, the diets of the local population took a sharp downturn, leading to consequences like a wave of cases of neuropathy in 1992 and 1993.

A United Nations Development Program (UNDP) report points out that urban gardens have become "a means of subsistence" in much of the world, a phenomenon closely linked to the growth of urban populations.

The UN agency estimates that the number of urban residents in the world will increase from 2.4 billion in 1990 to 5.5 billion in 2025.

In Cuba, of a total population of 11 million in 1996, 8.25 million lived in urban areas.