Havana’s changing urban agriculture landscape: A shift to the right?

Charlie A French ,Mimi Larsen Becker ,Bruce E Lindsay

doi:10.5304/jafscd.2010.012.013

Charlie A French , Mimi Larsen Becker + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2010.012.013

Copy DOI

Abstract

For two decades Havana, Cuba, has served as a living laboratory for practitioners and scholars of urban agriculture, particularly in its well-documented role in helping stave off food insecurity during a period of severe resource constraints. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the austere economic conditions that followed, the Cuban government enacted a series of radical agrarian reforms aimed at seeding the growth of private urban gardens—a new phenomenon in this country once dependent on trade subsidies and food rations. As a result of the reforms, close to 300 private urban agricultural cooperatives and thousands of small home gardens sprouted up across Havana. Yet in the ensuing decade and a half, Cuba’s increasing desire to integrate with the global economy, and its adoption of free-market principles, has forced the urban agriculture sector to make dramatic adjustments. Using secondary data, reports by other observers, and our own structured interviews with 11 of Havana’s urban gardeners, this study examines the challenges and opportunities that urban agriculture has experienced, and will continue to experience, in Cuba’s post-communist society. We hope to stimulate continuing inquiry into Havana’s evolving urban agriculture scene, as it continues to provide valuable lessons for other cities in the Global North and South that are increasingly likely to experience their own future resource constraints and food insecurity.

Highlights

As a socialist country abandoned during the collapsed Soviet Union and isolated by a lack of trade with many former trading partners, Cuba has provided a unique opportunity to study how nations and their urban communities in particular cope with resource limitation to maintain an adequate food supply
Reports by other observers, and our own structured interviews with 11 of Havana’s urban gardeners, this study examines the challenges and opportunities that urban agriculture has experienced, and will continue to experience, in Cuba’s post-communist society
Using published data and interviews with a small sample of urban agriculture practitioners in Havana, we explore the recent past and current transformation taking place in the city’s urban agriculture movement

Summary

Introduction

As a socialist country abandoned during the collapsed Soviet Union and isolated by a lack of trade with many former trading partners, Cuba has provided a unique opportunity to study how nations and their urban communities in particular cope with resource limitation to maintain an adequate food supply. The Cuban Ministry of Agriculture (MINAG) followed suit by authorizing private and state-run agricultural markets, including small produce stands called “kiosks” as well as larger open-air markets where cooperative producers and individual farmers could sell farm products for profit (Bourque & Canizares, 2000). The first of the private urban agricultural structures to emerge as a result of the Special Period reforms was the Basic Units of Cooperative Production (UBPC) (see figure 1). Other factors reportedly contributing to the decline appears to represent the government’s new policy of UBPCs include lack of state support, price caps to shift significant food production away from on agricultural sales, lack of autonomy by producer urban centers and back to the urban fringe, where groups, and debts inherited by cooperatives for the much of the country’s agricultural production was purchase of equipment Havana Urban Gardeners’ Perceptions that the subjects first give permission and remain of Change in Urban Agriculture anonymous

Motivation to Garden

Findings

Discussion and Conclusions