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  • From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Fwd: Re: [SANET-MG] Ag change in Cuba/TE view
  • Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2010 14:22:08 -0400


Michele Gale-Sinex wrote:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
TWO years ago last month Raúl Castro formally took over as Cuba's president from his convalescent elder brother, Fidel. The switch raised hopes of reforms, especially of the communist country's long dysfunctional agriculture. But change has been glacial. Official figures show that in the first two months of this year deliveries to the capital's food markets were a third less than forecast. Nobody starves, but hard-currency supermarkets go for weeks without basics such as milk and bread.

What has gone wrong? Cuba's state-owned farms are massively inefficient, and rarely provide more than 20% of the country's food needs. Three hurricanes in 2008 made matters worse. Raúl Castro has acknowledged the problem, and introduced some changes. Idle state land has been leased to private farmers. The government has raised the guaranteed prices it pays for produce. Farmers can now legally buy their own basic equipment such as shovels and boots, without having to wait for government handouts.

But farmers say that the reforms have been too piecemeal to be effective. In meetings across the country they have called for more. They want to buy their own fertilisers and pesticides, and to control distribution. The government still supplies almost everything, and does it badly. Much of last year's bumper crop of tomatoes rotted because government trucks failed to collect them on time.

Significantly, the state-owned media have reported the farmers' complaints in some detail. They have also announced that 100 of the most inefficient government farms will be closed. Officials are launching a pilot plan to set up market gardens close to cities. And reports from eastern Cuba suggest that food shortages there are less acute than in the capital.

http://www.economist.com/world/americas/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15769891&source=hptextfeature

Maybe this a system like this could be implemented around Cuba.
<>
The Conversation: Hub seeks to fill gap from farm to table
- Sacramento Opinion - Sacramento Editorial | Sacramento Bee
http://www.sacbee.com/2010/03/28/2636826/the-conversation-hub-seeks-to.html

After years of being urged to "eat fresh, eat local," residents of the
Sacramento region are responding. From neighborhood dinner tables to big
institutional kitchens, locally grown foods are in high demand.

But every spring, locally grown produce is rotting in the fields of the
small family-run farms around the region.

Between that abundant supply and the strong demand, the market has
broken down. There is no good way to get those crops from the farms to
the people who want them at a price consumers are willing to pay.

Bob Corshen wants to fix that.

Corshen is director of local foods for the Community Alliance with
Family Farmers, based in Davis. The alliance and its partners are about
to build the link that will close the gap in the local food supply
chain. At the same time, they may be putting in place the first piece of
a far-reaching social mission to bring more fresh foods into the
region's low-income communities.

The new link in the food distribution chain will be known as an
"aggregation hub." But that really is just a fancy name for a
cold-storage warehouse.

Farmers will bring their harvests to the hub. A contractor working for
the alliance will inspect those small shipments of strawberries or
asparagus or carrots and combine them to fill the larger orders that
come from the customers. Then those boxes – identified as locally grown
and traceable by county and farm – will be sent into the community
aboard the same trucks that already carry produce from around the world.

If all goes as planned, the small farmers will enlarge their markets and
their profits. Sacramento shoppers and diners will get the local foods
they want. Distributors will have a way to meet the demands of their
customers. And the contractor managing the distribution hub will earn
money for its role in making it all possible.

Corshen's group is behind the "buy fresh, buy local" campaign that is
now working better than anyone had hoped. Suddenly local food is on top
of everyone's wish list.

"We are involved in this for the simple reason that this whole concept
of local foods is booming," Corshen said.

Corshen said a recent issue of Packer Magazine, which he calls the bible
for the food distribution industry, asked readers which word had more
influence on their customers: "organic," "sustainable" or "local."
"Local" won in a landslide.

"All in the sudden the distributors give a damn," he said. "They realize
there is a need for it."

The problem is that the existing system for distributing fresh produce
in the region is built for large-scale shipments. It is too time
consuming, and too expensive, for produce distributors to deal with
dozens of small and sometimes unreliable farms when they could get the
same product in one large lot from a farm anywhere in the world. And get
it, in many cases, for less money.

<...>

The key difference with the aggregation hub is that it will not try to
replicate the existing distribution network. Instead, it will piggyback
on top of it.

<...>

The alliance expects to have its hub up and running within a month. It
most likely will be housed at a food processing building in south
Sacramento near Executive Airport, although other sites are also being
considered.

Unlike similar hubs opening in Los Angeles and Oakland, the Sacramento
hub is likely to have a broad public service mission. Organizers hope to
make fresh food more accessible to low-income communities, provide
education about whole foods and nutrition and employ youths who would
otherwise be jobless. The expanded hub might also have cleaning and
processing facilities so the produce can be shipped in ready-to-use bags
that large institutions, such as schools and hospitals, prefer.

That part of the project is being funded by a grant from the U.S.
Department of Agriculture and managed by Soilborn Farms, an urban farm
with land near the American River in Rancho Cordova.

Shawn Harrison, a founder and director of Soilborn, envisions a food
center that will serve farm stands in urban neighborhoods, farmers
markets, corner stores and food box programs that deliver fresh produce
directly to people's doors.

"For these underserved communities, what the food hub does is, one, give
us the ability to source local, and then it creates momentum around
these kinds of incubator mechanisms, to get food into the community,"
Harrison said.

But Harrison does not see it as something only for low-income
communities. He and others would like the project to be the beginning of
a long-term reversal in the trend toward shipping locally grown food out
of the region while importing most of the food that Sacramentans eat.

More local consumption of local food would reduce transportation costs
and pollution while freeing more farmers from the wild swings of the
international commodity markets.

"This isn't something that is going to happen over a year," Harrison
said. "This is a 20-year process where we begin to shift the food that
we have the ability to grow in this region, that has typically gone out,
we can shift it to come back in.

"Ultimately, people living in the Sacramento region will more than not
be getting food from places where they know where it is coming from and
they know the quality of that food. That will be their preference, and
they will be able to do it in an affordable manner, in an equitable manner."

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.




  • [permaculture] Fwd: Re: [SANET-MG] Ag change in Cuba/TE view, Lawrence F. London, Jr., 03/30/2010

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