Reconciling Bioenergy and Food Production in Cuba: A Case for Integrating Competing Agricultural Models on the Caribbean’s Largest Island

Abstract

After the collapse of Cuba’s sugar industry during the 1990s, immense expanses of land where sugarcane used to grow were abandoned and quickly covered by the invasive marabú tree. With nearly 900,000 hectares of that land still lying fallow, several scholars have asserted that Cuba must breathe new life into its once powerful sugar industry, primarily by stimulating sugarcane biofuel production. Others, however, considering Cuba’s massive food import dependency and persistently dismal domestic agricultural production, have looked at that same untapped land and avowed that it must be harnessed in a sustainable way to feed the increasingly-food insecure island.

This thesis contributes to this debate by asking: does the persistence of these vast swaths of idle lands, or tierras ociosas, support the call to reinvent the island’s sugarcane agroindustry or the urge to scale up agroecological food production? Drawing on state statistics of agricultural production and in-person interviews, this thesis conducts costbenefit analyses in order to weigh the tradeoffs of the debated land uses and also evaluates the potential benefits of the status quo of Cuba’s tierras ociosas.

This thesis shows that the tradeoffs of both the call to reinvent the Cuban sugar industry and the competing cry to scale up agroecology on Cuba’s idle lands incur costs that swamp the potential benefits of transforming the status quo. On the one hand, reinventing the sugarcane agroindustry could be accomplished by adding 447,177 ha to sugarcane production, which would produce nearly 2 billion liters of sugarcane ethanol, 2.8 million tons of sugar and generate 5,000 GWh of electricity. While sugarcane production could boost foreign exchange by roughly 2.2 billion USD a year, the massive investment costs needed to restore the agroindustry, estimated at 3-5 billion USD, are nearly insurmountable for the cash-strapped Cuban State. On the other hand, agroecology could be scaled up on 446,823 ha to substitute all major food imports and finally achieve Cuba’s goal of food sovereignty, saving approximately 720 million USD in foreign exchange each year. Nonetheless, the lack of infrastructure and the depressed wages in the Cuban countryside, a product of the State’s economic distortions to keep food affordable, dampen any desire for laborers to return to farming. Since agroecology cannot function without manual labor, the State would have to forcibly relocate its citizens to the countryside to achieve food sovereignty.

Therefore, although sugarcane and agroecology have been pitted against each other in the debate over Cuba’s idle lands, this thesis argues that integrating these two models can create positive synergies through sustainable development that erase the negative tradeoffs currently reinforcing the status quo, allowing Cuba to achieve its goal of food sovereignty. Scale, surprisingly, turns out to be a confounding variable in the debate. Rather, the crux of the agricultural crisis stems from the system’s inefficiencies. In sum, this thesis suggests an important opportunity for the US to inject the critical investment into Cuba’s sugar agroindustry that will be necessary to achieve an integrated agricultural model on the island.