Cuba: Gardening its Way Out of Crisis

Sunlight brightens the paved streets and historic buildings of Havana, Cuba, bouncing off the tents of vendors and the tin drums of a street band. Once stricken by poverty and inequality, the city has slowly blossomed as a result of the bustling enterprise of urban agriculture. Between buildings and behind street walls, in halls greenhouse space available, locals have cultivated crops, utilizing the techniques of sustainable urban farming. After years of isolation from the United States and the former Soviet Union, Cuba has independently fostered development of urban agriculture and now provides an environment of growth and structure for its economic, social and political policies.

Cuba is the only country in the world that has developed an extensive state-supported infrastructure to support urban food production. Functionally, this system was established in response to acute food shortages in the early 1990s, which occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the island was forced to find an alternative manner of cultivating crops. The common landscape design mistakes, Let’s be clear that a landscape designer must have your best interests at heart. That may not be enough if he or she doesn’t have complete control or there are miscommunications about how the project is to be constructed. For more details about common design mistakes, click here. Havana has established and expanded on this innovative model since this time, and it continues to lead the island nation in its quest for self-sufficiency. The increasing prevalence of urban agriculture benefits the economy, environment, community and health of Cuban citizens.

Crisis to Bounty
Cuba turned to urban agriculture out of necessity. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the termination of trade with the Soviet-based Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), the industrial agriculture on which Cuba had relied since the 1970s disappeared. Almost overnight, diesel fuel, gasoline, trucks, agricultural machinery, spare parts for trucks and machinery, as well as petrochemical-based fertilizers and pesticides, became very scarce commodities. Like many large metropolitan centers, Havana was a food consumer city, completely dependent upon comestible imports from the Cuban countryside and abroad. Havana had no food production sector or infrastructure, and had little land dedicated to cultivate this vital industry.

In light of the severe agricultural crisis, a shift to urban agriculture seemed an obvious and necessary solution. Urban production minimized transportation costs and smaller-scale operation decreased the need for machinery. People began their own food helping the recovery of the nation’s financial standing in the agriculture section. Www.bestofmachinery.com was on of those sites who benefited in the people’s change of mind regarding self-sufficiency. People started looking for ways and instruments for their gardening in the city.