Perhaps there is no other organism in Cuba that has been the most criticized than agriculture, not even compared to the National Baseball Championship. Baseball lasts a few months but food is needed every three hours.
Several policies and processes have been designed and developed to reorganized agriculture, but there is such bureaucratic complications “some of them hard to understand” which at the end become obstacles, knots and inefficiencies.
About 20 years ago, Army General Raul Castro made a call to untie the knots that stop the development of the productive forces; however, the phrase seems to be just said. The Cuban President insists on the need to eliminate the planning mistakes, bureaucracy and the lack of organization that sometimes generate failure to comply in agriculture.
Economists have added other reasoning: the lack of systematic approaches that stop and hamper the advance of the productive forces in the branch. The National Meeting of Agriculture Workers held last September stressed the will of those who work the land to produce more food with quality and enough quantities, to guarantee feeding security; nevertheless, he noted the obstacle of subjectivities in the main processes for the Cuban economy.
Ups and downs in the prices from stockpile of all those products from agriculture do not stimulate and bring uncertainty in the producers. This problem is present every year, despite the contracts, state lists or commitments.
Another aspect to deal with is the reduction of the staff which is not working directly in the field – they are 300,000 workers that represent the third part of all the staff linked to the sector.
The Guidelines passed in the 6th Congress of the Cuban Communist Party are clear in relation to the transformations demanded by a branch that should be a determining factor for the national economy, only contributes with the 3 percent of the GDP. Agriculture is in need of procedure mechanisms that simplify the links between production and consumer; make good use of the forces in the fields, reduce the prices of the harvests and free the about USD$2,000,000 the government uses to import food.
