• Submitted by: admin
• national
• Business and Economy
• 05 / 19 / 2010

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HAVANA — The Cuban government has turned over nearly 1 million hectares of previously state-owned land to individual farmers, but half of it still lies fallow or is underutilized, highlighting the tremendous challenges facing an agricultural reform program that President Raul Castro has announced as key to the island's future.

Economy Minister Marino Murillo disclosed the figures in a speech closing out a gathering of small-scale farmers in Havana on Sunday.

The session was closed to foreign media, but his words were reprinted in the Communist Party newspaper Granma on Monday.

Murillo said some 2.3 million acres had been turned over to private farmers since Raul Castro announced the program in 2008, shortly after formally taking over Cuba's leadership from his brother, Fidel.

At the time, Raul Castro said that turning over fallow land to farmers was a matter of "maximum national security," and was necessary to breathe new life into an agricultural sector hobbled by decades of government mismanagement.

But the land reform has failed so far to bring the game-changing surge in production that president Castro had hoped for.

In the region of Havana, for instance, production during the first two months of 2010 was 40 percent below the government's goal. Granma cited government ineptitude as a main cause.

Murillo said that "about half" of the land assigned under the agricultural reform "remains fallow or insufficiently utilized," and he cautioned that farmers who have received government fields will lose them unless they find a way to increase productivity.

"This situation needs to be changed as soon as possible," Murillo said. "And if any producers are not able to do it, we will have to transfer these lands to others who can."

A red-letter headline on the front page of Monday's Granma made the challenge clear: "The Number One Mission of Our Farmers," it said. "Produce for The People."

Murillo did not say why so much of the land is yet unused, but many farmers complain that they have been hamstrung by a lack of equipment, seeds and fertilizer, and victimized by incompetent local officials.

The 920,000 hectares — roughly the size of Yellowstone National Park in the United States — is about one-seventh of Cuba's arable land, and nearly a third of the fallow state-owned land targeted for private distribution, according to 2008 National Statistics Office figures.

Even so, the program has had successes. Cuban state-run media have highlighted individual farmers who have turned once-barren land into productive fields. And Murillo said private farmers now produce 70 percent of the island's food, despite only controlling 41 percent of the arable land.

Murillo is also vice president of Cuba's Council of Ministers, the country's Cabinet.

He also said the government plans a new tax system for agriculture, but gave no details, and he outlined the basics of a plan to import less food, let farmers buy supplies without going through the government and increase dependence on organic fertilizer by 2015.

By PAUL HAVEN
Associated Press

Source: www.montereyherald.com