Cuba pushes to double its rice production

Associated Press

July 13, 2008

BAHIA HONDA, Cuba - Soaring world rice prices have Cubans worried about keeping the national dish of beans and rice on the table - and officials are scrambling to increase local production.

Raul Castro's government hopes to halve rice imports over the next five years, according to Juan Perez Lamas, vice minister of agriculture. To do that, Cuba will have to more than double production - currently about 200,000 metric tons of milled rice a year.

Rice-obsessed Cubans consume an average of 130 pounds of it a year - more than double the U.S. average. When rice disappeared for periods during the lean times of the 1990s, some people cut spaghetti into bits so it resembled the familiar grain.

Recent rumors that rice might vanish from cheap government rations led to panic buying at farmers' markets before officials issued assurances they wouldn't let stocks vanish.

Low prices a few years ago led Cuba to cut rice production, turning to exports. But world prices have jumped from $500 a ton to more than $1,200 a ton in just a few months.

That means it makes more sense to use local production, which costs about $400 a ton, Perez Lamas told reporters at a recent conference on rice.

Cuba now grows just a fourth of the 800,000 metric tons its 11 million people consume annually.

Officials say they plan to bring abandoned rice fields back into production, while investing in canals, land-leveling and other technology to help boost output per acre. They plan to build silos to help store the crop.

Some farmers like Jose Antonio Espinosa say they're already getting world-class yields - 17 metric tons of unmilled rice per acre, up from the national average of less than 10 metric tons per acre.

Espinosa directs the Camilo Cienfuegos Agricultural Cooperative in the western town of Bahia Honda. So far, only 14 of its 2,500 acres are devoted to rice.

But Espinosa says that could change.

"With the price tripling in recent months, I cannot conceive of someone with a stream or small dam nearby who isn't growing rice," he said.

Members of the cooperative get part of the rice for their own use and can sell the rest - some of it to consumers at farmers' markets.

Cuba's Communist leaders so far have resisted raising prices to give farmers a financial incentive to grow more rice - though Ruben Alfonso, a specialist at Cuba's Rice Research Institute, says that is under study. The government has raised prices on some other goods.

Consumers at farmers' markets pay 15 cents a pound - roughly the same as last year and down sharply from prices in the hardship years of the mid-1990s, when it could cost 59 cents a pound, a large chunk of a monthly salary in those days.

Cuba also has struggled with the effects of drought and hurricanes, and the government is trying to lure young people back to fields where increasingly gray-haired farmers are nearing retirement age.

"It is a food security issue," Alfonso said.