CUBA: Innovation Gives Boost to Small Farmers
By Dalia Acosta

SAN ANDRÉS, Cuba, Jan 9 (IPS) - Cuban small farmers are strengthening their traditional ties with the land through a farming project that links scientific know-how with ancestral techniques and encourages greater local autonomy in decision-making on food production.

The Programme for Local Agrarian Innovation (PIAL), in effect since 2000, could offer an alternative for the agriculture industry in Cuba, where around half of the country’s fertile land is not cultivated, even though more than 1.5 billion dollars in food products are imported annually to meet domestic demand.

"The aim is for farmers to have a say in the design of the country’s agricultural policies," PIAL director Humberto Ríos told IPS. "It’s an example that we want to give of how, when farmers have a more active voice and are the ones engaged directly in innovation, the country makes greater progress."

For Ríos, a researcher at the National Institute of Agricultural Sciences (INCA), which has promoted the initiative from the very start, "what is needed is the development of a more decentralised system of innovation, where the key actors are not us scientists, but farmers themselves."

According to Ríos, the research has been circumscribed to scientific institutes due to the lack of resources and of determination to disseminate the results and make them more widely available,

"It is assumed that an extension worker will teach the techniques to the farmers, but that doesn’t work, either in Cuba or abroad," he said.

PIAL’s experience, said the expert, has demonstrated that, "when it is the farmers themselves who design the experiments and process and make available the scientific information, the land begins to bear more fruits."

Pedro Felipe González, better known as Coco, boosted his yield of beans from 270 to 324 quintals (around 14,500 kg) per "caballería" (43 hectares) after adopting a wider variety of seeds.

Ríos, a farmer from La Palma, 125 km west of Havana, was one of the pioneers of the Fitomejoramiento Participativo (genetic improvement) programme, which gave rise to PIAL.

On his nearly three caballerías (129 hectares) of land, the 78-year-old González grows 50 different kinds of beans (at one point he was growing 200), which at times have helped out other regions in Cuba hit by heavy rains. "One of our major efforts is to distribute the seeds, because that is our battle; if one farmer loses his seeds, another can offer him some," he told IPS.

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