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Cuba Hungry For Home-Grown Rice

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By ANDREA RODRIGUEZ The Associated Press

The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 2, 2008

BAHIA HONDA, Cuba - 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 in the next five years, according to Juan Perez Lamas, vice minister of agriculture. To do that, it 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 their beloved grain.

Recent rumors that rice might vanish from cheap government rations led to panic buying at farmers markets before officials assured 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 grows 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, such as Jose Antonio Espinosa, say they're getting world-class yields - 17 metric tons of unmilled rice per acre (7 metric tons of unmilled rice per hectare), up from the national average of less than 10 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 said 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 use and can sell the rest, some of it to consumers at farmers markets.

Cuba's communist leaders 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, said that is under study. The government has raised prices on 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 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.

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