"Cuban agriculture turning to traditional methods in crisis"

Cuba is going back as it looks forward, expanding its use of ox teams in agriculture to save on costly fuel for tractors while increasing production in the desperately needed food sector.

"The current world financial crisis requires a mixture of the modern and the traditional," agricultural expert Juan Varela wrote in the Granma newspaper.

"Our country has sufficient capacity and experience to come out a winner and not allow itself to be defeated by problems and justifications."

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I love this. The switch to more traditional forms of agriculture is something I have been in support of for a long time.

While Cuba defiantly has political issues that effect the productivity within the nation the efforts it has put into organic, localized and tradition forms of agriculture has paid off. We could stand to learn some lessons from these changes in our own nation, or at least our government could.

For example, looking to more traditional methods of production could do WONDERS for unemployment in the USA.

Total employment in agriculture (operator plus hired labor) has declined by over 70% and the number of hired farm workers has declined by over 60% since 1950...there has been substantial substitution for the relativity cheaper capital and machinery inputs in place of the relativity more expensive labor inputs.

-Economic trends in U.S. agriculture and food sytems since World War II
By Milton C. Hallberg, Page 33.

This decline of employment in agriculture is a major contributing factor to the unemployment in our nation. Many say that 'well I don't want to work on a farm' and that is fine. However, I can speak for my family members who have lot their farms to industrialized agriculture and say they DO want to farm but can not.

The argument that these old methods of production would not work in today's world is fiction. They would not work to prop up today's agriculture-corporations, but they can and would feed the people.

For more information on this see my thread:

Local Organic Farming: An Alternative to Industrialized Agriculture

[edit on 26-8-2009 by Animal]

The US would be hard put to pull this off, but may still come down to this, out of neccessity.
It will all get down to food, in Michigan where I am at, they have plans to convert slums into forest and mini farms, in Detroit they say could become some what self sufficient.
This is big plan which started in Flint, Michigan, Obama is on board with this one aand giving support.
Part of reason for this is once these slums are gone, the police and Fire dept. will nolonger have to go on calls to these areas, once the house have been torn down, less area to patrol.
As for Cuba they have gotten bad rap, the thing is though the people are happy and everyone is being fed, and there are no obese people in Cuba, if there is I have not seen them.
People are going hungry in the Great U.S.A. , so who is really taking care of business?

[edit on 26-8-2009 by googolplex]