Essay by Eric Worrall
According to Carbon Brief, the success of organic farming in Cuba and the USA demonstrates the Sri Lankan failure was caused by incompetence, not by a lack of agricultural chemicals.
Q&A: What does the world’s reliance on fertilisers mean for climate change?
11 July 2022
…
The global production of fertilisers is responsible for around 1.4% of annual CO2 emissions, and fertiliser use is a major contributor of non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions.
Now, scientists and farmers are faced with a new dilemma: how to feed a still-growing population while reducing agriculture’s impact on climate and the environment.
Some are trying to end their fertiliser use altogether, while others are looking at how to reduce the amount of nutrients lost by optimising fertiliser application and management. And others are trying to recover lost nutrients from waste, where they can be recycled back into the farm.
…
Over recent decades, several countries have attempted to make the move away from synthetic fertiliser use. Some can provide a roadmap for doing so successfully, while others act as a cautionary tale.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the island nation of Cuba – still under blockade from the US and without another source of agrochemicals or mechanised equipment – was forced to find a new way to farm. In the decades since, Cuba has adopted agroecological farming methods at scale. Meanwhile, the water quality of its rivers and waterways has improved significantly since agroecology became the norm.
However, the attempted transition away from synthetic inputs in Sri Lanka went markedly less smoothly. Sri Lankan president Gotabaya Rajapaksa announced a ban on the import of agrochemicals in spring 2021 in an attempt to make the country’s agriculture more sustainable. The Sri Lanka Agricultural Economics Association warned the president that yields and farm income would drop precipitously and food insecurity would rise as a result of the policy, and the decision was met with widespread protests. Rajapaksa soon walked back some of the provisions in the ban, but protests have continued as a result of rising food prices and food shortages, along with a national economic crisis.
…
But Nina Prater, a livestock farmer in Arkansas and a soil scientist at the National Center for Appropriate Technology (NCAT), tells Carbon Brief that farmers that she knows and works with who have switched to organic farming are seeing comparable yields to those who farm using conventional methods
…
Read more: https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-what-does-the-worlds-reliance-on-fertilisers-mean-for-climate-change/
The claim that Cuba is an organic agricultural miracle in my opinion is a dangerous fiction. Even The Guardian admits Cuba uses lots of imported agricultural chemicals.
Organic or starve: can Cuba’s new farming model provide food security?
Roger Atwood
Sat 28 Oct 2017 20.00 AEDT…
Cuba has never been able to feed itself. It currently imports 60-80% of the food it consumes, at a cost of about $2bn a year. Two-thirds of its corn is imported and a similar amount of its rice, the latter mainly from Vietnam and Brazil. At markets around the country, sacks of rice can be seen piled to the rafters. Cubans love bread, but wheat doesn’t grow well in the tropical climate, so that has to be imported as well — mostly from the United States, which, in an exception to the Cold War-era trade embargo, sells food to Cuba for cash.
…
“It’s sad that the immense majority of farmers in Cuba still use pesticides and chemical fertilisers. They’re poison, and they enter our food,” says Pimentel, who raises 45 different crops on four hectares in an isolated valley in western Cuba. He’s proud of the fact he never uses chemicals of any kind. Yet he’s not sure his farm could ever gain certification as organic. The land, in Pinar del Río province, was once planted with tobacco, which has a reputation for high reliance on pesticides. Chemical residues from other crops wash in from neighbouring farms with the rain.
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/28/organic-or-starve-can-cubas-new-farming-model-provide-food-security
Notice the pattern. Communism isn’t a failure, it has just never been done right. Climate models are correct, but the predicted rapid warming is masked by natural variation. And now, the claim that organic farming failed in Sri Lanka because the Sri Lankans followed the wrong roadmap.
It was bad enough when the academics promoting such ideas were just driving up the cost of home heating and gasoline with their climate alarmism. But now they are focussing their attack on the foundations of global food security, and rejecting the abundant evidence they are utterly and catastrophically wrong.
Update: h/t Speed – More confirmation the claim Cuba is an organic farming success story is nonsense. Cuba has just had their worst sugar harvest in over a century. “… The report, which cited a spokesman for Azcuba, the state-run sugar company, blamed the shortfall primarily on a lack of inputs, including oxygen for sugar production, fertilizers, pesticides, fuel and spare parts for plant machinery. … The report said only 37% of the necessary herbicides and pesticides were available for use this season. …”
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What the?!? The article this post was based on doesn’t show in any way shape or form that organic farming in Cuba is successful at feeding Cuba. Fer cryin’ out loud, Cuba imports about 80% of their food needs, if I read the post correctly.
Forget the facts. Just absorb what I say. Cuba good, Cuba organic farming successful. Cuba has no problems feeding itself** with organic farming, just because one Cuban farmer who produces enough extra for some decent pocket change has done it.
Suuure… um…. no.
–
–
**Please do ignore, “Cuba has never been able to feed itself. It currently imports 60-80% of the food it consumes, at a cost of about $2bn a year“
I’m thinking that if Carbon Brief says something, anything it must be wrong.
Ah the nostalgia, recalling my childhood and Harrowsmith magazine in 1970s Canada. This mag specialized in giving practical tips to the back-to-the-landers then, mostly overage hippies who rarely lasted a second winter. My father used to read it and point out how much better it was to do it his way than the way he had grown up. Once he explained how much time and labor was involved we agreed.
PROM
As a life-long (relatively successful) chemical engineer, I cannot help but
make a suggestion that will help in this situation.
“Get your hands dirty with Sh*t.” or, Phosphate Rich Organic Manure.
see http://www.promsociety.net/profile.htm
I was lucky, a few years ago, to make friends with the great Dr. D M R Sekhar
while we were both on assignment to plants in Jordan.
I’ve made lots of DAP (di-ammonium phosphate fertilizer). In tests by Dr Sekhar
of PROM versus DAP, PROM did as well the first year, and significantly improved
the yield the second year “With No Further Addition.”
(Can you spell chelation?)
Look it up. Try it. With no Natural gas, no ammonia and no phosphoric acid, it’s
a choice. Especially if you are a small agricultural village, with little money,
but access to ground phosphate rock from OCP or Mosaic.
Plants need Nitrates or ammonia as well as phosphates. As an experiment I tried watering my citrus plants with dilute ammonia cleaning solution, loads of very rapid new growth. Where do you get the ammonia for your DAP from? There are not enough organic sources to satisfy world demand.
Now that you mentioned ammonia, it reminded me of all the chattering awhile ago about how hydrogen was going to save us all. Make hydrogen, and then ammonia from it, using the power from the wind turbines that can’t really be trusted to power the grid. If the green dictators who run the governments force fuels and fertilizer underground then the market for ammonia will be wide open.
Virtually all maize grown in New Zealand is planted with DAP.
I grew maize for grain for many years but now grow maize for silage for our dairy herd .
Maize silage remove a lot of potassium as the whole plant is removed from the paddock .
Grain maize only needed small amounts of Potassiium and phosphate as the stubble foliage was returned to the soil through grazing cattle if the soil was dry .
But for subsequent crops nitrogen had to be applied to grow a good crop .
Our neighbours tried to grow a maize silage crop with no artificial nitrogen because they have gone organic .
It was the worst maize crop I have ever seen in over 50 years of growing maize and it was cultivated from a grass paddock which had been fertilised for many years .
A combination of poor weed control and low nitrogen levels .
The attack on food production is to be expected, after all these people decry “overpopulation”, some call for `a world population of 500 million, you know just enough so the members of the WEF can have their servants, and then enough worker bees to make sure they have whatever they want.
You can’t defy the laws of photosynthesis and agronomy.
Plants MUST HAVE H2O, CO2 and certain minerals(fertilizers) for their roots.
In most cases, the more you increase those elements, the more productive the plant will be.
There’s an optimal level for all those elements for each plant that varies under wide ranging conditions.
Having less than optimal levels of any element, will cause a reduction in yield and/or reduction in the amount of something(s) in the plant that was negatively impacted by the sub optimal conditions.
Synthetic fertilizers, especially those loaded with nitrogen, allow humans to create a near optimal soil environment to grow plants.
Without them, soil conditions will not be near optimal and plants will not do as well.
This is agronomy 101.
This is feeding billions of people on the planet right now.
https://ourworldindata.org/fertilizers
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Diagrammatical-presentation-of-global-warming-due-to-fertilizers-Source-FAO-2014b_fig2_335541725
Another secret about fossil fuels: Haber Bosch process-fertilizers feeding the planet using natural gas-doubling food production/crop yields. https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/39215/
Correct link:
Another secret about fossil fuels
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/39215/
Historical Corn Grain Yields in the U.S.
https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/yieldtrends.html
I was in Cuba when Fidel was alive – not a lot of fat people there.
And those that were fat, were close friends of Fidel.
Not ‘green’
grim – everywhere, everything including the conversation here.
Cuban health.
How many people in Cuba have a diagnosable Metabolic Disorder – something that would severely disable if not ki1l them without treatment.
Compared to the US figure of 88%
Where all that’s needed is better self-care, coming from advice dispensed by doctors for example.
NB ‘Advice’ – not pills and surgery
Advice especially concerning diet,
i.e. Heavy metals, sugar, lack of vitamins & trace elements also residues of pesticides, antibiotics & hormones. ##
Randomly searched data says:
Life expectancy in Cuba (78 years unchanging ) = about the same as it in in the US.
In fact from here, we’re told that US males live one year less than Cuban males and the gap is widening.
While Cuba spends about $1,000 per person per year on healthcare, compared to about $15,000 in the US
(That 15K figure being an average of the folks who assert $3.8Trillion pa and those who say $6Trillion pa. I suspect the folks on the receiving end of such largesse are reluctant to disclose the exact amounts)
Now tell me about Modern Agriculture, Synthetic Fertiliser, GMOs and Pesticides.
Especially that there are no Free Lunches and right there (above) we have a figure on what a Free Lunch costs….
13 Dollars and 56 Cents each meal
and one year off your (US) life (increasing annually)
…..assuming 3 meals (lunches) per day for 330 million people.
And you say workers in Cuba are paid how much per day/week?
Is that what you mean by ‘never better’
Maybe and not for the first time in this crazed ‘everything is wrong’ world, maybe Cause and Effect have become confused and Magical Thinking has taken over. We all know what causes Magical Thinking don’t we.
## I’m sure we all recall Idso (father and son) recently proclaiming the benefits of CO2 induced fertilisation and the ensuant Global Greening.
*How’s that greening going. Hit the rocks has it? Hence why synthetic fert is now so essential?)
About how Idso snr had some orange trees growing in his little patch of desert near Phoenix and that the fruit had 15% more Vitamin C than normal – due of course to all the extra CO2 in the ‘fertilised air’
While Idso carefully did not mention that, since the arrival on farms of synthetic Nitrogen fertiliser, the Vitamin C content of Citrus Fruit has dropped by 85%
Also Vitamin A inside citrus fruits, down to 20% of its figure of 70yrs ago.
Idso’s oranges thus contain 17.25% (15% plus (15% of 15%)) of the Vitamin C they contained 70 years ago.
So which is it..
Did CO2 rising from 300ppm to 400ppm cause:
How’s the Vitamin A and C content of Cuban oranges?
(I do doubt its very good either, they’ll be grown on similar soil/dirt/rock to Florida)
Or did synthetic fertiliser cause the fall and if so, how did it do that?
(It absolutely did, now explain how)
Raving ever onwards….
We all know about Vitamin A (**) – hence = the ‘requirement’ for Golden Rice.
Which the people growing and eating utterly and completely hate.
Would it not have been prudent to have done some research on that first, by simply asking the people, instead of foisting that GM shit upon them and expecting their eternal gratitude?
As is happening here when The Piss is taken out of Organic Farmers and their consumers.
Patently ‘tolerance, empathy and understanding of others‘ has gone the same way as Science = down the toilet/drain.
(See now what The Real Problem in this world actually is?)
** Vitamin A, apart from being good for your eyes (how many folks wear glasses these days) is also an immensely important part of your immune system. Just as is Vitamin C
Say hello to cancer, covid and 200+ autoimmune calamities – things beyond even the wildest imaginations of 70 yrs ago.
Peta, did you randomize the sentences while composing or only after ?
No comment Peta except this:
I observed that Cubans are rarely obese, and Americans often are, and morbidly so.
I also observe here in Canada that the obese are extremely unhealthy, often have to ride in electric carts while still in their 40’s, and age rapidly and badly.
If I could make one change for the health of the general populace, it would be to attack obesity – as opposed to all the pills, supplements, gimmicks, etc. Lose the lard! .
88% of Americans have disorders that would kill them if not treated? Really?
How many of these academics have down sized to donate half their trough money to Sri Lanka? I suspect if they had a conscience that there would be enough to bail the country out.
Also note the big thing about Marxism that is being replicated here.
Marx was an outsider. He was not a Worker and he was not an Owner. Yet he still wanted to upend the system.
Here we have grand claims being made by people who live in neither Sri Lanka or Cuba on how the people who do live in those countries should carry on making them feel better.
He was a lazy, overeducated but unemployed self-important mooch who put his wife and family in poverty and sponged off his co-idiot but safely employed in the family business friend, Engels.
The best social welfare program is a job!
” The claim that Cuba is an organic agricultural miracle in my opinion is a dangerous fiction. ”
That is also what I think. It would contradict Lavoisier’s chemistry, near two centuries of agricultural chemistry, and if it were true would amount to the discovery of the “philosophers’ stone”: the transformation of thin air or other spiritual entity in the material bodies of plants. Perhaps socialism was able to achieve there somo social justice (debatable), but socialism is not able to change nature’s physics and chemistry anywhere in the universe (I recall hearing someone somewhere saying it was the very Friedrich Engels who wrote that).
A few easily verified facts– Corn requres ~200lb/ac of N added to the soil each year….Manure contains ~2% N (dry weight)….A cow produces ~ 20 tons of manure /yr– ie ~ 800 lb of N…We plant 90M ac of corn/yr….We have ~18M dairy & beef cattle.
A little arithmetic and we see that cow dung, if ALL used on corn acres would only provide 1/1000th of the needed N…and that leaves nothing for the other crops, including the pasture grass on which the cattle were grazed.
There’s a reason Davey Crocket et al. kept moving west– They quickly played out the soil and had to keep moving to fresh land.
Many of the people who claim that farmers can use manure for their crops, also want to get rid of cattle.
Subsistence farming is not sustainable without indentured workforce
Or large families, which kind of defeats the ol’ depopulate plan.
The big motive for small vegetable farmers to grow certified organic vegetables, fruits and herb is demand and price in local farmer’s markets that market to the elite who can afford to pay the organic premium. The other reason for the small vegetable farmer is that it is cheap and easy to do it organically. This is true in Philadelphia where I did premium organic market gardening and marketing in farmer’s markets for profit and I am sure it’s true in Cuba as well.
Beyond small vegetable gardens forget organic…. it’s too expensive and risky for large high volume/value crops…..especially for Cuba’s Cigar/tobacco industry. see article
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220226-cuban-tobacco-yield-up-in-smoke-amid-fertilizer-shortages
So by example small organic veggie farmer has demonstrated in small local farmers markets to the left leaning elite of the viability of applying organics to the whole of global food production. This is dangerous ignorance and stupidity.
Oh BTW, Cuba imports 1.7 million tons of conventionally grown grain a year. The country would starve without conventional fertilizers. Check my math (which is meager at best) that is 3.4 billion pounds of imported grain for 11.33 million Cubans.
https://www.world-grain.com/articles/10274-focus-on-cuba#:~:text=For%20corn%2C%20Argentina%20and%20Brazil,14%25%20in%20FY%202014.%E2%80%9D
It’s amazing to me how often Cuba is painted as a paradise by many leftists but none of them seem very eager to move there…
(edit: I suppose it shouldn’t be ‘amazing’, it’s pretty much the norm)
Would these be the same leftists who promise that they are going to leave every time a Republican is elected president?
You know, that’s why I can actually have a little respect for Johnny Depp – he’s the only one who actually followed through. (granted he DID come back but at least he kept his word)
So, if I follow correctly: Sri Lanka was perfectly competent at running modern agriculture but became all of a sudden incompetent at grasping the essence of biological agriculture….right.
It’s not that they were incompetent, it’s that “biological” agriculture is simply not capable of feeding large populations.
Yes, that was my point. My sentence was ironic.
We have one poster on this thread who is making the claim that the only problem in Sri Lanka, was that they didn’t implement the organic program correctly.
Dems and their friends in the news media learned some time ago- making up a success story that fits is much easier than actually finding one.
Ignoring anything that doesn’t fit their agenda, is also easy. Hunter Biden laptop for example.
Cuba also has one of the best “official” infant mortality rates in the world…….
I was in Cuba about 15 years ago and watched a farmer plow his rock strewn field using an Ox to pull the plow. Never occurred to me to think about fertlizer – it seemed a remote concern
With regards to increasing yields using better hybrids and genetics.
This has been effective now for many decades, however it eventually runs into a brick wall.
The energy in a plant used for animal consumption was acquired while it grew.
Where did all the energy come from:
Photosynthesis!
You can improve a plants ability to perform photosynthesis by altering genetics and creating new hybrids but a key, non negotiable factor will always be inputs. You can cause a plant to be more effective at making energy but that also requires giving it the input tools(like fertilizers) to increase the components/parts of the plant that generate more energy(from photosynthesis).
LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICShttps://www2.estrellamountain.edu/faculty/farabee/biobk/biobookener1.html
First Law of Thermodynamics: Energy can be changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed. The total amount of energy and matter in the Universe remains constant, merely changing from one form to another. The First Law of Thermodynamics (Conservation) states that energy is always conserved, it cannot be created or destroyed. In essence, energy can be converted from one form into another.
Plants are made out of something. The material to make up plants has to come from somewhere. That something is fertilizer(minerals in the ground), CO2 and water.
One of the more profoundly absurd things about these proposed cutbacks to the use of synthetic fertilizers in the soil is that they are also trying to reduce fertilizer in the air……….CO2.
For instance, where will plants get their materials/inputs for making leaves(mostly nitrogen) to gather sunshine and collect CO2 if you cut back on nitrogen?
Where will they get the rest of the minerals that are deficient in almost all natural soils if you don’t add them with fertilizers?
Answer………..there is no magic source. There is no green fairy dust that we can sprinkle on plants to replace fertilizers. You either add fertilizer or the plants can’t optimize their growth and yield/food production. There is no refuting or altering this indisputable law of agronomy. Legislation to greatly reduce the amount of fertilizer/nitrogen in the soils WILL reduce food production. Not an opinion. That’s a physical law as explained above.
We can do a better job managing run off from excessive fertilizer that does significant damage to our surface water systems/ecosystems but plants have always needed their nutrients and WILL always need their nutrients, which will almost never be optimal in unfertilized soil.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/86882/#87072
An exception to this would/will be when we engineer MORE plants to extract their nitrogen from the atmosphere(actually, convert N2 to NH3 in the soil-even though the are trying to reduce NH3 in the soils)…..nitrogen fixation (atmosphere is 78% nitrogen).
Until that happens, we’re stuck with giving them the essential nitrogen via the soils and when this is replaced by nitrogen fixation…………it’s still nitrogen they are pulling from the air. In some places, where synthetic fertlizers are NOT used, this will actually INCREASE the amount of nitrogen/NH3 in the soils. Great for the plants there but is the opposite of the absurd objective.
https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2014/02/21/how-do-plants-get-their-nitrogen-from-the-air/
Bacteria and archaea in the soil and in the roots of some plants have the ability to convert molecular nitrogen from the air (N2) to ammonia (NH3), thereby breaking the tough triple bond of molecular nitrogen.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/biological-nitrogen-fixation-23570419/
https://www.ruralsprout.com/nitrogen-fixing-plants/
Take down the names. I’m sure since they are so sure of future organic abundance , they are all fine with being the last to be fed.
Sorry for the tangent. Bill Gates is also considered the largest private owner of farmland in the U.S., holding upward of 260,000 acres in dozens of states. I wonder if he is growing anything on that land and. No grain reported. Just carrots, onions and potatoes on 260,000 acres?! There is no report that these are grown organically.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/mcdonald-s-french-fries-carrots-onions-all-foods-come-bill-n1270033
Even scarier is the report today that he is giving virtually all of his wealth to the Gates Foundation!!!
It is easy to show that a plant can or will grow naturally without people adding fertilizer to it. Every plant grew like that before people started adding fertilizers.
There are barriers to the growth of all plants, like nutrients, adequate water, enough sunshine, not too much competition, ways to cope with pests and more. Plant yields can be increased until they meet a barrier. Fix that barrier, you get better yields until you meet the next barrier, fix that, etc.
The same is true with added fertilizers. Von Liebig in 1855 wrote about fixing successive barriers. If you have a potash deficiency, you need to add potash, not nitrogen or phosphorus fertilizer, until your fertilizer plan reveals the next limit. (Much discussion involves N, P and K because they are major players in nutrient plans, but there are dozens on nutrients that are barriers to growth until they are added and corrected.)
Farming involves a harvest stage, where plant material is taken from the field for consumption. Each carrot that you eat has its lot of those dozens of nutrients that are processes by the body and/or wasted. Their NPK has to be added back to the farm soil if farming is to continue. If you harvest without fertilizing you will deplete your soils so yields will reduce until nothing of use will grow.
This depletion process takes time. Sometimes, a rich soil will seem to go on producing year after year with no help, but it is inexorable that when you harvest and remove, you will eventually have to replace. Some farming enthusiasts have been blessed with rich soils that are still going well, which can lead to false claims that farming can succeed without added fertilizer. So, eventually, the story telling can involve whole countries like Cuba as noted here.
Most farmers, the ones with poorer soils, have learned to cope by various means. Some are scientific, others are folklore. Organic farming is folklore based and it is a danger to global food production efforts. There is simply no purpose in wasting time and effort with organic farming when superior methods have been demonstrated on huge scale time and again. There is no value from mindsets whose logic is based on kindness to Nature (e.g. so do not kill pests with chemicals) when the objective is to prevent human deaths from starvation.
Organic farming is based on silly beliefs as stupid as the noble savage view of ignorant past cultures. You and I, as scientists, have a duty to fight it. Geoff S
One of the largest applications on farm land is Calcium Carbonate .
Calcium Carbonate was formed millions of years ago from minute sea creatures that died over millions of years and sank to the bottom of the sea .
These formed layers on the sea bottom and have been uplifted to become part of the land as limestone and chalk’
Calcium carbonate is quarried and ground very fine to be used as agricultural lime .
It is the calcium in the lime that raise the PH .That is that it reduces the soils acidity.
Acid low ph soils will grow very little except blueberries .
The doomsayers are against cement manufacture as CO2 is released during manufacture of limestone into cement .
How long will it be before they start calling for a halt to using lime on farms ?
Our peat soils in New Zealand were not very productive as applications of a tonne of lime to the acre was far to little to raise the PH ‘Researchers found that applications of up to 4 tonnes an acre were needed and the lime had to be incorporated into the soil down as far as the plant roots penetrated .
Our peat soils are now very productive but we have the green loons saying that as the peat is drained it releases CO2 .
They want to turn them back into peat bogs .
Limestone was formed from sea creatures that absorbed CO2 and peat bogs are formed from living plants that have absorbed CO2 .
What is the problem ?
Farmers used to rotate fields between row crops and alfalfa. Alfalfa fixes nitrogen in the soil plus its deep roots (up to 12 feet deep) break up the soil and improves its water retention and mineral retention. The big issue with doing this is the amount of land that is taken out of production for food grains, anywhere from three to seven years. When you had a lot of small farmers with small livestock herds the alfalfa could be used for livestock feed. As the small farmer has disappeared in favor of thousands of acres of food crops and cattle herds in the thousands so has crop rotation like this.
There are always pro’s and con’s in how society proceeds. If the greenies want to maintain their urban lifestyle, including plentiful and cheap food, then they are going to have to begin to recognize the *entirety* of what that takes. You can’t arbitrarily define good and bad without recognizing the trade-offs that go with it.
What a load of crap from Carbon Brief. I’m Cuban BTW, born and raised. Calling any economic endeavor of the Cuban government a success is a lie. In the 70s and all through the 80s the bulk of the agricultural output in Cuba (except for sugar cane) was in the hands of the School to the Countryside program, which put a high percentage of middle and high schoolers in boarding schools in the countryside to basically work for free in the fields. I was, like most kids of my generation, one of those students spending half of the day, 5 days a week, doing the job of a farmer, most of the time not knowing what the heck I was doing. Only by using enormous amount of fertilizer was the country able to compensate the lack of productivity of the work force. So right until the 90s Cuba was effectively overusing fertilizers. The fall of the communism in Europe forced Cuba to grow food without much fertilizer. The country has never been able to supply its own population with enough food and it needs to import millions of dollars’ worth of food from international markets every year and it relies more and more on donations from the UN and some “friendly” nations. The only reason Cuba doesn’t end up like Siri Lanka is because it is a terrible dictatorship, where the smallest sign of dissent can land you in jail. Cubans unfortunately would rather risk death by jumping in a raft and cross the Florida stretch than protest and spend many years in jail. Just search the web for what happened to many of the participants in the protest on July 11, 2021.
The sad things about most leftists is that they believe the ability to lock up dissidents is one of communism best features.