Cuba intends to plant 200 thousand hectares of rice in 2026, double what was expected in the current year, but far from what is necessary to cover the demand for cereal, the state press reported this Wednesday.
The president of the Agricultural Group of the Ministry of Agriculture, Orlando Linares, explained that half of the projected hectares will be planted in the provinces of Pinar del Río, Villa Clara, Sancti Spíritus, Camagüey and Granma, as reported Granma.
Linares commented that “the planting will have the support of national seed, while the Vietnamese side, which will participate in the program, will provide its own seeds.”
Currently, there are a Vietnamese company producing rice in Cuba and it is the first foreign firm that since 1959 has received land concessions for this purpose. That company’s harvest was 1,000 hectares, equivalent to 3.3% of what was planted throughout the island in 2023.
The 2025 plan included increasing the area of rice cultivated and maintaining productivity to reach around 100 thousand tons of the product, but the campaign has not yet ended, so the total harvested is unknown.
Production drop
Cuba harvested about 80 thousand tons of rice in 2024, just 11% of what it consumes annually and only 30% of what it produced six years before, according to official information.
The data of this basic crop in the Cuban diet They agree with those of many other agricultural productions that have been drastically reduced in the last five years of serious economic crisis on the island, despite the approval in 2022 of a food security law.
The information explains that national rice production increased gradually between 2012 and 2018, when it reached 304 thousand tons (of the 700 thousand that the country requires annually).
However, since then it has been reduced “dramatically” due to “the lack of inputs and fuel to support the plantations,” according to sector authorities.
The drop in productivity also stands out, according to the information data. If in 2018 each hectare produced just over two tons of rice, in 2024 that same area would produce half: barely one ton.
The drop in production in 2024 led the Cuban Government to import 100% of the rice it offers at highly subsidized prices in the supply book (ration card).
Promising yields in first rice harvest of Vietnamese company in Cuba
This contributes to the important disbursement of foreign currency made by the Cuban Government, since it imports around 80% of what the country consumes, according to United Nations data. And the island has difficulties in earning that foreign currency due to the decline in tourism and remittances.
Furthermore, according to data provided on different occasions by the Executive, the Cuban Government dedicates about 1.6 billion dollars a year to importing food for the basic basket of the supply book and nearly 2 billion to buying crude oil and derivatives outside the country.
Together, covid-19, the tightening of US sanctions and errors in national economic policy have aggravated the structural problems of the Cuban economy, which has maintained imbalances for decades.
EFE/OnCuba.
