HAVANA, Cuba.- When pork meat was more available to Cuban consumers, the State imported 70% of the food that the pig population needed, and the producers only had the task of guaranteeing the other 30%, which they achieved this mainly by planting crops such as soybeans, corn and cassava. We are talking about a few years ago, when a pound of pork in the agro-markets fluctuated around 60 pesos in national currency.
However, as a consequence of the weakness of Castro’s external finances, and also due to the import substitution strategy that guides the trade policy of the island’s rulers, it was recently decided to invert the terms: the State only It was going to import 30% of the feed for the pigs, while the pig farmers had to manage as best they could in order to reach the remaining 70% of the feed that the pig mass needed.
A situation that has been overcome by a few pork producers who already had land cultivated with animal feed, but which becomes extremely difficult for those who had not prepared the conditions for such a change.
A pig farmer from the province of Granma offers his considerations in this regard: “For all the producers it was very difficult to stop counting on the feed that came from the ship almost directly to the pigsties, but those who did not prepare land are now in a much worse rut. hard, because have to start from scratch”.
And it must be added that finally getting the animal feed from the products that are grown is a long and expensive process. In addition to the land and the seeds to plant, it is necessary to have sufficient liquidity to hire a labor force to help cultivate the products, harvest them, dry them, and mill them.
Likewise, obtaining land in usufruct for those producers who decide to venture into this adventure, moreover, is not easy at all. This is one of the main concerns of Cuban pig farmers, which has even been raised by them before the country’s highest authorities.
The Head of the Department of Land Control in the Granma territory, for example, has recognized that “the stipulated term to create and approve a file for the delivery of land, which must go through a chain of steps in which several agencies intervene, is still very long. It is a bureaucratic procedure and a lot of paperwork.
As a result of all the above, there has been a significant reduction in the number of pork producers who had agreements with the State for the breeding and marketing of this product. Of 14,000 pig farmers with agreements in 2017, currently there are less than 2,000. That is, almost 12,000 workers in the pig industry who have had to find other ways to earn a living.
That is the fundamental reason why today pork is so scarce in all the country’s markets, and that when it appears it is quoted at prohibitive prices for ordinary Cubans.
There is no lack of specialized voices that insist that, only by increasing the importation of food for pigs, this much-demanded meat will once again be present in the usual diet of Cubans. But the rulers refuse to do so. Let those who can eat pork meat, and those who can’t, let them content themselves with watching the pigs on the television news.
OPINION ARTICLE
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