Alice Claydon is one of three Student Travel Award 2014 recipients. She recently visited Cuba to investigate urban agriculture – this is the first of two blogs about what she learnt and experienced.
They say that the first step on the road to recovery is admitting that you have a problem. So here goes….we have a problem with food.
Except that in the case of the 21st century industrial agricultural system, the term ‘problem’ doesn’t really come close. As Professor Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University London, has been warning for the last 35 years, we are currently facing a global ‘food crisis’ which is already having a catastrophic effect on people’s health, livelihoods, and the natural environment.
On a global scale, food production is the single biggest cause of climate change – greater than any other human activity on the planet. It is estimated that the industrial food system emits more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation network, or even all energy generation on Earth. It is a sad irony then that climate change is one of the greatest threats to the future security of food.
We already use 60% of the Earth’s land for food production, and the other 40% cannot viably sustain efficient agricultural production. In order to ensure global food security we need to address the way that global food is produced, distributed and consumed. Currently one billion people in the world are obese, and yet another one billion are starving.
Diet-related health problems are placing huge strains on health care systems all over the world. By 2035, it is predicted that diabetes alone will cost the NHS £16.8bn. To put this into perspective, over £162bn was spent on diabetes last year in the USA. Producing more food will not compensate for unbalanced global consumption; it is estimated that 30-50% of all food produced never even reaches a human stomach anyway. With poor practices in harvesting, storage and transportation, as well as market and consumer wastage, we are actually already producing enough food to comfortably feed 7 billion of us now.
The distribution of people across the planet is rapidly changing. One of the direct effects of the widespread conglomeration of agricultural land is the displacement of people from rural to urban contexts. Since 2012 we have for the first time in human history become a predominantly urban species, and feeding cities has become one of the greatest challenges of our lifetime.
Not that most of us in Britain would be remotely aware of this challenge and the monumental environmental costs of putting daily food onto our plates. Supermarkets create the illusion of a permanent global summertime by offering a constant and vast array of food, over 40% of which is imported. The majority of us never have to worry about where we will get our food from – so surely that means the system must be working?
Well Lord Cameron, head of the Countryside Agency, realised after the fuel protests in 2000 that any disruption to the supermarkets’ just-in-time delivery supply chain would mean that only three days of food per person would be left on the supermarket shelves. We are living in a country where, every day, we are potentially ‘nine meals from anarchy’. More recently, Oxfam’s Good Enough to Eat Index compared the availability of food, its price, quality and nutritional value in 125 countries worldwide. Britain came out as the worst country in Europe.
As we move into a less stable economic, political and environmental future, the likelihood of mass disruptions to the global energy and food supply chain grows ever more real. What would it be like if suddenly for some reason we had no industrial food to rely on? There is one place in the world we can look to for an example of the industrial model falling apart practically overnight, and that is Cuba.
In 1989 the Soviet Union collapsed, taking with it Cuba’s main source of GDP and nearly all of its imports of fossil fuels, fertilisers, pesticides and agricultural machinery. Tractors and harvesters stopped dead in the fields, trucks could not transport food around the country and hundreds of thousands of cattle starved to death without the grain to feed them. The government declared a state of emergency know as the ‘Special Period in a Time of Peace’, made worse by the continuing US trade embargo. A radical new model of food production was rapidly needed to prevent mass starvation.
During the Special Period the average Cuban lost between 5-25% of their bodyweight. Although there was widespread famine, mass starvation was prevented as the government implemented a system of ‘usufruct’ (essentially a long term lease with little or no cost) for anyone to grow food on vacant land in the cities and the countryside. New techniques for growing high yield, pest resistant, organic produce were developed by Cuban scientists, and networks to disseminate and share knowledge and skills spread across the nation. Urban agriculture not only became a viable means of feeding the predominantly urban population, but it also emerged as a key driver on the country’s road to recovery.
At least one analyst has suggested that the Cuban model ‘may hold many of the keys to the future survival of civilisation’. In my next post I will share some of the secrets to the success of Cuba’s low carbon, organic, urban agricultural movement and I will also suggest what we as landscape architects can learn from the Cuban experiment.
If there’s one thing I took away from my time in Cuba it’s this: ‘Si, se puede!’ – ‘Yes, you can!’
If a country facing economic collapse, political isolation and widespread shortages could transform itself into a world leader in sustainable development within a decade, then surely it’s possible here too.
During my trip I discovered some of the secrets to the success of Cuba’s urban agricultural movement:
1. State support: Over forty government departments are dedicated to every aspect of low carbon organic food production providing support, training and research. Learning how to grow food is entrenched in education from nursery school upwards. Schools, hospitals and elderly care homes all have organic gardens which teach people how to grow and prepare healthy food. Widespread political propaganda also re-enforces the message that self sufficiency contributes to national security.
2. Citizen participation: Encouraging people to participate in urban agriculture is essential to its success, and there are incentives for producers and consumers alike. Rationing in Cuba still exists, which allows each citizen to purchase a small number of essential goods at reduced prices each month. Urban farmers can earn more than twice the state salary of doctors or teachers because their pay is directly linked to productivity. National criteria for excellence are set across all forms of urban agriculture and these are assessed regularly. Meeting these criteria greatly improves a farm’s reputation and boosts morale.
3. Flexible typologies: A decade-long iterative design process has created a clear set of productive landscape typologies which can be adapted to fit nearly every situation. These typologies range from the smallest scale private gardens or urban lots, to large scale co-operatives and suburban farms. Different combinations of scales, functions, and users have been tested in a variety of contexts to create a robust set of models which can be easily deployed by people with little or no previous experience in growing food.
4. Fine grain networks: The production and distribution of fresh food in cities is almost universally integrated into every neighbourhood. The small scale nature of urban agricultural plots and markets allows them to be retrofitted into existing urban grids which creates a wider and more even spread of fresh food sources. Organic production is also far more manageable in smaller spaces because of the level of manual input needed. Another result of these networks are the personal and responsive relationships between producers and consumers, which gives people a sense of ownership over their environment.
5. Agroecology and permaculture: A huge amount of research has been carried out by Cuban scientists into natural processes which can improve crop yields and disease resistance. These include concepts like interplanting, microbial-based pesticides and symbiotic fungal associations. ‘Organoponicos’ were developed as long and narrow raised beds filled with organic matter which can be intensively planted and meticulously maintained to produce high yields. Closed loop systems are the key to reducing waste and maximising efficiency – current industrial methods are 10% energy efficient whereas Cuban methods are 200% efficient.
However, the Cuban model is by no means perfect and some of the key issues with it include:
– Cost of food: The Cuban state salary is less than $20 US a month and around 75% of that is spent on food. To compare, in the UK we currently spend around 11% of our monthly salary on food (although Cubans do not have other high monthly costs). With the tourist industry rapidly expanding in Cuba people are finding themselves priced out of the market by hotels and restaurants, which often leaves little food left for everyday consumption.
– Contamination: Water and soils are not tested and monitored for harmful contaminants and pollutants. Given that most urban sites were once industrial, and reclaimed materials are used to build raised beds, there is potential for heavy metals and toxins to be passed through the food chain. Roadside farms absorb vehicular emissions which helps to clean the air, but few studies have been carried out into the health implications of consuming this food.
– Integration: By their very nature urban farms are valuable and are secured with fencing, which excludes them as public amenity spaces. I could not find any examples of recreational public spaces used for community growing. There is certainly potential to integrate productive urban landscapes into the street scene and combine them with other forms of green infrastructure such as SUDs, pocket parks and urban forests.
– Hard work: There’s no getting around it – growing low carbon organic food can be hard work! Low carbon agriculture relies on man power instead of fuel-hungry machinery and chemicals. This is challenging in aging populations and in Britain we are struggling to get younger generations involved in agriculture. The average age of a British farmer is 59 years old. Cities have the highest proportion of young people, so bringing food production to them is the best way of diversifying participation.
My trip to Cuba has shown me that although urban agriculture is not the only solution to the world’s food problem, it can certainly help to develop more resilient communities and it has a whole range of benefits. Growing more food in cities improves biodiversity, air pollution, green space, public health, food literacy, community engagement, employment prospects and urban regeneration. It also minimises waste, transportation, storage, packaging, vacant urban land, flooding, soil degradation and the urban heat island effect.
It was incredibly inspiring to see firsthand that all of these achievements are possible. It was also an opportune moment to experience the Cuban system in action, as the recent thawing of relations between the US and Cuba will have unknown consequences for the world’s only sustainably developing nation.
As landscape professionals we have a wonderful opportunity to create innovative design solutions which engage and empower people to become active participants in their local environment, and together we can work towards a more positive and sustainable future. Recent interest in urban agriculture is emerging as part of a wider global food security movement which aims to set us on the road to recovery.
In Britain though, making food more visible in our urban landscapes might well be the only way we can move past the first step on the road to recovery and admit that we have a problem.
— source landscapeinstitute.org By Alice Claydon