I'm shattered...I can feel the worst of my doomerism coming back.. we need to develop a new and lasting model of how to do without oil but in the meantime I'm working harder at my calling to neo-peasantry!!!

Nice post, Kyle. The distinction you make between food exports and in country food production can probably be explained by one economist who noted that large scale agriculture was "surprisingly resistant to the most successful strategies of adaptation." That is, it seems to be that large export farms can't be easily run by organic, low input methods - that small is necessary.

BTW, I think you overstate your own objectivity more than a little here. For example, you imply that you are the first person to note that the community response of the Cubans was a necessity. That point is quite explicitly made in _The Power of Community_ - there was never the suggestion that communities came together in anything other than a crisis response. But the point rather is that they did that, rather than going hungry in isolation as the Soviets seem to have done.

Sharon

Sorry for the worthless comment, but this was a great posting. It is nice to see somebody look at Cuba's energy and agriculture situation from outside of the 100% hatred or 100% enchantment that you always seem to get.

On a small scale Cuba highlights something I've been suspecting. Cash crops like grains/soybeans etc are probably better produced using modified versions of our petro agriculture. I think they should become more organic over time but the cost/benefit ratio seems to favor modifying current practices.

Organic wheat/rice etc is more of a social desire at least for in the short term. Remaining supplies of oil/NG and use of biofuels and alternative routes to synthesis of ammonia will probably keep something close to current agricultural practices viable for these basic crops.

However it seems that all other vegetables outside of these core ones benefit from small organic approaches. This makes a lot of sense to me. Anyone who has grown a garden has probably realized that even small gardens can provide a lot of your produce. And if your willing to eat canned/frozen/dried food it works.

You missed something that might also be important most farm animals outside of cows can be successfully raised on small organic farms. Chickens and rabbits esp but also pigs and goats. And of course fish from ponds. So you also get more protein then you think.

The end result is its just the big carbohydrate sources that seem to be and issue. Generally diets heavily weighted in these are not good anyhow.

Nice post I think that it highlights something thats been bothering me about American organic farming. Right now its done more to support a lifestyle not out of pragmatism. And I think that the anti-fertilizer/herbicide etc crowd is missing what is showing in Cuba that the cash crops will probably continue to be produced like they are into the future.

For now this means that organic wheat farms are probably not a good idea long term at least for making money.

But it highlights that these are the real problem areas since petroleum based agriculture will probably suppress development of organic alternatives till its "too late" to replace them if shortages impact food production. Korea I think illustrates this.

And yet even with all that ineffieient socialist production. The Cuban people are far better off than many of their fellow south American capitalist hell holes on many measures from health care to literacy. Just goes to show that if you are an imperial center of capital e.g. US or Britian you can do quite well out of the gig, if you are on the periphery then you are better off with a form of democratic socialism. Heck even the USA has 43% of capital allocation done by the government sector because the free market can't figure it out. Balance appears to be a key in success.

The real lessons learned from the Cuban experience are,

having your country produce just a few things and importing everything else leaves it vulnerable to disruptions in global trade and supply

This is what is scary. In the United States, we are importing a huge amount of things. I read recently that 99% of shoes are imported. I expect that replacement parts of a lot of things we need are imported. At least we do produce quite a lot of food, so we are better off than places where population is very dense.

Yes, people in Cuba are much better off than the people in most Latin American countries, but that's mostly because they've been in a state of relative peace. Even the best economic system can't do well with total societal-collapsing civil war.

I like to use Google Earth to go to places that are ignored by the MSM. When I looked at Cuba I expected to see more cars because I had read reports of all the old American clunkers running around. Google Maps didn't show many cars and on rural roads they were nearly absent. The whole country looks very dreary IMO.

If they had used their sugar surpluses to make ethanol Cuba may have become a mini Brazil by now. But what's done is done. I find it hard to believe that after Fidel's and Raul's departure, some of the smarter ones won't figure out it's better to follow the Chinese and Russian examples than to live in the of splendor socialist squalor.

Excellent article- I think theoildrum's balanced and quantified analysis is a priceless asset.

The emerging paradigm is becoming pretty obvious. Barring total system collapse farming bulk grains with machines (powered by anything from horses to fusion reactors) is the best way to get our basic carbohydrate energy demands. Processing these crops into everyday convenience foods is likely to become less economical (mostly from packaging and transport needs), so people would do well to relearn the art of cooking from scratch with only minimally processed ingredients. For fresh foods that require large amounts of labor, refrigeration and rapid transport and sale the most efficient way is to grow your own. After a year of veggie gardening I am eating vastly more fresh produce than I would ever allow myself to buy from the shops. In between these two extremes are root crops and specialty grains where the transport difficulties and small markets/unimproved strains make it closer to break even to grow your own if space allows. They make a good safety net to have on board in your garden in case of a more severe systemic meltdown.

Cubans overall have better health than in the 1980s, mostly due to a more varied diet and with more fresh fruit and vegetables. Cuban longevity is more or less equal to that here (US) at the tiniest fraction of the cost. Cuban health is much better than it other parts of Latin America. Cuba exports doctors and health care. We export weapons (with free delivery of bombs if you qualify as a terrorist haven). Cuban education is similarly impressive.

Life in Cuba is hard, and many, many mistakes have been made, and there is no utopia there. I know this very well from several direct sources. But if one compares the efforts made by the Cuban gov't in seeing that the bottom half of its population has some kind support and ability to survive and compare it to our gov't, well you'll see there is no comparison, none at all.

As for dictatorship, I'll only say this: we've had two highly flawed Pres. elections, we've had 9-11 (I wont' start), the anthrax attacks (again, I won't start), the Patriot Act, the Wellstone assassination (ok, I started), the Military Commissions Act, and several other subsequent acts that have gutted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We torture, we render, we assassinate, we bolster, support and impose open dictatorships, we invade, we bomb, we blockade, we destabilize. We account for more than half the world's miltary budget, we have miltary bases in over 700 countries. We have ripped up innumerable international treaties and refused to sign many others. Explain to me in greater detail your complaints about Cuba please.

Not every thing you say about Cuba is wrong, maybe not even most. But don't pretend there isn't a spin to it. No-one is without bias (except me :) ).

The very notion of 'the common good' has been pretty much extinguished in America by decades of 'greed is good', and 'I got mine, you get yours' and 'Me, Me, Me Hyper-Individualism'.

It's the Gospel of Chronic Capitalism Incarnate.

It has produced an unchecked level of consumption, by Americans, which has no rival in human history.

It has brought us all to the very doorstep of mass extinctions of a myriad of creatures and beings, ourselves included.

If '...the changes arose from necessity, not community; community arose from necessity' in Cuba, what can be expected to arise from the culture of
'Me, Me, Me Hyper-Individualism' in America?

Cooperation? Hardly. Try Neo-feudalism. Enslave the 'little people', makem work on a plantation growing food for their corporate-military-prison complex Masters.

When the Soviet Union unraveled, the first person on the average Russian's doorstep was Not Adam Smith, it was Al Capone.

When life unravels in America, gangsters will rule the streets. Necessity will be in the form of someone telling you that if you give them a hundred bucks a week, maybe your house and business won't burn down.

The concept of sustainability is creeping into mainstream thinking. Not everyone is happy about paving over farmland for Melbourne's urban sprawl, possibly using US construction workers on visas http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23316671-662,00.html

I presume as Cuba's population grew they had a policy of setting aside land for small scale farming rather than housing. Or maybe side by side development. No doubt their tropical climate helps. Australia keeps receiving a get-out-of-jail card with every new mineral export. One day that will stop.

4.0 t CO2-e emissions per capita looks pretty impressive to me. British Columbia, where I live, at about 16 t/cap is well above the global average and Alberta is near a whopping 74 t/cap thanks to all that oil and gas generation.

I seem to remember that Cuba has a little oil and gas off its north coast. What proportion do they import?

Damn. There goes my ability to point at Cuba as an example of a rapid adaptation to a large change.

It's good to see some clear-headed thinking -- there's not enough time left to be delusional about how to cope with the hard times ahead.

In California, there are people who believe we can feed ourselves just like Cuba by growing Victory Gardens in our back yards. But as I show below, we're a different climate, different culture, and live in a much more densely populated region--we should be cautious about what "lessons" we think can be learned from Cuba.

Lessons for California and the U.S. from movie "How Cuba survived Peak Oil"

After seeing the film The Power of Community: How Cuba survived Peak Oil, I thought about how those lessons might apply to California Agriculture. California grows about one-third of the U.S. food supply. Much of what follows is based on the excellent Oxfam analysis of the complexities involved in Cuba and its food production reforms. see http://www.oxfamamerica.org/newsandpublications/publications/research_re...

Just as Robert Hirsch of SAIC advised the U.S. Dept. of Energy that we ought to prepare for peak oil at least a decade ahead of time, so too should social values and our economic structure be altered well ahead of peak.

Social Factors

Before 1959, the United States owned 40% of Cuba's sugar production, 90% of the utilities, oil refineries and mines, and some of the banks.

The Cuban revolution powerfully motivated people to overcome United States domination and become self-sufficient. People were willing to make large personal sacrifices for the public good. The energy crisis took place within this social framework.

As times get harder in the United States on the down-slope of Hubbert's curve, our Lotto-driven, "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" society will need to be convinced to work for the greater good. Dmitri Orlov's three-part "Post-Soviet lessons" (fromthewilderness.com) describes the problems our culture has that will make this difficult for us.

There's some hope -- 29% of Americans are volunteers. A campaign to get the other 71% volunteering would be a good start for preparing society for what lies ahead, plus keep people busy as their jobs disappear.

Economic structure

The disparity of wealth in America is likely to lead to a lot of social unrest as times get harder. Adjustment to peak oil would go more smoothly if wealth were more fairly distributed, but the only way this could possibly happen is to institute the reforms suggested in Joel Bakan's book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power.

Land Reform

In Cuba before 1959, eight percent of the farmers owned 70% of the land. The revolution redistributed the land to the farmers.

California is, and always has been, a state with very large farms. It is unlikely the land will be redistributed here. [Voluntarily, anyway - ed.] California's past and present is most likely its future: brutal exploitation of labor (Richard Street "Beasts of the Field").

Also, California has the largest and most elaborate water distribution and irrigation system in the world, and these large waterworks function best in a centralized and highly controlled manner, which also does not lend itself well to land redistribution.

Percent of population doing Agricultural work

As energy declines, we can allocate more and more scarce energy to agriculture, but at some point a proportional number of people and animals must go back to the land to make up for the lost energy - ultimately 90% of us.

Cuba was fortunate to already have at least 15% of their population living rurally (the CIA fact book says 21% are agricultural workers now). Although the Oxfam report and movie don't say anything about this, I imagine that this meant a much larger percent of urban dwellers had some connection to the land and potential food aid from their relatives who worked on farms than the average Californian has.

But less than one percent of our population are agricultural workers -- 834,000 according to www.bls.gov -- and that number is expected to drop.

Cuban Agricultural Research and Extension

Cuba had already started sustainable agriculture programs and research many years before the crisis hit. This allowed them to quickly get information to farmers and city dwellers and train them to grow food organically. A campaign to breed oxen and train young farmers in how to use them was quickly put in place.

The United States started spending a large amount of money on agricultural research starting in the 1850's, and the bills that started agricultural colleges and the department of agriculture state quite clearly that this money is to be used to aid the small farmer.

But that intention was corrupted almost from the first day by larger farmers quickly taking advantage of the research at nearby colleges. Nearly 100% of college and USDA funding now goes towards industrializing and mechanizing agriculture. (Jim Hightower, Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times).

Californians need to allocate far more resources to the University of California SAREP (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program), which has a skeleton staff of ten people and almost no funding for research. They have a good statement of what sustainable agriculture is at www.sarep.ucdavis.edu. .

Climate & Water

Cuba's temperature ranges between 68 and 81 degrees F, and they get almost 50 inches of rain per year, over the entire year. That allows them to grow crops year round.

California is cursed with a Mediterranean climate, where there’s no rain during the height of the growing season. This is gotten around with elaborate irrigation systems, and in the warmest part of the state it's possible to grow crops year round.

The USA devotes about seven percent of its energy to provide water services. See www.iags.org. In California, the water table has dropped significantly, requiring energy to pump water beyond what windmills can provide. As energy declines, that will impact water availability and decrease crop production.

California is also likely to have severe water shortages in the future. There is already competition between agriculture and the 36 million residents of the state for water. Worse yet, all global warming models for California show significant water problems from drought, early snow melt and disappearing glaciers (reservoirs in the sky) and extreme flooding, which will greatly reduce the amount of food that can be grown here.

Urban Food and Agriculture

Our most fertile land, the peat soils in the delta region, can not be saved from hydrostatic forces, earthquakes, severe floods, and rising sea levels, no matter how much money is spent (Thad Bettner www.lib.berkeley.edu/ ). This is bad news for the Bay Area; our best hopes for food in an energy crisis would be to have food shipped from the Delta to the greater bay area.

In 2000 food purchases took up 66% of the average Cuban salary, because the food rations did not cover all of the food people needed. High prices were partly due to a shortage of trucks to haul produce from the country to the city - the few people who had trucks charged vendors and consumers a lot of money and paid the farmer very little. The Cubans got around this problem by donating trucks and fuel to the agricultural cooperatives to eliminate middlemen. We should plan ahead of time how to eliminate the middle man here as well.

Given our capitalistic system, and the current lion’s share of profit going to middlemen rather than farmers, I’m not confident this will happen.

Cuban urban dwellers can receive up to one-third of an acre for a personal lot in the periphery of the major cities. Doing the same for Bay Area residents would mean most of us would need to commute 30 to 100 miles to reach our little plot of land since we are so densely and massively urbanized.

I have other issues with growing food in the Oakland urban environment as well: www.energyskeptic.com (See the Oakland Depletion Protocol document in section #3.)

Conclusion

Just as Cuba had a sudden energy crisis, so too are we likely to have many crises from energy shocks in the future from wars, hurricanes, terrorism, revolutions, and potential five to eight percent world-wide oil depletion rates. There will also be hiccups in global trade delivery of oil and LNG.

We can get more efficient and sacrifice resources to agriculture, water services, and the trucking industry, but as geological depletion relentlessly continues, as global warming and extreme weather greatly reduce agricultural production, and as the ten high plains states above the Ogallala reservoir run out of water or the energy to pump it up from hundreds of feet down, we will face a food crisis.

We would be better prepared for that if we started programs now to get large numbers of people to go back to the land. There is no way we can continue to have just one percent of the population providing half of the food for the other 99%. (we import the other half: Larry Rohter. Dec 12, 2004. South America Seeks to Fill the World's Table. New York Times).

We should plan an orderly retreat. This would be done by relentlessly cutting back on our energy use more than the depletion rate so that we stay under the energy curve. Universities would shift from industrial and mechanical agricultural research to providing sustainable agriculture outreach to small farms and collectives. However unpleasant this sounds, the alternatives are chaos, starvation, Rwandan-style lowering of the population, the complete loss of Democracy to fascist leaders who will step in to try to regain stability, and the potential invasion of our country by other nations taking advantage of our weakness.

http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&...

* * * * *

Great balanced post on Cuba with lots of good comments. Ideology sucks and blinds our perceptions and our planning capabilities, reducing resiliency and survivability.

I should have taken another couple of days to write the article. I found an FAO report from 2001 that tells us imports as a percentage of consumption, and even breaks it down into per capita calories for us.

1970-1979, 741 of 2,756 were imported; 73% self-reliant
1980-1989, 925 of 3,039; 70% self-reliant
1990-1995, 667 of 2,468; 73% self-reliant
1996-2001, 612 of 2,496; 75% self-reliant

Of course, protein and various vitamins and minerals might come out very differently. But this gives us a broad brush to paint with and say that up until 2001 at least, far from Cuba importing 70% of its food in nutrition terms, it actually domestically produced 70% of its food.

It also tells us that in 1996-2001 Cuba's food import averaged about US$621 million. It's now about $900 million, a 50% increase. At first glance, this gives us 25% x 1.5 = 38% of nutrition from imports, so that Cuba still produces over half its own food - well under the mere 30% stated in recent articles. Of course imports may have increased at the same time as domestic production, or one increased but the other not, and so on.

I can't find more recent figures than that. Overall, though, it seems that since Cuban imports have risen in dollar terms while the price of grain etc have risen, and it's been reported that their calories per day have been rising steadily since 2001, their domestic production must at least have stayed steady.

So their imports today almost certainly provide more than the 1996-2001 figure of 25% their calories; but could not really be more than 50% their calories.

Overall, then, it still seems reasonable to say that Cubans produce a bit over half their own food in nutrition terms. It may be more, but is not likely less.

On a lighter note (from an earlier comment from Kiashu):
Samba is from Brazil.
Cubans dance salsa.
All those writers publishing about food production and oil in Cuba would do well to ask the average Cubans what they think.
Different picture, not a comfortable one for most used to polarized opinions.
Perhaps going to Cuba would be a good idea, if one writes about it…
Also double or triple checking sources is always a good idea. Too much ideology is attached to the issues.

So a quick summary of this whole post. Cuba is not a good example of people coping with sudden relatively fast oil depletion because necessity was actually just a gun pointed at their collective heads. It sorta worked by as soon as the gun to the collective head was lowered, they just backslid into old habits, which is Human Nature i.e. Fate, nothing can be done about this.

A 'capitalist' country, in similiar circumstances, would fair no better, probably much worse, due to it's inherent 'winner take all, I got mine, don't tell ME what to do' attitude, plus and enormous amount of guns, drugs and general deeply dysfunctional pop culture.

So where is an example of peak oil coping, "Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects" by Dmitry Orlov. Someone who has experienced 'Life from Both Sides Now.'?