Preface. After seeing the film “The Power of Community: How Cuba survived Peak Oil” in 2006, I thought about how those lessons might apply to California agriculture. California grows about one-third of the U.S. food supply.  And how an energy crisis and collapse might happen in the U.S.

Much of what follows is based on the excellent Oxfam analysis of the complexities involved in Cuba and its food production reforms.

2024-10-26 The Guardian update: Sadly, this article reveals that Cuba has not survived peak oil now that Venezuela has collapsed and not sending them oil.  Since all nations are headed that way as well, it is a good idea to keep an eye on Cuba to see how they cope, maybe we can learn something.

2012 update:  Cuba’s agriculture experiments are not working out according to the New York Times. There are many reasons, but the main one is there aren’t enough trucks to distribute the food, and existing trucks are so old they often break down.

2017 update:  Organic or starve: can Cuba’s new farming model provide food security? The Guardian, a few points from this article

• 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
• Officials are promoting small, local farms as perhaps the only way for the country to finally start feeding itself, and there has been a gradual shift o smaller, often organic farms — a radical change from the monocrop sugarcane economy that ruled Cuba for a century.  Organic farming does not bring the large yields that will solve Cuba’s problems however.  Farm yields are pathetically low, despite Cuba having possibly the richest soil of any tropical country in the world, said Pedro Sanchez, an agronomist at the University of Florida.
• In the wake of the Soviet collapse, Cuba lost 80% of its international trade in under three years. The result was severe food shortages. Castro dubbed it “the special period in peacetime,” a euphemism for what many Cubans describe as one of the worst traumas of their lives. It dragged on for five years, but its psychological effects lasted much longer.
• One woman I met remembered people fainting in the street from hunger. An artist remembered regular rations for children, but, for adults like himself, an endless diet of sugar water. Another stressed years of blackouts and boredom, relieved only by lots of marijuana. An agronomist described to me the death of hundreds of thousands of farm animals due to the loss of imported feed. “We came very close to starvation,” he said.

2019 update. Due to US Sanctions, declining Venezuela production and more”

• Cubans feeling the pinch of severe fuel shortage. Cuba is currently mired in an energy crisis, forcing some farmers to plow their fields with oxen. The current cutbacks have prompted comparisons to the Special Period — a euphemistic expression for the dire economic crisis that hit Cuba as a result of the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the tightened US sanctions that followed. At the time, the country lacked vital necessities including food, medicine and everyday goods such as shoes, clothing and hygiene products. Workers worked shorter hours due to a lack of electricity that sometimes was out up to 16 hours a day.This time around, public transportation has again been reduced to a minimum. Police are stopping cars without passengers and forcing the drivers to transport people. On the sugar cane fields, where Cuba’s main export is cultivated, tractors have been replaced with oxen. According to state media, 4,000 teams of oxen are scheduled for use.
• Amid crippling sanctions, Cuba deploys oxen, wood-fired ovens to overcome fuel crisis. Cuba is deploying oxen to replace tractors, using wood instead of gas at many state bakeries and advising citizens to save electricity by making the most of daylight. The government is prioritizing what little fuel it has to sustain critical services such as hospitals and sectors such as tourism, which generate much-needed hard currency. Some cement factories have decreased production, and a large steel factory in Havana has stopped operating altogether.  Public transit has been cut back so much that many workers are being told to stay home.  Some state workplaces, universities and schools have simply cut hours to save electricity and provide some relief to public transport at peak commuting hours.  Queues at gas stations in Havana snake for blocks, with some Cubans even sleeping in their cars overnight to have a chance of filling up. Irrigation equipment is being turned off at times of peak electricity usage to reduce the burden on the power grid.
• Cubans’ resilience sorely tested as US oil sanctions bite. Transport inspectors have been deployed to ensure that anyone driving a vehicle which belongs to a ministry or state enterprise gives fellow citizens a lift.  At offices and factories throughout the island all machines and lights are switched off between 11am and 1pm.

2022 update: Cuba continues to be amazing and wins my vote for one of the best places to be postcarbon not just because of their climate, but especially their culture: A small island nation has cooked up not 1, not 2 but 5 COVID vaccines. It’s Cuba!

Related Posts

• North Korea collapse posts
• How different nations have coped with oil shortages
• Dmitry Orlov: How Russians survived the collapse of the Soviet Union
• A book review of “Russia’s Food Policies and Globalization”
• Lessons Learned from How Cuba Survived Peak Oil
• Venezuela collapse posts

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Social Factors

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.

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”  describes the problems our American 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.  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 in 2006 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 (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 (Oakland Depletion Protocol)

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.