Outside Havana, a combine belonging to a private Vietnamese company is harvesting rice, directly farming Cuban land — in a first — to help address acute food shortages in the country. The Cuban government has granted Agri VAM, a subsidiary of Vietnam’s Fujinuco Group, 1,000 hectares of arable land in Los Palacios, 118km west of the capital.
Vietnam has advised Cuba on rice cultivation in the past, but this is the first time a private firm has done the farming itself.
The government approved the move after a 52 percent plunge in overall agricultural production between 2018 and 2023, according to data from the Center for the Study of the Cuban Economy at the University of Havana. The rice numbers are even worse.
Photo: AFP
Total rice production dropped from 300,000 tonnes in 2018 to 55,000 tonnes in 2021, in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic. The number is slowly recovering, authorities say. Rice is a staple of the local diet, with Cubans consuming 60kg of rice per person per year.
During a media visit to its rice fields in May, an Agri VAM representative said the harvest yield to date is seven tonnes per hectare, “but we want more.” That number dwarfs the tonne and a half yield-per-hectare of Cuban growers.
Vietnam in the 1980s experienced the kind of food shortages that Cuba is going through now. Today, the Southeast Asian country is the world’s third exporter of rice and a valued consultant to other rice-growing nations.
“The climate and the temperature are very good for agriculture,” but Cuban growers lack necessary farming products such as fertilizers, the Agri VAM representative told reporters.
Although Agri VAM can import some materials, it faces other obstacles such as fuel shortages, transportation problems and frozen assets, Cuban economist Omar Everleny Perez said.
Agri VAM and other foreign firms in Cuba might be making profits, but “they cannot transfer them abroad because the banks have no liquidity, no foreign currency,” Perez said.
An independent Cuban media outlet, 14ymedio, recently published excerpts of a letter sent in May in which Agri VAM asked the Cuban government to unfreeze US$300,000 in its account at the state-owned International Financing Bank.
Vietnam’s state media in May quoted Vietnamese Deputy Minister of Agriculture Nguyen Quoc Tri asking the government in Havana “to eliminate investment barriers that Vietnamese companies encounter.”
Agri VAM and Cuban officials did not respond to a request for comment.
Cuba is mired in an acute economic crisis and desperately in need of foreign investment. Vietnam and other allies have shown interest.
Last month, Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz announced that Havana was taking measures “to energize foreign investment” as he authorized “wholly foreign-owned companies” in the hotel sector.
After three years of promises, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko announced in May that Russian businesses want to invest US$1 billion in Cuba. Moscow would give them preferential financing rates, he said.
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