Cuba: Micro-vegetables and sustainable urban food systems in Cuba
“The employment of women and young people who can implement simple technologies from their homes to produce micro-vegetables that they can then market and help both the local community and their own families to be self-sufficient”.
Havana, Cuba
Inter Press Service
06.07.23
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With a dozen workers, Enparalelo promotes the local development project Creating Productive Urban Landscapes, aimed at stimulating the use of spaces with potential for sustainable agricultural activities, harmoniously inserted in the urban context.
“We intend for the MUPs to become a model capable of aligning the potential of the Cuban population, as a result of continuous investment in education, with the need to create capacities for innovation and entrepreneurship in the ambit of food security and local development,” Fabre told IPS.
He stressed the interest in working especially with the elderly, a population group “with great human resource potential, also taking into account the emigration of young people and people from rural areas. We also want to turn agricultural activities into something attractive and innovative.
The young entrepreneur recalled that Plaza de la Revolución is the oldest of Cuba’s 168 municipalities, where 30.3 % of its residents are aged 60 or over.
Data from the state-run National Office of Statistics and Information (Onei) also corroborate that 77.1 % of the slightly more than 11 million inhabitants of this Caribbean Island nation live in urban settlements.
According to experts, the process of urbanisation both in Cuba and globally should lead cities to take more responsibility for reducing the high pollution load and to look for alternatives for the generation of their own food.
If at the beginning the course planned to turn the MUPs into a large network of senior producers, “we have preferred to implement them in this first stage with interested people and show results. Then we will work with other groups,” said Fabre.
