Farmers to government: Give us more freedom to sell our products
By Gerardo Arreola
From the Mexican newspaper La Jornada
HAVANA, May 17 – Private farmers, who generate 70 percent of the food produced in Cuba, asked for more freedom to sell their merchandise, while the government announced greater rigor in the control of commerce and the taxing of the farm sector.
The Vice President of the Council of Ministers and Minister of the Economy Marino Murillo on Sunday informed the 10th Congress of the National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP) that the authorities will eliminate the centralized allotment of farming supplies, so the producers can buy them directly at municipal markets.
President Raúl Castro attended the meeting but it was Murillo who addressed the closing session, without responding explicitly to the demands already known and now formalized by the ANAP. The Association has 3,635 cooperatives and 362,440 associates.
The minister only acknowledged that “one of the most discussed topics during this Congress has been that of commercialization.”
Murillo said the government wants to save about US$800 million (from the more than $2 billion it has to pay to import food) through a rapid increase in the production of rice, beans, corn, milk, meat and forage.
According to reports from local media, the farmers asked the authorities for permission to
• expand to other products the current experience of selling milk directly to the state-owned retail stores;
• deal directly with tourism enterprises without official intermediaries; and to
• negotiate freely with public enterprises, eliminating the existing procedure that makes them pay commissions to government entities.
In particular, the Congress asked for “a review” of the mechanism of transporting merchandise to the City of Havana, whose many stages of official intermediation have sparked numerous complaints from the producers.
“There cannot be a single, centralized commerce when we’re talking about a diversified economy,” said cooperative member Lázaro Hernández from Bejucal, Havana province. He suggested that, to re-launch the products that are scarce, “we must value them at supply-and-demand prices, so the producer will decide to plant them.”
Juan José Hernández of Artemisa, Havana province, said that, by being obligated to sell only through the Interior Commerce Ministry, the farmers “experience large losses, the products don’t arrive in the best of condition or arrive much too late.”
By contrast, Murillo asked for rigor in the application of the existing mechanism, through which the producers enter into contracts with the government for their crops, in amounts close to 90 percent, and can sell their surpluses only on the open, supply-and-demand markets. He also announced an official offensive against unauthorized intermediaries.
The opening of a market of agricultural supplies, such as fuel and fertilizers, eliminates one bureaucratic step the farmers must take, but Murillo warned that prices will be controlled.
The vice president said that cooperatives and small-farm owners will no longer enjoy exemption from taxes and that a stricter tax policy will be applied to the sector. A leading member of the Congress backed the idea and proposed “a progressive scale.”
Murillo reported that, since last year, 920,000 hectares of idle land (out of an available total ranging from 1.2 million to 3 million hectares, according to different calculations) have been awarded in usufruct. But he pointed out that nearly half of the awarded fields remain uncultivated or are poorly exploited.
