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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
I didn't say I was objective, I said that I was presenting an "honest" assessment of the situation, rather than one filtered through some ideological filter for or against the whole idea of smallscale localised organic agriculture.
In the documentary and the public discussion surrounding it, there's a lot of talk about how existing community structures associated with the socialist way of doing things laid the foundations for the response to the crisis. In the youtube discussion I linked to, the interviewer Donaldson says,
"I mean, you've got a dictatorship there, and that's got some pluses and minuses... I mean, one thing about a dictatorship is, if they say, we're all going organic gardening, then we're all going organic gardening [...]"
Megan Quinn responds, "the government has done a lot of things to incentivise, which I'll get to in a moment. But at the beginning of the crisis the government really couldn't do anything, things were moving too fast, so what they did was actually relinquish more control to the local communities."
And so on. The documentary and the discussions surrounding it have basically said, "it was the power of community that got them through it, and this was because of past government policy, and now new government policy is really helping them."
And this isn't true. The changes arose from necessity, not community; community arose from necessity. The people say they're closer now than they were before; so the local gardens didn't come about from an existing close-knit community, they came about, and then community was built on top of them. And the government at first opposed these changes, and only accepted them when there was no alternative. They spent a few years supporting them after that, but now things are being rolled back.
It appears that a similar but still different dynamic was at work in the Soviet Union. According to the reference below, even before it fell apart, a full 30% of food (by ruble value, not calories) came from household plots that had always been important to the Soviet food supply. Large scale agriculture in the USSR really sucked (for a whole host of reasons) and was never able to fully displace private small scale production at any point much to the chagrin and embarrassment of the Soviet elite. Household plots were in gradual decline until Gorbachev came along.
However, before the Soviet Union fell, with the advent of Gorbachev the Soviet government knew the game was up food-wise and they began to say, in effect, "grow your own food" even before food production fell off a cliff.
With good reason since by 1998 Russians were getting 59% of their food by ruble value from household plots (the peak) and eating much less than before.
Necessity trumped ideology.
Source:
(1)"Russia's Food Policies and Globalization"
http://books.google.com/books?id=Lp4expSaYF4C&printsec=frontcover#PPA7,M...
(2)
http://www.tinbergen.nl/discussionpapers/99046.pdf
BTW, as a bit of a corrective to folks who cite Russia as an example of gardens sustaining city folks, both sources agree that household plots were much more important for the maintenance of the rural populace than their relatively better off urban comrades. Rural dependency on small plots was five times greater than urban dependency. Gardening was common in urban areas but it didn't contribute nearly as much (neither ruble-wise nor calorie-wise). The ability to acquire marketed food was substantially greater for urbanites although there does seem to have been a small minority of city folk who were entirely sustained by homegrown staples like potatoes.
I think the conviction that one is being more honest than everyone is generally, actually a bias in itself. I don't mean that as an attack, just that I think it undermines the credibility of the analysis to engage in self-praise of your own perspective while doing the discussion.
I have not see the Youtube discussion you refer to (dial up, can't watch it), only the film itself. But I do think that the film itself makes the claim that socialism made it more likely that people would respond with collective solutions, but it doesn't claim that the power of community was motivated by anything other than a crisis.
That is, I think your distinction, between "community formed by necessity" and "community formed by community" is somewhat useful, but not quite as much as you think. That is, I don't think you've made the case that this particular collective response was the only choice - you've set it up as "government overthrown" or "government accepts a particular kind of response." I agree that Fidel had every incentive not to be overthrown. What I think you have not made a persuasive case for is that *the particular form* that the Cuban agricultural change took was the only possible response - that is, for example, that Castro couldn't have gotten the same results in any other possible way, or stayed in power in any other way. That is, necessity required a response, not as successful a response as they actually got.
I also don't think you've made a case that socialism wasn't a factor in the solutions become communal in Cuba - I'm willing to accept that the documentary's case may be insufficient, but you haven't successfully argued that - you've rather asserted it.
Again, I really liked your article, but I think what you've done is overstate the case on at least one side of the argument, so that your own mid-point looks as you put it, more "honest." The problem is, that bias pervades all analyses, and sometimes when we're most trying to be unbiased, we're most in the grips of it.
Sharon
Thinking further on being objective, I actually came into writing it not at all objective, in that I was hoping I'd find out all the stuff was true. A relaxed, warm and sunny country with good healthcare, national self-reliance and independence, the country looking after itself, just exporting a few luxury goods, beautiful food-producing gardens everywhere, friendly grocers selling you vegetables grown not even a mile away, sexy Latin men and women dancing the samba with each-other between picking melons - who wouldn't like that?