GAF
Produce more food
In recent months, Cuba has adopted a series of measures aimed at reactivating and boosting the economy, given the difficult conditions imposed at the international level by COVID 19, aggravated for our country by the reinforcement of the blockade that the United States has maintained for almost six decades.
As a result, they are having profound transformations in agriculture in search of maximizing food production, a priority for the authorities to guarantee the food security of each citizen, a right endorsed in the Constitution. One of the goals is also to reduce imports that still represent large outlays of foreign currency for the country, and increase exports in order to generate profits that can not only be used for the development of this branch, but also for other sectors vital to well-being. of the society. The Agricultural and Forestry Productive Poles are part of this path, which are precisely called to increase food production for the population, but also to supply industry and tourism, one of the driving forces behind the economy. This new figure can be made up of companies, cooperatives, individual producers, science institutions and universities, the latter entities that can contribute a lot with the introduction of new technologies and different ways of doing and seeing agriculture. In the first stage, they are working on the constitution of 64 poles, including 4 to harvest rice and grains, three fruit trees, five coffee and cocoa growers and eight loggers, it was known on the television program Mesa Redonda. Even when a Pole has a fundamental line of crops, it can venture into other lines, which, according to the authorities, favors that area where it is located and its workers by having self-consumption. Frank Castañeda Santalla, director of the Higher Organization for Agricultural Business Development, affirmed that this new system makes it easier to concentrate resources in the most productive places, to use machinery and technologies more efficiently. An also important element is that its conformation in a certain geographical area will result in the improvement of the living conditions of the inhabitants of that area and the surrounding areas, as it is a source of work and local development. The creation of these poles is one of the 106 measures approved by the Cuban government to strengthen the agricultural sector and the socialist state enterprise, the main subject of our economic model. This system has great potential to promote the economic and social development of the communities and the country in general and to advance in the improvement of the living conditions of Cubans.
