Cuba, Where Beans Are More Important Than Cannons

The Guardian reports that the Cuban agriculture ministry thinks 75% of the food needed by its major cities can come from a 4 mile wide ring of small farms around the cities.

Cuba has launched an ambitious project to ring urban areas with thousands of small farms in a bid to reverse the country's agricultural decline and ease its chronic economic woes.

The five-year plan calls for growing fruits and vegetables and raising livestock in four mile-wide rings around 150 of Cuba's cities and towns, with the exception of the capital Havana.

The island's authorities hope suburban farming will make food cheaper and more abundant, cut transportation costs and encourage urban dwellers to leave bureaucratic jobs for more productive labour.
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The farms, mostly in private hands but also including some cooperatives and state-owned enterprises, must grow everything organically, and the ministry expects they will produce 75% of the food for the city of 320,000 people, with big state-owned farms providing the rest.
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The project is modelled after the hundreds of urban gardens developed by then-defence minister Raul Castro during the deep economic depression of the 1990s that followed the collapse of communism in eastern Europe.

He proclaimed at the time that beans were more important than cannons,