CUBA-ECONOMY: Fish Farming – the Way to the Future.

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Nov 9 1995 (IPS) - Cuba is pushing ahead with a fish farming project to give the island a new economically and ecologically viable food source by the year 2000 that will overcome a serious protein deficiency in the Cuban diet.

Ambitious plans call for the annual production of 50,000 tons of freshwater fish by the end of the century through intensive farming methods. Current fish production stands at 30,000 tons per year.

Cuban officials believe that economics favor fish farming, as it is much cheaper to produce fish in this way than to send fleets into the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

The new aquacultural program forms part of a general economic restructuring process that, in the case of fishing, includes the creation of small, autonomous productive units while labor policies will be more flexible to encourage a greater work effort.

This is intrended to overcome present problems problems in the state-run fish farm industry which, according to one observer, “combine administrative labor and technological shortcomings with the over-exploitation of fish ponds, violation of no-fishing zones, clandestine fishing and the theft of fish and fishing equipment.”

Black-market vendors abound in Havana and other large cities, selling fillet of tilapia, a freshwater fish grown on state fish farms.

“They bring them right to my house,” said Jose Miguel, an engineer who pays one dollar or 25 pesos for six fillets from fish that he knows are caught illegally or stolen from the processing plant.

Official figures say that at the beginning of the decade, 47 percent of fish consumed in Cuba came from the oceans, 22 percent was imported from the former Soviet Union, 15 percent was caught from shore, 13 percent was produced by aquaculture and the rest came from other sources.

The breakup of the Soviet Union and the subsequent economic crisis in Cuba affected the deepwater fishing fleet and a visible decline in the amount of fish on the tables in Cuban homes.

With its new fisheries program, Cuba joins the worldwide movement toward aquaculture, perceived as the only solution to the dwindling oceanic fish harvests caused by over-exploitation.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 19 million additional tons of fish will be needed each year by the year 2010 – if the current world annual per capita fish consumption of 13 kilograms is to be maintained.

Cuba does not have a high population growth rate, but its territorial waters are limited due to the proximity of other countries, which encouraged the island to develop aquaculture beginning in the 1970s.

According to the Hydraulic Resources Institute, Cuba has 226 dams and over 2,000 microdams, creating lakes and ponds containing more than eight billion cubic meters of water.

Sixteen technical advisors from China, a nation with an ancient aquacultural tradition, provide assistance to the island’s fish farms, which produced 20 million tons of fish in 1994.

A report to the Popular Power Assembly (or Congress) last September said that the country had 26 fish nurseries capable of producing 500,000 tons of fry to be stocked in the dammed water bodies.

The new program calls for the construction of three fish nursery ponds and 30 fattening ponds in each of the country’s municipalities, which would produce an additional 120,000 tons of freshwater fish meat annually beginning in the year 2000.

In addition to the state ponds, some 10,000 small ponds have been stocked with fish in agricultural communities, mountain zones and military installations.

The so-called family aquaculture program should produce another 20,000 tons in addition to the centrally planned production by the end of the century, although experts caution that it remains to be seen how people take to the program.

Fishing Industry Vice Minister Enrique Oltuski says the plan is based on better exploitation of dammed ponds and natural ponds in addition to intensive use of small bodies of water.

Officials must deal with the effects of the national economic crisis on aquaculture, which has led to a decline in daily worker productivity from 85.6 kilograms of fish in 1990 to 49 kilograms in 1994.

Experts attribute this falloff to a decline in pond fertilization and to institutional inertia in seeking domestic solutions to the traditional dependence on imports.

The report presented to Congress says Cuban aquaculture is still “inefficient” and “subsidized,” and suffers from the problems that affect national production generally.

Along with the illegal raiding of fisheries, production is hurt by high labor turnover due to the remote location of the fish farms and the hard nature of the work. As is true in other occupations, Cuban aquacultural workers earn low wages and labor under difficult working and living conditions, especially with regard to housing and food.

Industrial observers say that the aquaculture development program must address the worker housing and wage situation if it is to succeed in raising production.