Development & Aid, Environment, Headlines, Health, Latin America & the Caribbean

DEVELOPMENT-CUBA: Drought Drives Up Risk of Food Insecurity

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Jul 9 2004 (IPS) - The predominant colours in the countryside of the eastern Cuban province of Camagüey are yellow and brown. The livestock have no fresh grass to eat and the cracked earth is gasping for water, which is neither falling from the sky nor reaching the homes of local residents.

”It’s a critical situation, never before seen around here,” artist Ileana Sánchez, 45, told IPS by telephone. She said she has lived ”all my life” in the provincial capital, Camagüey, 570 km from Havana.

The province of Camagüey, whose 15,990 sq km make it the largest in Cuba, is located between the provinces of Ciego de Avila and Las Tunas, which have also been hit hard by the long-lasting drought.

A livestock-breeding region par excellence, Camagüey produces between 23 and 25 percent of the country’s milk in normal times, and a similar proportion of beef. It is also home to Cuba’s largest cattle and sheep herds.

The shortage of rainfall, which already began to be felt in late 2003, has resulted in around 2,000 sources of water drying up, while dairy production is an estimated one million litres below normal.

”It hasn’t rained. Nothing is falling from the sky,” said Sánchez. ”No water has reached my home since late May. The pipes are dry and I’m lucky to have a well in my yard, which was built in 1991. We only used to take water out of there for drinking, because it is very pure, but now we use it for everything.”

She added that she doesn’t waste a single drop of water. ”I recycle it, nothing is lost,” she explained. Depending on how dirty it is, she uses the water left over from the housework to clean the floors or water her three fruit trees and dozens of plants.

In the city’s fresh produce markets, there is a notable shortage of vegetables. ”You can get tomatoes, but they’re bad quality, I think it’s because of the lack of irrigation. Besides, the price has gone up from 1.5 to six Cuban pesos a pound,” she said..

Nevertheless, the stands have plenty of eggs for sale, at 1.5 pesos each, and fish. ”I have the impression that the authorities have reinforced supplies of those products to ease the impact of other shortages,” said Sánchez.

The Cuban peso trades at 26 to the dollar in the government exchange houses, but is one to one in the official market.

The long lines of people queuing up at the trucks that distribute water are a common sight in Las Tunas and Holguín, where food security has also been sharply undermined by the drought.

This week, the Cuban office of the World Food Programme (WFP) launched a project with a budget of more than 161,000 dollars in food aid to benefit 114,195 children under five in Camagüey, Las Tunas and Holguín.

The United Nations agency noted in a communiqué that the drought affecting provinces in eastern and central Cuba is one of the worst seen in the past decade.

The WFP plan includes the distribution of a complementary ration of rice, beans and cooking oil as part of the ”basic food basket” that the government makes available every month to each family at subsidised prices.

This project will begin to be implemented in around two weeks and will continue for one month from the first delivery of food aid, the WFP said in the statement released on Jul. 1, but which began to circulate among the press this week.

Although she recognised that it would provide important support for low-income families, Sánchez said the aid is merely an insufficient band-aid measure. ”The (government) rationing book does not cover all of a family’s dietary needs,” she said.

The situation could worsen with the start of the cyclone season, which lasts from June to November. Tropical storms bring a large quantity of water for filling the reservoirs, but also floods and wind that destroy crops and homes.

>From October 2001 to October 2002, Cuba was hit by three hurricanes that wreaked havoc throughout most of the country. Hurricane Michelle alone caused economic losses of 1.8 billion dollars in November 2001.

The Fidel Castro government has set up a special commission to seek alternatives for the short, middle and long terms in dealing with the sharp decrease in precipitation across the island. According to official sources, June 2004 was among the driest months in Cuban history.

The food shortages that accompany prolonged periods of drought are the consequence most feared by the 11.2 million Cubans living on the island.

Their food consumption fell dramatically during the economic crisis of the early 1990s, when Cuba’s main supplier and trade partner, the Soviet Union, collapsed.

In the mid-1990s, daily calorie intake dropped to 1,863, including 46 grams of protein. Those figures represent, respectively, 74 and 61 percent of the established basic daily requirement.

That phenomenon took its toll on health. The accumulated deficit of vitamins, especially the B complex and some essential amino acids, is blamed for a jump in neurological diseases in 1993.

In the late 1990s, calorie intake rose to 2,400 and protein to 65 grams per day, though still below the globally recognised minimum. In 2003, consumption reached an average of 3,193 calories and 82.8 grams of protein per day, according to official figures..

In 1998, the Cuban government and WFP agreed to implement a project to alleviate food vulnerability in the island’s eastern region ”because it was considered to be lagging behind most, relative to the national situation.”

According to their study, drought poses one of the greatest threats to the eastern region and is defined as ”a period of abnormally dry meteorological conditions, lasting long enough that the lack of precipitation causes a serious hydrological imbalance.”

Other threats include floods and coastal erosion associated with torrential rains that accompany severe weather like tropical cyclones, low-pressure systems, cold fronts, or combinations of these.