Humberto Rios, 46, was announced as a prizewinner on April 19 in San Francisco along with five other activists from around the world. They will each receive $150,000, a huge sum in Cuba where the average annual salary is equivalent to $240.

Rios said the award initially was met with suspicion by his government because it came from the United States, Cuba’s longtime ideological foe. But Cuban officials eventually embraced it and he hopes it contributes to improving U. S.-Cuba relations.

NEW VISION

“I think there’s a new vision, which is to cool a little bit the hostile environment,” he said. “I think we have common problems – maybe different solutions, but also common solutions,” he told Reuters recently.

He will use his prize money for such things as house repairs, but some will go toward funding his work, Rios said.

The prize was begun in 1990 by philanthropists Richard and Rhoda Goldman to encourage environmental protection.

Rios won for his work promoting a return to more traditional farming techniques focusing on seed diversity, crop rotation and the use of organic pest control and fertilizers to both increase crops and improve the Communist-led island’s environment.

MUSICAL MESSAGE

Rios is also a musician and has found music to be a useful tool in spreading his message. At local events, he sings folk and salsa songs that promote biodiversity and good environmental practices – “Recycle, papi, recycle” is one – and get the farmers dancing in the fields.

Traditional farming methods fell out of favour in Cuba as agriculture, dominated by sugar production, became industrialized in the last half of the 20th century, particularly after the Soviet Union took the island under its wing following Cuba’s 1959 revolution.

Flooded with pesticides and fertilizers from the Soviet bloc nations, Cuba in the 1980s became the highest-per-capita user of agrochemicals in Latin America.

At the same time, farmers, dependent on the government for seeds and supplies, had little choice in what they could grow.

POST-SOVIET CUBA

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba was stuck with an agricultural system dependent on agrochemicals it could no longer get and an environment damaged by their heavy use.

Rios, then a doctoral student in agricultural sciences, began to see positive results as farmers, out of necessity, turned to traditional ways. In the late 1990s he launched a program to encourage their broader use.

His biggest emphasis, he told Reuters in a recent interview, was to simply give farmers more seed choices and to let them, not distant bureaucrats and scientists, decide which ones to use.

He began organizing “seed fairs” in farming communities where farmers could choose from a broad selection of seeds. They were encouraged to share information on the results so that each farm became a micro-experimental station.

SEED SELECTION

The key was that farmers chose seeds suited to their specific conditions, he said, instead of everyone getting the same ones.

In different regions of the island, “the criteria for seed selection are completely different,” Rios said.

He said yields began doubling and tripling, and soil damaged by years of overuse and chemicals began to recuperate as crops were rotated and agrochemicals abandoned.

“When you use a diversified system, over the years it increases the amount of protein per area, the amount of vitamins per area, it diminishes the amount of work per area and above all, it increases the smiles of the people,” he said.

He says 50,000 farmers are involved in his Program for Local Agricultural Innovation, which is backed by the National Institute of Agricultural Sciences, but much work remains.

Most land and agriculture is under state control in Cuba, but the island has 250,000 small farmers and 1,100 private cooperatives who, together, produce 70 per cent of agricultural output on less than a third of the available land.

Cuba is dependent on imports for most of its basic foods, which drains its fragile economy and has forced President Raul Castro to put more land in private hands and – as Rios advocates – decentralize decision-making to local levels.

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Shortages were exacerbated in the Cuban capital when shipments from food suppliers slowed in a conflict with the government over newly imposed price controls.

In markets around Havana, customers found stretches of mostly vacant vendor stalls and limited supplies of food. A market in the Vedado district offered only papayas, a small stack of melons and a few bulbs of garlic.

Vendors shrugged their shoulders and said nothing else had arrived for them to sell.

A shopper named Yissel, who did not provide her full name, said the situation was the same in other markets and in her neighbourhood grocery store.

“These are difficult times because everything is so affected, so damaged (by the hurricanes),” she said. “In Minimax (grocery store), it was like I’d never seen it. I saw almost nothing, not like other times.”

Due to problems in its state-run agriculture, Cuba has long struggled to meet its food needs and imports much of what it consumes.

Hurricanes Gustav and Ike made the problem worse when they ripped through most of the country in a 10-day span starting Aug. 30, causing $5 billion in damage and destroying 30 per cent of Cuba’s agriculture.

A top agriculture official warned two weeks ago of impending food shortages that he said could last six months. But he said the government had implemented emergency measures to make sure no Cuban went hungry.

On Oct. 1, Cuba’s state-run press reported that those measures included placing limits on the amount of food to be purchased and putting caps on prices.

One newspaper reported that many food suppliers had not made their usual shipments because the government’s price controls would cause them to lose money.

The situation would be less dire, said Elsie Perez Martinez, a doctor, if the nearby U. S. had given Cuba a hand by providing aid or lifting its 46-year-old trade embargo against communist-run Cuba.

The United States has offered more than $5 million in aid, which Cuba rejected. Cuba requested that the U. S. temporarily lift the embargo so it can purchase goods for recovery, but the Bush administration refused. The U. S. has permitted food sales to Cuba since 2001 but only for cash and not on credit.

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