Cuba Pays US $300+ Million a Year for Rice Imports

A grain it should be harvesting on the island

Visiting Pinar del Río, Salvador Valdes Mesa, one of Cuba’s vice presidents, urges producers to grow this cereal to reduce import costs.

By 14ymedio

HAVANA TIMES – After over a month’s delay, the ports of Cuba are about to unload rice corresponding to the ration book quota for the month of December. According to a note published Thursday by the Ministry of Domestic Trade, the east and Isla de la Juventud have already been supplied from a previous delivery, while for the west and centre of the island distribution should start with the arrival of these ships and to cover last January.

Although we have not been told where the rice which arrived in Santiago de Cuba came from, according to an official from Granma province, it is likely that it came from the Portuguese-flagged cargo ship River Confidence, which was travelling from Ho Chi Minh City. Meanwhile, two bulk carriers are expected in Havana today, the Emerald Confidence, also flying the Portuguese flag and coming from Paranagua (Brazil), and the Alycia, a Maltese cargo ship also coming from Vietnam.

These are the places where the rice imported by Cuba usually comes from, together with Uruguayan rice – the country from which a cargo ship flying the Panamanian flag also arrives in Santiago today – and which costs the country more than 300 million dollars, according to Salvador Valdés Mesa, visiting Los Palacios on Thursday. In this municipality, for the first time, the state has handed over land to a foreign company; from Vietnam, to be precise.

The vice-president, who toured the Empresa Agroindustrial de Granos in this town in Pinar del Río, urged local governments to resume the popular rice movement, an idea that has been insisted upon in recent years due to the drop in production. The plan, which originated in the Special Period of the 1990s, consists of cultivating the product using traditional methods for family consumption, while the surplus is delivered to collection centres for free sale.

In Pinar del Río, there are more than 2,600 producers involved in this activity, covering some 7,100 hectares, compared to 5,000 in the “specialised sector”. “The biggest incentive to plant rice today is the enormous demand in the domestic market,” the vice-president said. But the state knows that there are hardly any inputs, fertilisers and herbicides, that any surplus would slip through its fingers and go to the informal market and, what’s more, that self-consumption does not solve the problem of the lack of rice in a country where it is considered an essential ingredient in all meals.

Yesterday,  Valdés Mesa put import costs at a generic “more than 300 million dollars”, but it could be a lot higher. According to the 2023 yearbook, $343,305,000 was paid that year, a record figure for the last five years (in 2019 it was $239,725,000), especially if the fall in population is taken into account.

“We have to increase national production so that foreign currency can be used to meet other needs,” said Valdés Mesa, who attributed the drop in production in recent years to a lack of inputs and fuel. Orlando Linares Morell, president of the Agricultural Group of the Ministry of Agriculture, said that the nearly 100,000 hectares planned for the crop represent only 66% of what was planted in 2018.

The vice-president stated that there are companies from several countries interested in investing in rice production in Cuba, although some of those that already exist have not been satisfactory. The case of La Sierpe, in Sancti Spíritus, is well known, where a Vietnamese project prospered until the Asians tired of Cuban inefficiency and left in 2022.

Nevertheless, Vietnam has continued to target Cuba, but now with new conditions. The Los Palacios project is being carried out by a Vietnamese company whose name is not known but which has been the first foreign company to receive leased farmland on the island since 1959, a demand that the Russians have also put on the table when it comes to making investments.

At the moment, the company has 308 hectares to plant rice and, in addition to bringing in its own specialists, provides fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides and other resources necessary for production, as well as hybrid varieties from the country, reducing the demand for seeds from 150 kilograms per hectare to 30.

Translated by Translating Cuba.

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