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.
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.
At the conclusion of the US/Vietnam war, Cuba donated thousands of tons of rice to a war-ravaged Vietnam. My, my, my how the mighty have fallen.
When you have no private ownership of anything in Cuba you have scarcity of everything. Where’s the incentive to produce? That’s not right you have ownership of the misery that corrupt government has can dished out for the last 66 years!
By the way the Cuban government has to pay COD (cash on delivery) of anything it purchases from the USA!
Cuba is notorious for not paying it’s foreign debt!
Free democratic and globally supervised elections and the embargo will end! Viva Cuba Libre!
Why should the embargo end? Maybe the cuban government and mismanagement and corruption and communism and dictatorship must end.
End the US blockade of remittances, fuel, inputs, markets, etc. Simple solution EEUU American dummies. Your coverage omitted so much journalism. It seems like a propaganda tool oF Marco Rubio and Trump.
U S must end the embargo now it’s been there since 1962 old cars still there needs new cars still no apply and what is left in the Castro government and cuban president Miguel Diaz canel must let go politician who been in prison for 30 or 40 plus years or they dying cuba is terrible shape right now time to end the embargo
The Cuban government pretends to pay us and we pretend to work.
Communist innefiency as noted by now Capitalists Vietnam and Russia…
Who is going to grow the rice? Most Cubans want nothing to do with farm work, No one wants to be a ‘peasant farmer’.
After living over ten years in Cuba, and after visiting over 148 times to Cuba, this is, my eye opening opinion; we all agree Cuba is fortunate enough to be blessed with fertile farm land. But, why then is the low production of rice? Lack of incentives towards farmers to increase production and the lack of market opportunities for the farmers to dispose the rice. These above mentioned important issues must be addressed to avoid low rice production ,
I can’t believe my grandfather’s land that was stolen by the government in 1960 will be given to a foreign country. My ancestors must be rolling their graves…
The economy is manage by the government, and governments in general are very inefficient. The economic model in Cuba is a total disaster
Can you imagine that in 2018 there was 151,000 hectares (1,510 square kilometers) of rice planted for the population then of 11.33 million people (or 0.0133 hectares/person), yet seven years later there is only 100,000 hectare (1000 square kilometers) planted for the current population of 10.94 million people (or 0.0091 hectares/person). So in other words the population decreased by 3.443% from 2018 to 2025, but rice field allocation decreased by 33.78%. To make matters worse this decrease in field allocation does not even speak to the drop in production per hectare due to the lack of inputs like fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. No wonder Cuba has to import so much rice.
but, having said all that, the average rice yield per hectare at the low end is 3 – 6 tons per hectare and at the high end 10 – 12 tons per hectare. So the current 100,000 hectare allocation for rice production at the low end should produce from 300,000 tons (300,000,000 kg) to 600,000 tons (600,000,000 kg) or given the current population as noted above – from 27.4 kg/person per year to 54.84 kg/person per year – which is 2.28 kg/person per month to 4.56 kg/person per month. But at the high end of the yield spectrum we’re talking from 1,000,000 tons (1,000,000,000 kg or 91.4 kg/person/year or 7.6 kg/person per month) to 1,200,000 tons (1,200,000,000 kg or 109.7 kg/person per year or 9.14 kg/person per month).
So basically all these numbers suggests that Cuba should be able to produce enough rice to easily feed themselves even at the current 100,000 hectare allocation.
The solution is to spend a tiny fraction of the amount spent to import rice on fertilizers and the other inputs.
I think maybe the one’s in charge of the entire food production supply chain simply don’t understand mathematics in general, but especially regarding agriculture, and most certainly not the mathematics of economics.
No wonder Cuba is hurting so badly.
For the same price as rice is on the black market in Cuba you can bring the same tonnage of fertilizer
The rice is worth about 3 times the cost of fuel fertilizer and other imported inputs. Cuba should be a net exporter of rice, sugar and many other agriculture products. Only a major change in gov controls and economic system. Cuba has the best unused Farmland in the world in my opinion