Hardly Anyone Dries Rice on the Road Anymore
By Daniel Valero (Progreso Weekly)
HAVANA TIMES – On the sunniest and best-preserved stretches of the Camagüey highway, once fought over by rice farmers, you can barely see a few drying crews today. The rice left to dry on the roads and the roofs of homes is no longer being produced. With fuel, fertilizers, and other productive inputs in short supply, along with high labor and transportation costs and a lack of investment capital, it’s perhaps easier to understand why so many people have stopped planting or are planting less.
Five or six years ago, you had to arrive very early to secure a good spot on the highway between La Gloria and Puerto Piloto, two small towns in the northern part of Cuba’s Camagüey province. The countless potholes lining this seven-kilometer road are interspersed with some still-paved sections, ideal for drying rice. During the “dry season” (from November to April), hundreds of tons of unhusked grain used to be scattered there.
The process that takes the grain from the fields to the table doesn’t end with the harvest. Next, the farmer must dry it and pass it through a mill to remove and polish the hull. Transforming “wet rice” (freshly harvested rice) into “consumable rice” involves both effort and cost: no more than half a ton of the final product is obtained from each ton harvested.
On the sunniest and best-preserved stretches of the highway between La Gloria and Puerto Piloto—and on others throughout Camagüey that rice farmers once contested—you can now barely see a few drying crews.
Their absence is not due to the growth in milling capacity. In countries with better agro-industrial infrastructure, virtually all rice is processed in mills, resulting in a higher-quality product in less time. However, in Cuba, state-owned plants have never managed to process all the stored grain, and no investments have been made to expand them in recent years. The rice that has stopped drying on roads and roofs has not ended up in any mills; it has simply stopped being harvested.
Since the pandemic began, delays in publishing the National Office of Statistics and Information reports and data have become commonplace. The most recent update to the agricultural chapter is from the 2023 Statistical Yearbook, 2024 edition.
The compiled information is alarming. In 2023, Cuba recorded its worst rice production of this century: 58,776 tons of “wet paddy rice,” which, according to press reports, would have been converted into approximately 27,000 tons of ready-to-eat food, “consumer rice.” For context, this production volume represented less than 4% of the island’s annual demand, (700,000 tons, according to data from the beginning of the pandemic, also yet to be updated). Furthermore, it is equivalent to less than 12% of what had been collected seven years earlier, in 2018, when a historic record of 304,000 tons of ‘consumer rice’ was set.
The decline was halted in 2024, revealed Orlando Linares Morell, president of the Agricultural Group of the Ministry of Agriculture in an interview with Granma newspaper a few weeks ago. According to his statements, nearly 80,000 tons of “consumer rice” were harvested last year, although yields per hectare were still less than half of what they had been in 2018. “Rice cultivation is highly technical. It requires a technological package that the country currently lacks. Therefore, it had to be removed from the national balance sheet. In 2024, the family rations sold was 100% imported, and this is also expected to be the case in 2025,” the executive anticipated.
At first glance, it appears that the decision to cover what the island does not produce with imports is based on economic logic. However, in practice, this is not the case.
In June 2020, Lazaro Diaz, then director of the Rice Technology Division at the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Fisheries, explained to Granma that the comprehensive development program for this crop (launched in the 2011-2012 campaign) had its most significant asset in its proven profitability under Cuban conditions. The cost of each ton of domestic production was estimated at around $319, while the average price for purchasing foreign rice was estimated at $520 per ton during 2019-2020. In other words, with the amount spent on importing three tons of rice, five tons could be produced in Cuba.
Domestic production relied on a cost sheet that outlined an ideal scenario, where all the resources of the so-called technological package (fuel, fertilizers, etc.) were dedicated to cultivation, a situation that hadn’t occurred even in the most prosperous times.
Aside from some international collaboration projects with China and Vietnam and the “linkages” that state-owned companies have established in several provinces with private businesses to obtain inputs, MINAG’s primary focus remains on the well-known formula of “doing more with less.” This premise guides the so-called popular rice program. Describing it to Granma readers, Linares Morell praised it as a “modality that already demonstrated its effectiveness during the difficult years of the Special Period crisis, in the 1990s.” More than 20,000 producers are enrolled in the program across the country. They tend small plots along the banks of rivers and gullies. In provinces like Pinar del Río, they cultivate almost as many hectares as the state’s grain agroindustrial company, he emphasized.
However, there is a considerable gap between “cultivation” and “harvesting,” which the official conveniently ignored. While “popular rice” plots consume virtually no fuel or other imported products, their production levels cannot be compared with large-scale plantations. Despite the collapse of recent years, in Cuba, the latter often yields more than double that of the former: 4.15 tons of wet rice per hectare in 2022 for the state sector vs. 2.49 for private farmers. Also, I’d like to point out that not even in its golden age did the country exceed 4.5 tons of wet rice per hectare, the national average. India, the world’s leading rice exporter, expects to average almost six tons per hectare this year.
Putting in the work
Small-scale farming has another disadvantage: its reliance on intensive labor, which is becoming harder to secure in Cuban fields.
Pavel, a rice farmer in La Gloria, experiences this firsthand yearly during the cold and spring seasons, the two rice harvests in Cuba. “This is hard work, and most young people prefer to find something more ‘noble’ in the village. ‘With a box, selling bread on a bicycle, I earn more than here, and with less wear and tear,’ some have told me”, he commented.
Many jobs that are currently done manually could be mechanized, he insisted. “In this same area, due to the lack of spare parts, almost no combines are working anymore, and on more than one occasion, we’ve had to cut and thresh by hand to save the harvest. If you add to that the thefts, which have become an epidemic, the fuel crisis, which has made it an ordeal to get to the nearest mill, and the problems with the so-called banking system, perhaps you can understand why so many people have stopped planting or are planting significantly less. The best part is that when they call meetings and someone raises these problems, they are silenced with slogans. The problem is that slogans don’t yield rice.”
Regarding this issue, the government maintains a policy that borders on immobility. For example, despite a new foreign investment law coming into effect in 2014, which, in theory, opened the door to the incorporation of foreign capital into agriculture, it was not until March of this year that the first such business was authorized. The project, led by a Vietnamese company, will manage approximately 300 hectares specifically designated for rice cultivation in Pinar del Río.
Although the news was reported in numerous media outlets, its practical scope is limited. To return to pre-pandemic rice production levels, Cuba would need to cultivate over 200,000 hectares at current yield levels.
In this sense, a good opportunity to attract investment lies in the new land ownership, possession, and use law, the preliminary draft of which was also presented in March and must be approved in December by the National Assembly. However, this document closes the door to emigrants and new management forms (private Cuban businesses, local development projects, etc.), reserving the possibility of investing in agriculture exclusively for foreign companies and residents. This is a contradictory decision, considering the sector’s profound decapitalization and the private sector’s significant role in production.
According to MINAG officials, the draft bill will be discussed until May 1st. However, it remains unclear whether it was addressed during the assembly process organized by the National Association of Small Farmers since the beginning of the year. What is known is that these meetings did not answer most of the farmers’ complaints.
Measures implemented with these assemblies in mind, such as reducing tariffs on imported agricultural inputs and machinery, benefit only a limited percentage of rural producers who can justify their income in dollars (tobacco growers, beekeepers, etc.). Meanwhile, other measures that would have a greater impact, such as resuming sales of inputs in Cuban pesos (as before the 2021 reforms) or establishing an official exchange market where farmers can buy the foreign currency they need for their imports, are not being adopted.
“The countryside gives, but one must put in what’s required,” says Pavel. At first glance, it may seem obvious, but it’s not so apparent in Cuba.