12 Agriculture and Food Systems
Model’ as the official policy – an agriculture that focuses on technologies that
substitute local knowledge, skills and resources for the imported inputs. Two
important strands to sustainable agriculture in Cuba have emerged. First intensive
organic gardens have been developed in urban areas – self-provisioning gardens in
schools and workplaces (autoconsumos), raised container-bed gardens (organoponi-
cos) and intensive community gardens (huertos intensivos). There are now more
than 7000 urban gardens, and productivity has grown from 1.5kg per square metre
to nearly 20kg per square metre. Second, sustainable agriculture is encouraged in
rural areas, where the impact of the new policy has already been remarkable. This
paper by Nelso Companioni and colleagues is from Fernando Funes’ book Sustain-
able Agriculture and Resistance, which documents in detail these agricultural changes
in Cuba. This chapter focuses on the urban agriculture component, and shows
how small areas of urban land have made such significant contributions to national
food security. Urban agriculture is important to families in many countries, yet it
is often forgotten by policy makers.
In the final article in this volume, Terry Marsden explores the quest for eco-
logical modernization in industrialized food systems. He focuses on challenging
the prevailing economic notions of scale, critical mass and centralization, and sug-
gests that ecological modernization raises a new question: ‘how could/should the
contested relationships between civil society, the state and the market be rear-
ranged in ways which would usher in different types of autonomous development
which would incorporate ecological worth?’ Through three areas, agriculture,
restructuring food supply chains and forestry, Marsden explores how ecologically
modernizing processes are operating in industrialized societies, and how these in
turn are influencing rural development trends. As ecology has emerged as an
important objective, so it has become embedded more into the institutions of
economy. Might this lead just to a stronger growth treadmill, or a different and
possibly more robust rural development paradigm? What does this mean for spe-
cific sectors? In South Wales, for example, forestry authority attempts to encourage
more participation and inclusion in forested areas is constrained by deprivation in
local communities, where other state services are being withdrawn. Food deserts in
large cities are enclaves hidden from most who see corporate-led retail outlets as
being abundant and cheap, rather than missing. Monopolistic retail arrangements
affect the marginalized in society the most. And common to many places, primary
producers who are, of course, nearest to the land, are being gradually discouraged
as regulators seek to protect consumers, and corporations themselves acquire most
of the value in the food chain.