Our future lies in arable soil.

In this Antillean island, approximately 11 million hectares of land are fertile; most of them are used for various crops and livestock, while almost three million are devoted to forestry development. But not with the intensity and yields that the times and the population demand.
According to my father and his brothers, my grandfather had a «conuquito», back in his native Bolondrón, which he served better than my grandmother. Between laughter and jokes they used to say… «before the sun came up, ‘El Viejo’, he was already wiping his tip of corn, beans or malanga, after milking the cow and feeding the pig and the chickens».
«From this good land, we get what we need to feed the mulattos so that they come out healthy and strong», he would say to his grandmother while, sitting on the stool that he leaned against the wall and smoking the cigars that he could never leave, he watched his sowing.
And how right he was, that tall man, with big, calloused hands and muscles defined by hard work in the fields, who learned to use the land to live and raise his large family of six children.
However, today Cuba, under the difficult conditions imposed by the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the United States, spends some two billion dollars a year to acquire the food that can be obtained from our lands, just by making them produce. Ninety-five percent of the food we need comes from the soil.
In this Antillean island, approximately 11 million hectares of land are fertile; most of them are used for various crops and livestock, while almost three million are devoted to forestry development. But not with the intensity and yields that the times and the population demand.
Social factors such as the abandonment of work in the fields and the loss of family tradition due to lack of motivation or the presence of better paid jobs and the increase of urbanization, together with the development of tourism, the oil extraction industry, electricity and light industry, among other sectors, have an impact on the growing number of idle or poorly managed lands that we see in any rural scenario.
But the low agricultural and livestock production that we see on the table is also due to the intensity and frequency with which desertification and drought occur, together with chemical contamination and deforestation that threaten the quality of the soil, the diversity of species that inhabit it and the fresh water resources it treasures.
If we are alarmed by the fact that if this rate of mistreatment of the land continues, by the year 2050 the affected arable area will be the size of South America, the fact that five millimeters of soil take more than 100 years to form is even more worrying.
These and other reasons indicate that our future lies in the cultivated soil and that restoring these ecosystems to make them more resilient to climate change is a priority for the people of this century.
Challenges for Matanzas, one of the provinces with the greatest economic and agricultural potential in Cuba
Matanzas has sandy soils in the north, red soils in the center and dark or black soils in the south that summarize the ideal conditions for agricultural activity in the south-central region, belonging to the Havana-Matanzas plain, where the most fertile lands in Cuba are located.
However, unsustainable practices such as monoculture and the excessive use of machinery for tillage have caused aridity, erosion and landslides to the point of requiring techniques and strategies to reverse the situation.
An example is the OP15 Country Partnership Program, which, initiated in 2008, advocates better land use and the fight against desertification and drought. It is financed by the Global Environment Facility.
Through OP15, the Sustainable Land Management (SLM) model is used to diagnose physical, chemical and biological soil conditions in order to apply organic fertilizers such as cachasa, chicken manure, bat guano, among other manures; in addition to vermiculture and agroecological techniques such as crop rotation.
In addition, the protection of the hydro-regulating strip of farmland near the rivers and the work to stop the advance of the salt wedge due to the rise in the average sea level, a phenomenon that increases the vulnerability of Matanzas because of its low or very low coasts.
The work of producer Fernando Donis and his family on the Cayo Piedra farm, located 15 kilometers from Máximo Gómez, stands out. The MST prevents the land from flooding during periods of heavy rains, even though it is close to the Roque canal.
Also noteworthy are the environmentally friendly actions carried out under the direction of Pedro Correa at the Coincidencia farm in Boca de Camarioca and the cultural-economic-environmental dimension of the Guamacaro Kilometer 9 project, born from the initiative of playwright Ulises Rodríguez Febles, son of the Matanzas region.
With the rescue of rurality, Guamacaro Kilometer 9 also favors the production of foodstuffs such as guagüí and fruits that have been traditionally harvested in the Guamacaro Valley, in the municipality of Limonar.
And although the good examples are still insufficient to counteract the effect of desertification and drought, due to the amount of land in the province that remains uncultivated or full of marabú and the insufficient use of agroecological practices, every day more and more cooperative members and individual farmers are convinced of the importance of science to exploit the land in harmony with the environment.
This explains the acceptance of the Bases for Food Sustainability (BASAL) project, which for five years, allowed the successful application of agroecological practices in the territory and the project of future climate scenarios, designed by specialists of the Matanzas Provincial Meteorological Center based on the study of the variables temperature, rainfall, wind, relative humidity and solar radiation.
The project, which began with the division of the map of the province into nine grids, is now divided into 36 grids to deliver meteorological information at the community level and thus increase the accuracy of the prediction. The application of this knowledge avoids or reduces losses and increases the awareness of those who exploit the soil.
The idea is that every June 5th, World Environment Day, we reinforce the commitment to keep our farmland healthy to ensure the sustainability of the food program with the corresponding decrease in imports, protect the habitat of thousands of species, ensure the presence of water and clean air, among other benefits offered by arable land.
Written by Ana González Goicochea.