Cuban Agriculture Announces Opportunities for Foreign Investors

Havana, Feb 7 (ACN) Some 59 agriculture areas are opened to foreign investment this year, executives announced during a press conference on Tuesday.

The director of International Relations at the Cuban Agriculture Ministry, Orlando Diaz, said the offer includes three proposals in which coopeatives operate as partners in businesses producing and marketing pork, chicken meat, milk and other activity aimed at local development.

Major opportunities are found in the ranching, agriculture and forestry areas, which include a large variety of their usual production.

Othe opportunity areas include traditional export goods like charcoal, bee honey, cocoa, coffee, while the Flora and Fauna Corporation promotes nature tourism.

Diaz explained that Cuban agriculture counts on skilled labor and research centers to address pressing problems affecting production.

He said labor in the sector amounts to over 830 thousand workers, with 519 thousand of them grouped in cooperatives, average age is 47 years, while their experience in agriculture is backed by scientific research.

Some 16 percent of all Cuban cultivable lands is idle; local agriculture production is challenged by the need to provide large and stable food supply to more than 11 million people, 80 percent of whom live in the cities. This implies the need to increase food production, reduce imports and diversify exports.

Important enough is the need to close the gap between the countryside and the cities by creating better living conditions in the rural areas, better homes and infrastructure as well as larger use of technology, and access to consumer goods.