Film night: Urban Farming in Cuba - what can we learn from it?

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Cuba’s markets for sugarcane disappeared. As a result, Cuba no longer had the foreign exchange it needed to buy food for its citizens, or chemical fertilizers for sugarcane plantations.

Cuban citizens responded to food shortages and near-famine through ‘repeasantization’. People began cultivating gardens in cities, and the state began to encourage the creation of small farms. Agro-ecological farming became the favored method of agricultural production because it did not require expensive, imported chemical inputs.

Come and  watch some short films about this transition to agroecology, with informal discussion after each one.