A private pig farming business called "Carne de Tres" will be the first to receive foreign direct investment in Cuba, after the Government opened the country's wholesale and retail trade toinvestors from other countries.
The venture belongs to a MSME in Ciego de Ávila, which focuses on the production and marketing of pork and its derivatives, and has a presence on sales platforms.online on the island, where pork legs cost up to 70 MLC.
"We are the first pilot project in Cuba that willreceive foreign direct investment, a form of non-state management in agriculture and specifically in pigs. This local development project approved by the government of the municipality of Ceco de Ávila began with the breeding, fattening, and reproduction of animals of average genetics, and then from the possibility of becoming the Carne de Tres MiPymes we began to think more in a big way," said Leonel Duarte Pla, general director of the venture, in statements to Cuban official television.
He stated that the project – one of the more than 4,000 new economic actors on the island – focuses on the improvement of breeding buildings, the development of animals that the pork company now rejects, and alliances with that government entity.
The MiPymes said that it expects to reach 130 tons of meat sold in 2022, a figure higher than last year, when it sold 97 tons.
"We are going to produce our own animals, slaughter them, market them, taking into account clean production with the use of biogas and the liquid feed plant that will allow us, with mixed feed or imported feed, to obtain an efficient and collaborate with meat production in the country," stressed Duarte Pla.
The Cuban government announced on August 15 the opening of the country's wholesale and retail trade to foreign investors, in its attempt to overcome the serious shortage of food and other basic products that affect the population.
Especially pork, the basic animal protein in Cuban culinary culture, began to become scarce after the Covid-19 pandemic due to the lack of food for animals. Consequently, in the market the meat reached values over 300 pesos per pound. Even the end of the year in 2021 had the characteristic that for the first time thousands of families on the island could not wait for 2022 with pork on the table, they had to settle for chicken in the best of cases, a product of the shortage and the high prices.
The first vice minister of Foreign Trade and Foreign Investment, Ana Teresita González Fraga, explained on the official television program Mesa Redonda recent government provisions that seek to stimulate foreign investment in wholesale and retail trade – state and private –, and justified the shortage in the internal market for goods and services with currency restrictions for state entities to operate.
He said that it was agreed to promote that these foreign investment businesses are destined, fundamentally, to the sale of raw materials, inputs, equipment and other goods that can contribute to promoting the development of national production; and so that mixed entities canpre-finance national producers who have the conditions to become suppliers, as would be the case of Carne de Tres.
Themeasure generated criticism by Cubans who expressed their skepticism and said that this measure confirms that the "blockade" in Cuba is that of the communist regime towards the people.
"Yesterday's announcements in relation to foreign investment and internal trade - above all - confirm the brutal blockade to which the authorities have subjected economic activity in Cuba for decades. Excess control and inability are the basis of the scarcity. Of everything," said Cuban biologist Arturo Pérez-Riverol on Twitter.
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