A total of 4.2 million Cubans, or 37.8 percent of the country's inhabitants, experienced food insecurity during 2023, according to a study released this Thursday by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
The collapse of agricultural production in Cuba over the past seven years and its increasingly growing dependence on food imports, in addition to the reduction of trade, tourism income, and remittances from abroad, have resulted in food insecurity affecting nearly 40% of the Cuban population, according to a study conducted by a team from the Economic Research Service (ERS) of the USDA.
Based on the International Food Security Assessment (IFSA) model, USDA researchers concluded that, by 2023, Cuba's estimated average food gap was 225 calories per capita per day.
The IFSA model defines the food gap as the difference between projected food demand and a caloric threshold of 2,100 kilocalories per capita per day.
The study's measurement yielded an alarming result: 12.8% of Cubans (1.4 million people) did not reach the daily threshold of 2,100 calories per capita in 2023.
However, due to the uncertainty regarding the official data on the calculation of Cuba's Gross Domestic Product (GDP), researchers considered a scenario with adjusted GDP per capita (based on the average GDP per capita of the Caribbean subregion) and estimated that 37.8% of the population of Cuba (4.2 million) would have experienced food insecurity during the past year.
The research emphasizes the dramatic decline of national agricultural production in Cuba starting in 2016, which has increased its dependency on imports to cover the food deficit, estimated at 41,000 metric tons in 2023.
Grain production in Cuba - mainly rice and corn - has been declining since 2016, with less than 400,000 metric tons produced each year between 2020 and 2023, according to estimates from the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service.
Between the years 2016/17 and 2023/24, Cuba's annual rice production fell from 335,000 to 140,000 metric tons, a decrease of 58%; while corn production decreased from 404,000 to 250,000 metric tons (38%).
Cuba's annual sugar exports - which in the 20th century were an important source of foreign exchange that could finance imports - plummeted from 1.1 million to 110,000 metric tons (gross value), a drop of 90.5%.
Due to the collapse of national agricultural production, the Cuban government has turned to imports to try to make up for the food deficit. "The country's main agricultural imports are basic products, such as chicken meat, wheat, and rice. This composition of imports reflects efforts to meet crucial food needs that cannot be satisfied by national production," the report stated.
Since the coronavirus pandemic, Cuba's economy "has been unable to achieve a strong and sustained recovery and continues to face the decline in tourism revenues, the reduction in agricultural production, energy shortages, and double-digit inflation," it was considered.
According to the USDA, the ongoing economic recession has limited the country's ability to import agricultural products and revitalize domestic food production, thus worsening food security in Cuba.
"This level of food insecurity reflects the high internal prices of food, which reduce the purchasing power of households, particularly those with lower incomes, for whom food represents a larger proportion of total spending," the study states.
In this context, U.S. agricultural exports to Cuba have increased over the last three years, but they have been concentrated in a single product, chicken meat.
"After U.S. agricultural exports to Cuba plummeted to $157 million in 2020, this trade rebounded to $299 million in 2021, $319 million in 2022, and $337 million in 2023. Poultry accounted for 89.4% of U.S. agricultural exports to Cuba" between 2020 and 2023, noted the USDA.
The European Union (EU), the United States, and Brazil were the first, second, and third suppliers of Cuba's agricultural imports from 2017 to 2022, respectively; while Russia donated 25,000 metric tons of wheat to Cuba in 2023.
Recently, the Cuban regime acknowledged that the country has experienced a significant decline in protein production, poultry farming, and pig farming, due to a lack of supplies, fuel shortages, and weather conditions.
The Minister of Agriculture of Cuba, Ydael Pérez Brito, reported that the country does not exceed 200,000 tons of food produced.
Eighty-nine percent of Cuban families suffer from extreme poverty, revealed the VII Report on the State of Social Rights in Cuba 2024 presented last July by the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights (OCDH). The figure represents a one percentage point increase from 2023 and a 13% increase from 2022.
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) announced last June that 9% of children in Cuba suffer from severe food poverty. This condition means that minors have access to only a maximum of two of the eight essential foods for a healthy life.
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