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The Ministry of Agriculture of Cuba published this Tuesday the Resolution 17/2026, a regulation that sets forth the guidelines and procedures for the marketing of agricultural and forestry production for the current year.
The resolution, formally issued on February 2, 2026, is published in the Official Gazette No. 61 Extraordinary 2026 with over 17 pages of regulatory content.
According to the official text, the objective of the regulation is to "support the Economic Plan regarding the demand for agricultural and forestry products, through a contracting process that is based on the potential of agricultural and forestry producers, with the aim of increasing the supply to all destinations."
The resolution applies to individuals and legal entities involved in the production, processing, and marketing of agricultural and forestry products, including tobacco.
The regulated processes encompass everything from harvesting, slaughtering, and collection to packaging, preservation, processing, transportation, distribution, storage, and final marketing.
Contracting is carried out between the productive base and local subordinate dairy, meat, and retail companies, with a priority given to state orders, municipal food balance, and industry.
The regulation defines the productive base as the structure formed by agricultural cooperatives, companies, and business units, state, private, and mixed micro, small, and medium enterprises, landowners and usufructuaries, and other producers.
Agricultural cooperatives take on the responsibility of defining productive potential and organizing, controlling, and evaluating compliance with the indicators.
Among the specific objectives, the resolution aims to "consolidate the inclusion, in the hiring process, of new economic actors engaged in productive, transformative, or marketing activities related to agricultural and forestry products."
The standard also requires "promoting the process of banking all commercial operations, which must be documented in the contract to be formalized, as one of the payment methods, in accordance with the possibilities of each territory."
Resolution 17/2026 is part of the framework of the end of the Acopio monopoly announced in April, when the regime published Decree 143, signed by Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz on December 30, 2025, which ended four decades of exclusive control by that state company over agricultural marketing.
However, the regulatory openness contrasts with the practical difficulties: in April, the private company Havana Agro SURL reported obstacles from the Ministry of Agriculture that hindered producers' access to agricultural equipment, highlighting the tensions between the announced regulatory changes and the institutional resistance that still exists in the sector.
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