Humberto Rios Labrada
Credit: Will Parrinello
Like many countries worldwide, Cuba was once a fertile farming country that fell victim to industrial agriculture. The once hundreds of varieties of seeds and sustainable farming practices dwindled down to a handful of seed types and methods of working the land that stripped it of its fertility. However, Cuba is on the road to recovery, thanks to the efforts of Humberto Rios Labrada, a scientist and biodiversity researcher who this week won a Goldman Environmental Prize for his work.
Thanks to Rios, Cuba is shifting away from a dependence on chemicals and back to a dependence on farmers knowledgeable about the capabilities and needs of the land.
For over 30 years, Cuba was a primary supplier of sugar to its trading partners like the Soviet Union. To produce a high yield, farmers adopted chemical-intensive, mechanized practices that focused on monocultures. Over 50% of the land was devoted to sugar cane, and the rest was dedicated to just a handful of crop types, which were grown with a small selection of seeds. But with the collapse of communism in Europe came the collapse of Cuba's agricultural sector - no one was trading sugar cane, and citizens suffered massive food shortages.
Farmers needed to return to sustainable farming practices that increased biodiversity, and there to help them was Rios. While doing field research, Rios saw that the farmers were going back to practices that encouraged a revitalization of the land, which could also solve Cuba's food crisis. He became committed to facilitating partnerships among small farmers that revolved around seed trading and sharing knowledge, and he worked to establish agrobiodiversity learning centers. Rios is helping agricultural scientists realize that farmers hold a vast amount of knowledge about crop cultivation, and that traditional knowledge is as important as scientific discoveries when it comes to agriculture.
Thanks to his work, Cuba, its land and its people are on the recovery. Today, more than 50,000 farmers participate in seed biodiversity initiatives and agrobiodiversity is rising.
