The Cuban State pays 15,000 pesos for an animal, processes it and sells it for 60,000 pesos, denounce the producers.
IPS* (via 14ymedio), Havana, 18 September 2024 — Producers in Cuba’s agricultural sector consider that when it comes to producing and marketing food products such as milk and meat, Resolution 275/2024 of the Ministry of Agriculture is increasingly distant from the urgent needs of the country and even more so from the Cuban countryside.
“The fact that a state-owned company pays 38 pesos for a liter of milk does not take into account the costs of producing it or the prices of supplies,” comments farmer Armando Zamora on the regulation that obliges him to sell most of his products to state-owned companies at pre-established prices.
In this regard, he gives the following example: “A roll of wire costs between 30,000 and 36,000 Cuban pesos (CUP), about 100 or 120 U.S. dollars, depending on the exchange rate in the informal market, where the value of 1 dollar is around 300 CUP.
“The resolution says that the priority is the state order, but the price they [state-owned companies] pay, compared to the 100 CUP paid in the informal market for the same liter, makes the pocket decide, not the conscience,” he adds.
“The price they [state-owned companies] pay, compared to the 100 CUP paid in the informal market for the same liter, makes the pocket decide, not the conscience”
After insisting that he sees no prospects for 2025, the worker linked to livestock farming for 19 years reflects: “Whoever sets those prices has never gotten up at two in the morning to milk a cow”.
Another long-standing unresolved problem is the difference between what the state-owned company pays the producer for beef and what the industry earns.
According to Zamora, the state companies “pay 15,000 pesos for an animal and when they process and sell it, they get 60,000 pesos. The one who spent years raising it, planting feed and taking care of it so that it would not be stolen is the one who earns the least… Without incentives, there will be no greater production”.
Amid a severe production crisis, dependence on imports and high food prices, most of the opinions warn of the negative aspects of the new resolution of the Ministry of Agriculture, published in the Official Gazette on September 4.
Designed to organize and control the marketing of agricultural, forestry a