Using data from the United Nations and the World Bank, this research examines whether agroecology has contributed to improve soil quality in Cuba, the country where this approach to food production, embraced after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, is more extensively developed. Through a panel model, both a comparison of Cuba with itself through time and a cross-national comparison of Cuba with the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), were performed to establish if the Cuban transition to agroecology effectively decoupled industrial agricultural practices from yield relative to other countries in LAC. Decoupling is understood as the removal of the positive association between fertilizer use and yield. Synthetic fertilizer use is considered, while controlling for agricultural land, tractor use, and the weather, as an indicator of industrialized agriculture, while the yield of maize and beans is used as a proxy variable for soil improvement.
Results/Conclusions
The model shows a reversal of the fertilizer use and yield positive correlation in Cuba after 1991, wherein productivity has increased while the use of inputs has shrunk, suggesting that agroecology has improved soil quality in Cuba. This points to the potential of agroecological approaches to food production for coping with soil degradation and other global ecological problems such as the disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus biogeochemical cycles.