PINAR DEL RIO, January 30 (Víctor Rolando Arroyo, UPECI) – The
tobacco crop in Las Martinas, in the westernmost corner of Cuba’s foremost
tobacco-growing province, is in imminent danger of being lost to the twin
threats of blue mold and drought.
The blue mold is still prevalent, say growers in the area, because the local
government sold them agricultural control chemicals that were past their
expiration date.
Persistent drought compounded the damage to the crop and irrigation was not
able to save it because approximately half the nearly 1,000 pumps that irrigate
the fields for the 1,200 local growers are not working.
The crisis is made worse by the general lack of supplies, particularly the
insufficient quota of fuel for irrigation, which fluctuates between 2½ and
4 gallons a week. Plastic hose is also hard to come by.
Growers in the region are reported to be upset at government pressure to
fulfill State production plans in spite of the lack of means to overcome their
problems. The State plan includes 70 percent of the arable land in the province,
which makes proper field rotation and improvement hard to achieve.
Growers who don’t fulfill their assigned quotas risk either being fined
or losing the use of the lands which the government assigned to them. Local
Ministry of Agriculture official Gilberto Rodríguez told growers last
week that he would not authorize a reduction in the production plan. "Whoever
doesn’t fulfill the production quota will have to hand over his land, even
if it later becomes overgrown with weeds," he said.
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