The Effect of Cuban Agroecology in Mitigating the Metabolic Rift: A Quantitative Approach to Latin American Food Production

Abstract The historical development of capitalism created what Karl Marx called a rift in the social metabolism with nature, whereby soil nutrients were systematically siphoned into cities where they were discarded as waste and thus did not return to the land. An alternative mode of food production known as agroecology was developed by different scientists and activists partly to transcend this contradiction. Drawing on data from the United Nations and the World Bank, this work analyzes whether agroecology has contributed to mitigate the metabolic rift in agriculture in Cuba, the country where this approach to food production, adopted after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, is more widely developed. By means of a panel model, both an internal comparison through time within Cuba and a cross-national comparison of Cuba with the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), were developed to determine whether the post-Soviet transition to agroecology in Cuba successfully decoupled industrial agricultural practices from productivity in comparison to other countries in LAC. Decoupling is understood as the removal of the positive correlation between fertilizer use and yield. Synthetic fertilizer use is utilized as an indicator of industrialized agriculture, and productivity of maize and beans as a proxy measure of soil improvement. The model shows a reversal of the fertilizer use and productivity positive correlation in Cuba, where crop productivity has increased while the use of inputs has diminished, which suggests that agroecology has indeed mitigated the metabolic rift produced by industrialized agriculture.

ASA citation: Betancourt, Mauricio. 2020. “The Effect of Cuban Agroecology in Mitigating the Metabolic Rift: A Quantitative Approach to Latin American Food Production.” Global Environmental Change 63:102075. doi: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102075.