WASHINGTON, Oct. 5, 2016 - One of the biggest reservations
about increasing agricultural trade with Cuba has been that U.S. food won’t
benefit the common citizen on the communist island. U.S. farming
representatives are fighting back, though, stressing that U.S. commodities will
end up on the dinner plates of the average person as well as provide a much-needed
boost to U.S. exports.
Cuba imports all of its food through one government agency,
but that doesn’t mean the U.S. should not sell its chicken, rice, corn, wheat,
soybeans, pork and dairy to the country, and it doesn’t mean that the sales
won’t benefit ordinary Cubans, said Doug Keesling, state support committee
chairman of the U.S. Agriculture Coalition for Cuba and former chairman of
Kansas Wheat.
“I think it’s time to end the embargo,” Keesling said in a
recent interview. “It’s a policy that hasn’t worked and the people over there
need help. The people need food, so is it right for us to say we’re not going
to trade with them?”
The U.S. does export some agricultural commodities to Cuba,
but financing restrictions have given countries like Vietnam, Brazil, Argentina
and Canada an advantage. As it is now, Cuba can only buy U.S. agricultural
commodities if it pays cash up front.
The Senate and the House are both considering legislation to
remove the credit restrictions.
But critics like Cuban-born Mauricio Claver-Carone,
executive director of Cuba Democracy Advocates, say that the state purchasing
agency – ALIMPORT – is nothing more than a tool of Cuba’s Foreign Trade
Ministry and the Castro regime, which diverts food for political purposes.
“In most of the world, trade means dealing with privately owned
or operated corporations,” Claver-Carone said at a House Agriculture Committee hearing.
“That’s not the case in Cuba. In Cuba, foreign trade and investment is the
exclusive domain of the state, namely the Castro regime.”
Keesling and others argue that other major customers for U.S.
farm goods including China, India and Iraq also buy their imports through a
government agency.
Eric Wailes, a professor of agriculture economics at the
University of Arkansas, just got back from a trip to Cuba and he said imported
rice does filter throughout the entire Cuban society. Foreign-supplied rice is
in the stores where everyday Cubans get their government-sponsored rations and
it’s also available on the secondary market, he said.
Right now most of that imported rice is coming from Vietnam
and Brazil, he said, but if Congress would end the financial restrictions on
sales to Cuba, the U.S. could do a much better job at supplying the country.
“Cuba could certainly benefit by having more access to
higher quality, more freshly milled and competitively priced rice,” Wailes
said.
As for wheat, Keesling said that right now imports from
France and Canada are being used to make the bread and rolls that all of the
Cuban people eat. It’s been five years since the U.S. shipped any wheat to
Cuba, according to USDA data. And when those U.S. exports were flowing, they
reached all Cubans, said Keesling, who said he witnessed it firsthand.
“I’ve been in the flour mills – there are six – and I’ve
seen the wheat coming in,” he said.
The Cuban millers prefer the kind of hard red winter wheat
they can get from states like Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado, Keesling said.
Cuba, with a population of just over 11 million people, may
be a relatively small nation, but the effects of removing the U.S. credit
restrictions would be huge, Keesling said. The U.S. provides between 80 and 90
percent of the wheat and corn imported in the Caribbean, he said, and there’s
no reason American farmers should not be able to capture that big of a market
share in Cuba. If that happened, it could add 50 cents per bushel to what corn
farmers are getting now for their crops.
“Kansas just came off a record wheat crop – 464 million
bushels of wheat,” he said and stressed that stocks are so high that elevators
are filling up, forcing farmers to keep their crops on the ground.
The U.S. International Trade Commission said in a report earlier
this year that the U.S. credit restriction on sales to Cuba has a massive
effect on U.S. exports. The ITC said Cuba bought an average of 313 million
worth of U.S. farm commodities 2010 to 2103, but also predicted that removing
the credit restriction could more than double those sales.
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