Marco Visscher | July/August 2010 issue
Somewhat surprisingly for an agricultural scientist, Humberto Ríos Labrada is often found singing and dancing before a crowd. “In practice, music is much more effective than my scientific studies,” Ríos explains. The inspiration for his songs—which he performs in farming communities throughout Cuba—comes directly from his work promoting plant diversity.
Ríos became involved in this work by chance. For Cuba, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 meant fertilizer and chemical pesticides could no longer be imported. For a country that buys great volumes of agricultural chemicals, this was a disruptive development. During the food crisis that followed, Ríos wanted to examine how farmers were faring in the poorest regions. “The funny thing was that in this area, they were happily growing their own food,” Ríos remembers. It appeared that the farmers were still applying an age-old technique based on crop rotation, seed diversity and the use of insects to combat blights and plagues. This was an art contemporary farmers had forgotten.
Ríos believes this farming technique is vital to the future of Cuban agriculture, so he set up information centers. Now some 50,000 farmers have embraced the principles of organic farming and biodiversity. These communities are growing various types of rice, beans, corn and other crops. The farmers often report crop yields greater than when they used chemicals. “If biodiversity forms the foundation of our farming,” says Ríos, “the crops will taste better, which means happier people at the dinner table.” These days, Ríos has good reason to sing. Cubans farmers are producing more, and he was recently awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize.
