As part of the effort the country is making in terms of food sovereignty and nutritional education, emphasis is placed on basing it on the governance of local food systems and articulating it with the process of designing and managing municipal and provincial development strategies, a process that should conclude in the year 2021 as part of the implementation of the Policy to Promote Territorial Development.
In the process of updating the Cuban Economic and Social Model, it is desired to stimulate the development of territories (municipality and province), from the country’s strategy, so that municipalities are strengthened as a fundamental instance, with the necessary autonomy, sustainable, with a solid economic-productive base and the main disproportions among them are reduced, as an element to measure its effectiveness, taking advantage of endogenous and exogenous resources and the interactor, interterritorial and multilevel articulation. In this aspiration, it is based the strategic role that the cooperative sector has in Cuba and its linkage through productive chains with the rest of the forms of state and non-state management, in order to increase the added value of local productions, to promote exports, to substitute imports and to contribute to food sovereignty and nutritional education.
The Municipal Development Strategy (EDM in Spanish) and the Provincial Development Strategy (EDP in Spanish) are integrating instruments that help guide the management of the municipal government according to the priorities defined, based on national, provincial and municipal interests. From their design and management, they articulate the diagnoses and projections that are defined by other planning instruments, fundamentally by the General Plan for Territorial and Urban Planning. However, they have been focused, fundamentally, on state entities and have not managed to sufficiently integrate the cooperative and private sectors, particularly those linked to food production.
In this sense, it is conceived that in the design of the EDM and EDP at least three possibilities should be considered:
- What all the state actors of the enterprise and budgeted system, located in the territory, can contribute from their goods and services, committed to the different destinations foreseen in the plan of the economy and the budget, as well as other elements that can be taken advantage of (technologies, human resources, installed capacities, financing and raw materials, from idle resources, waste or residues, among others) according to their use in new productions or local services in which the cooperatives have a space for the increase and diversification of their productions
- What can be promoted from the management of municipal governments with the non-state sector (cooperative and private) and the linkages of the latter with state enterprises, an aspect where the cooperative sector finds space for collaboration based on the improvement of its management in terms of effectiveness and socio-economic efficiency and the expansion of its cooperative social responsibility
- What the population can propose by calling for People’s Councils
The steps proposed for the design of territorial planning tools are not linear, but interact and provide inputs to each other, including analysis of context, challenges and opportunities, the role of the municipality in supra-municipal development, trends in the development of the territory based on key economic, socio-cultural and environmental criteria and indicators, characterization of the main potentials of the territory and balances of available resources, among other aspects that are of interest.
In all cases, the moments and forms in which the cooperatives are inserted into the process of designing the EDM and EDP are defined, particularly in the formation of development programs due to the economic and productive weight that this form of management has. It is conceived the incorporation of a representation of the cooperative sector in the Municipal and Provincial Groups of Local Development (Torres Páez, 2018).
It is essential to incorporate the conception of local food systems to the design and management of EDM and EDP, which must have their expression in local public policies, development programs and project opportunity portfolio, as instruments for their operationalization. In each of these components of the EDM and EDP, it is key that cooperatives get involved because of their specific weight in the agricultural sector, mainly in programs for rice, tobacco, various crops, citrus and fruit trees, cattle, pigs, beekeeping, coffee, cocoa, etc. (Díaz-Canel Bermúdez et al., 2020).
The agro livestock and non-agro livestock cooperative is founded as a possible holder of local development projects and its inclusion is achieved in the “Policy to Promote Territorial Development”, approved by the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Cuba. This contribution is introduced in the “Methodological Guide for the design and management of the EDM” and in the “Methodological Guide for the design and management of the EDP”, which are applied, to date, in 10 provinces and 32 municipalities of the country that are part of the Articulated Platform for the Integral Territorial Development.
This process contributes to diminish the traditional centralism, verticality and sectoriality that have predominated in the governmental management of the Cuban agro livestock sector, fundamentally at territorial level, and to replace it with an approach that grants more authority to the productive bases and to the agro livestock producers. The fundamental challenge is to transmit a nutritional culture and promote the transfer of technology and the application of the results of science and innovation to the municipalities, in the People’s Councils, in the nearly five thousand farms that exist in Cuban municipalities, in the agricultural cooperatives and enterprises that exist throughout the country, in the 700 thousand backyards (which could be as many as 1.3 million), where food is produced. Achieving this process around the structuring and governance of local food systems and in articulation with territorial planning instruments, is a fundamental premise for the successful participation of the cooperative sector as one of the key actors.
Within the framework of the Policy to Promote Territorial Development, the creation of a municipal and provincial promotion fund for local economic development is defined, based on projects presented by the different actors, including cooperatives. These funds are formed from the contribution of the territorial contribution to local development made by state and non-state economic actors. They will be administered in trust by a financial institution and as a priority will promote local food systems and other priorities associated with strategic economic sectors.