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Hey,
I have recently watched a film about how Cuba survived peak oil and was wondering do you think we would be able to survive peak oil if the same thing happened to us? Or are we all stuck in our old ways too much to be able to change?

I went to Cuba in 1997 and 1999. It was at the beginning of the new tourist era there which had recently been permitted due to the havoc caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.

I don't have the absolute facts here - this is just my view on what I "kind of" know, and what I saw while there.

Please bear in mind my visit was over 10 years ago. And anything I might say here isn't necessarily in relation to peak oil.

On my first visit, I stayed at the Hotel Nacional, Havana, for 2 weeks. This is considered the Premier hotel in Havana. Cuba was slowly coming out of the havoc, but even in the best hotel in the capital, there was food shortages and a beyond dire menu to select from.

From what I gathered talking to Cubans, the reason the food in the hotel was so bad, was they couldn't move it from where it was being grown, to where it needed to be. There were intermittent power cuts that meant any chilled food went rancid in the tropical heat very quickly. Thousands of tons of produce was wasted weekly just because they couldn't store or move it from the field.

One night in the hotel, all that was on offer was curried Brussel sprouts with rice. Or chilli con carne with rice. Both were highly spicy for a reason, the food was pretty much off. The menu was ad-hoc.. cos they didn't know what would arrive the next day..

Infrastructure in Havana was ok. Taxi's ran...buses ran. Some private cars ran. But the nights were very dark. No non-essential lighting was on.

As with any post collapse society, things still ticked over to some degree, hence the private cars and buses etc... but you could tell that it was bad.. and had been worse.

2 years later there was a huge improvement. many more cars, a lot of bussle on the streets. Things had been built. The menu was drastically improved.. though still pretty dire.

It seems now, that the lessons have been learned, not to rely on one source of income (for Cubans, the USSR).. and that whatever, you need food. Micro-gardens have sprang up in all places in Havana and Cuba.. that keeps the ingredients local and able to be transported easily and quickly without involving chill houses or chilled transportation... maybe it's a lesson for us to note.

Well on a list of country's by population density we are 51 on the list and thats the UK as a whole, not england which would be higher or london that would be higher still

Cuba is 103 on the list so they have more land per person than we do, the Cubans were used to hardish times we aren't. There are people drawing up plans on how many people the UK could support and when I talked to them last year they thought england had 10 million to many people, even if we all turned vegan and were on a strict ration similar in calories to the wartime diet.

It was pretty hard to produce enough food in the UK to feed the population during world war two, and we had imports from the empire and the states and half the population we have now .
We also had far more skilled gardeners and farmers in the 1940s and people with a great attitude and not that divided .

The Cuban situation didn't happen in a world that was falling to pieces I think our situation could be far worse

There are people drawing up plans on how many people the UK

Which people link?

I went to a talk in sunrise celebration on can Britain feed itself, the group I think are based in bath defiantly, in somerset somewhere I did write down their name and web address ...... but left it on a chair and wasn't able to find the name of the group again .

They did say they were going to put a report online but I don't know where

Simon Fairlie (was Somerset, now Dorset) wrote a long piece for The Land (The Land Is Ours) 3-4 years ago, entitled Can Britain Feed Itself? That may be who you're thinking of. Really worth reading.

Fairlie also has a new book out, about meat.

You can still download Simon's report (for free) here:

http://transitionculture.org/wp-content ... ritain.pdf

If you would like to subscribe to the magazine (and you should, it's bloody good!), the site is here: http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/

Fairlie's conclusion was that Britain can feed itself, but it will mean recyling everything, and growing much more food at micro-local level eg gardens. Quite optimistic I thought.

Cuba's problems mirrored the Soviet Union's supply problems. When transition occurs, a number of factors combine to cause shortages. Lack of a suitably flexible supply chain is one - the fSU had no experience of a modern supply chain with its means of tracking pallets, billing, recharging, different companies fulfilling different functions, ability to quickly move produce to the right market outlet etc. Lack of institutions to facilitate the supply chain is another - again, no real commercial banking sector in the fSU that could facilitate payments, extend loans, audit, make profit/loss analysis etc. Lack of equipment was another - fSU was famous for having produce rotting in the fields while students and soldiers tried to harvest it. My old economics professor called it "dis-organisation". There were products available, but no way of getting them to anything other than the most local of markets. For this reason, "shuttle" businesses became very popular - people who would travel to the factory, buy in bulk, and then sell in retail at train stations, metro stations, and local markets.

There were malign influences at work too. I have heard and read about hardline communists wrecking food supplies (easy enough when all the food is stored at an enormous complex supplying a town) in order to provoke public anger at the reforms.

The fSU's food suply system was over-centralised, too dependent on bureaucracy, didn't reflect true costs or market values, and had no resilience.

Our food supply system has similar faults - over-dependent on 5 big supermarkets, has little or no resilience, over-centralised within the supermarkets' supply chains i.e. dependent on a few mega-growers and a few mega-varieties. The population is largely de-skilled and feels entitled to an easy way of life. The next few years will be interesting indeed.

You can also download whole old back issues of The Land for free from http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/.

postie wrote:2 years later there was a huge improvement. many more cars

Ah yes, that kind of 'improvement'.

For a couple of years, Permaculture claimed to have saved Cuba from PO. It worked a treat until someone asked for some sort of case study, details, or anything to back up the assertion.

I think they're still saying that in "The Power of Community". It would be interesting to see some analysis.

woodpecker wrote:Simon Fairlie (was Somerset, now Dorset) wrote a long piece for The Land (The Land Is Ours) 3-4 years ago, entitled Can Britain Feed Itself? That may be who you're thinking of. Really worth reading.

Fairlie also has a new book out, about meat.

No it wasn't him this group were doing a county by country survey of the entire UK I think they may have had some state backing , they had a leaflet about who they were but I left it on a chair in the transition tin village hut .

Their provisional findings for their report were not that optimistic for england, although they thought wales and Scotland were in a better position.

They were looking for volunteers to help them I remember.

I think the group may have been somerset community food, or linked to them somehow ?
They have a thing called food mapper, which seems to be mapping where foods grown, but at the moment seems to be mainly active in somerset and the west country.
They don't have anything about the report .

And really this is the worrying thing, its the timing if we were serious as a country the government would be funding a report or have some clue whether we have enough land to support our population .

Waiting till the train hits you and then trying to repair yourself seems a pretty daft way to do things, when potentially there are 10s of millions of peoples lives at risk.

Does the UK have enough land to grow enough food, fiber, biofuels timber for its population, and have some for nature reserves .

jonny2mad wrote:I think the group may have been somerset community food, or linked to them somehow ?
They have a thing called food mapper, which seems to be mapping where foods grown, but at the moment seems to be mainly active in somerset and the west country.

This one?
http://www.somersetcommunityfood.org.uk/