From Hanoi to Havana: Cuba turns to Vietnamese expertise to tackle food shortages and attract investment

Malay Mail

2 days ago

LOS PALACIOS (Cuba), Aug 17 — Outside Havana, a combine belonging to a private Vietnamese company is harvesting rice, directly farming Cuban land — in a first — to help address acute food shortages in the country.
The Cuban government has granted Agri VAM, a subsidiary of Vietnam's Fujinuco Group, 1,000 hectares of arable land in Los Palacios, 118 kilometres west of the capital.
Vietnam has advised Cuba on rice cultivation in the past but this is the first time a private firm has done the farming itself.
The government approved the move after a 52 per cent plunge in overall agricultural production between 2018 and 2023, according to data from the Centre for the Study of the Cuban Economy at the University of Havana.
The rice numbers are even worse. Total rice production dropped from 300,000 tons in 2018 to 55,000 tons in 2021, in the depths of the Covid pandemic. The number is slowly recovering, authorities say.
Rice is a staple of the local diet, with Cubans consuming 60 kilos of rice per person per year.
A Vietnamese specialist checks the quality of grains during the mechanized harvesting at a Vietnamese rice field in Los Palacios, Pinar del Rio province, Cuba May 29, 2025. The national average rice yield is 1.6 tonnes per hectare, and the first fields harvested within this plan had a yield exceeding six tonnes per hectare. — AFP pic
Promising yields and daunting obstacles
During a media visit to its rice fields in May, an Agri VAM representative said the harvest yield to date is seven tons per hectare, 'but we want more.'
That number dwarfs the ton and a half yield-per-hectare of Cuban growers.
Vietnam experienced the kind of food shortages that Cuba is going through now, in the 1980s. Today, the South-east Asian country is the world's third exporter of rice and a valued consultant to other rice-growing nations.
'The climate and the temperature are very good for agriculture,' but Cuban growers lack necessary farming products such as fertilisers, the Agri VAM representative told reporters.
Though Agri VAM can import some materials, it faces other obstacles such as fuel shortages, transportation problems and frozen assets, Cuban economist Omar Everleny Perez and other sources with knowledge of the situation told AFP.
Agri VAM and other foreign firms in Cuba may be making profits but 'they cannot transfer them abroad because the banks have no liquidity, no foreign currency,' Perez said.
An independent Cuban media outlet, 14ymedio, recently published excerpts of a letter dated in May, in which Agri VAM asked the Cuban government to unfreeze US$300,000 (RM1.2 million) in its account at state-owned International Financing Bank.
Vietnam's state press in May quoted deputy agriculture minister Nguyen Quoc Tri asking the government in Havana 'to eliminate investment barriers that Vietnamese companies encounter.'
AFP contacted Agri VAM and Cuban officials but got no response.
A truck unloads Vietnamese rice in an industrial dryer, in Los Palacios, Pinar del Rio province, Cuba May 29, 2025. — AFP pic
Foreign investment: Badly needed
Cuba is mired in an acute economic crisis and desperately in need of foreign investment. Vietnam and other allies have shown interest.
In July, Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz announced that Havana was taking measures 'to energise foreign investment' as he authorised 'wholly foreign-owned companies' in the hotel sector.
After three years of promises, Russia's deputy prime minister Dmitry Chernyshenko announced in May that Russian businesses want to invest US$1 billion in Cuba. Moscow will give them preferential financing rates, he said.
But he cautioned that there is 'still hard work to be done' and said it is 'impossible to achieve things immediately, as if by magic.' — AFP