Cuba Looks to Revert Soil Degradation Process

Havana, Sep 17 (Prensa Latina) Cuba develops a comprehensive program of soil conservation and improvement, in order to revert the degradation process of this natural resource, indispensable for food production, said today a sector's source.

In conversation with Prensa Latina, the director of Soils and Fertilizers of the Ministry of Agriculture (Minag) Dagoberto Rodríguez, detailed that is the objective, but from a comprehensive conception in a sustainable agriculture, capable of producing food crops and thus respond to the demand of the population.

The soils of Cuba, well studied and characterized, suffer a degradation process since the discovery of the island by the Spanish, and which tends to increase because the country is subject to extreme events.

He explained that soils are very susceptible to erosion, affecting 70 percent of the farmland, besides the fact that low fertility prevails in this resource of the archipelago.

This situation and the climate determined that in 2000 a program of conservation, protection and improvement of soils is established, including actions with those purposes.

The tendency to salinity of the soil and bad management of water provoked that one million hectares are salinized.

For the last seven years we have been applying a new platform for conservation: soil poligons, water and forest, based on a comprehensive vision of sustainable management of the land.

It includes concrete actions of training and others to protect the war and forests, and face in an integrated way all the factors related to degradation of that natural resource.

In this regard, Rodriguez highlighted that conservation agriculture is a technology adopted for being friendly to the environment, protectionist of the soil by nature, while having in mind its principles like covering of the soil with organic matter, defends this resource from the impact of rainfall.

We have the task to stop and revert the degradation process, through all conservation practices that allow for high productive yields without degradation the soil. We search for the natural dynamic of soil formation to exceed the loss of this resource, he resumed.