More Cuban farmland goes in private hands

The government will make new land grants for 10 years, which can be renewed. Government agencies and cooperatives also may get 25-year grants. The grants cannot be transferred or sold to third parties. “For various reasons there is a considerable percentage of state land sitting vacant, so it must be handed over to individuals or groups as owners or users, in an effort to increase production of food and reduce imports,” the decree reads. Officials say the fallow land is as much as half the country’s farmland, despite food needs of the population of more than 11 million and of the tourism industry, a major hard-currency earner for the Americas’ only one-party communist regime.

Raul Castro has told Cubans food production is a national security priority.

He recently told lawmakers that “all forms of property and production can coexist in harmony as none is in opposition to socialism.” Last week the president told Cubans to expect hard times from the effects of the international economic crisis, including greater government control of revenues and more work especially in the farming sector.

“It’s my duty to speak frankly, because it would be unethical to create false expectations.

 To tell you otherwise would be misleading,” Castro said in a televised speech at the close of the first regular National Assembly session.

“We can’t avoid some impact on certain (basic) products and services,” he said, explaining that the same amount of food Cuba imported in 2007 will cost an additional 1.1 billion dollars this year.

Castro called on Cubans to increase farming activities. “In other words: we must go back to the land! We have to make it work!”