In the globalized world, trade is good. Through trade, a country can provide some basic commodities to the public, like sugar or petroleum, which it would not produce itself. Demand for certain agricultural products, and the trend toward the production of cash crops to raise a country's profits on exports, has led to highly efficient ways of producing food all around the globe. A country can't feed its people without synthetic farm chemicals. We need the efficiency of large-scale corporate or state farms in order to produce enough food.
International food is the answer to food shortages.
Their successes in promoting self-reliant organic farming offer a new model for food security and production that dispels the above truths. In the early 1980s Cuba was deeply committed to cash crop production. The USSR gave Cuba extremely favorable terms of trade for sugar. In 1989 this incentive inspired Cuba to devote three times as much of its land to sugar production as was used to produce food crops. This contributed to a pattern of food dependency, with imports accounting for as much as 57 percent of the total calories in the Cuban diet.