Cuba: sustainability pioneer?

AuthorWiskind, Adam
PositionFROM READERS - Letter to the editor

In the fall of 2006, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Living Planet Report found that Cuba is the only country in the world which meets its criteria for sustainable development. Cuba alone, according to WWF, manages to achieve certain basic living standards without extracting resources in a way that exceeds nature's ability to renew them. How do we account for these findings and what can we learn from them?

WWF determines a country's sustainable development by comparing its rating on the United Nations' Human Development Index, a measure of human welfare (health, education, poverty, etc.) to its ecological footprint, as largely reflected in its per capita fossil fuel consumption. According to the WWF report, both China and India still have fairly small per capita ecological footprints but neither has achieved minimum development standards. Cuba has. The United States, as expected, is highly developed but with a rate of energy use and consumption eight times higher than the world's capacity to sustain it.

Some have attributed Cuba's sustain-ability success to efficient "socialist planning and distribution, in which there is no incentive to waste resources in pursuit of short-term profit; the only incentive is to plan for sustainable development and the stewardship of natural resources for future generations" (www.pslweb.org, January 2007). Good planning and distribution may play a role. However, Venezuela, also a socialist country but with a much larger ecological footprint because of its use of fossil fuels, has a lower development index than Cuba. So a socialist system may be compatible with sustainable development, but certainly doesn't guarantee it.

More critical to Cuba's sustainability status are the choices it has made in the face of the U.S. embargo. The embargo created a closed economic system in which U.S. trade and tourism were restricted and income to the local economy was bound to fall. The challenge this presented, together with the need to wean itself from cheap oil after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, threatened wholesale economic disruption and political instability. The government of Cuba was forced by its extreme situation to confront the reality of limited resources. It chose the less traveled path of sustainable development for its people. Cuba transformed itself into a more self-reliant, less energy-intensive society without abandoning its longstanding commitment to strong health and educational programs.

It's...

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