(A Comprehensive Agricultural Program for Puerto Rico, Nathan Koenig) which they claimed could be achieved for a population of three million-your present size?

GASKINS. The report was ignored by planners. The economic system works against food self-reliance. We cannot dream that we can change one sector without seeing changes in other sectors. Over 60 percent of all foodstuffs consumed on the island are imported and sold by Puebla and Grand Union supermarkets. As long as such conditions exist, we cannot possibly think that those particular interests which are so tied into U.S. agribusiness are going to relinquish their claim on the economy of the island.

Also, the system of subsidies works against food self-reliance. The most overwhelming subsidy that Puerto Rico receives is food stamps, which reaches 70 percent of all families on the island. This is a multibillion social welfare project and I've heard it described as the world's most dollar intensive welfare program. You cannot underestimate the effect of that type of direct transfer of dollars into PR. It is a subsidy which comes from all the taxpayers of the U.S. mainland (PR islanders do not pay federal income tax) to the PR householder allowing him to consume the products of North American corporations.

Food stamps help support U.S. farms, food middlemen and retail chains because 85 percent of all our foodstuffs are imported from the mainland U.S. But it also helps support U.S. manufactured goods, cars, color TV sets, etc. Remember, the small island of PR is one of the major consumers of U.S. goods-right behind England, Japan, U.K. and Canada. Many of the food stamps are cashed in at black market banks or otherwise used as cash.

The effect is similar to the tax exempt status given to most foreign corporations. The investments do not benefit PR and only result in repatriation of profits. Another type of subsidy given the large farmer also works against food selfreliance. On sugarlands, for example, the Roig family in the Humacao area, the largest landholders in that area on the southeast coast, are paid a subsidy by the Puerto Rican Sugar Corporation per acre under cultivation-not by the amount produced. This kind of subsidy has led to decreasing yields because the subsidy is paid to the family no matter what production figures are like. As the same time, fewer and fewer people are employed on the plantation because of decreasing yields and the implementation of mechanization. The cane equipment comes from Louisiana-even though superior equipment for our type of terrain is manufactured in East Germany which designed their technology originally for Cuba.

Sugar yields are now the lowest of any sugar-producing area of the world— down to nine percent yield. The government states it is losing $700 per acre per year under sugar. Because the government rents many of the lands that are in sugar, the policy supports foreign corporations too. The U.S. company, C. W. Brewer & Co., for example, which is a holding company in Hawaii of the Rockefeller family, does not lose any money because their land is rented to the government whether yields are high or not.

When it seems more profitable to withdraw the lands from agriculture, the private interests are free to do so. So hotels are built or housing units for the middle-class.

FM. How can the government continue to finance this debt?

GASKINS. New York banks, Chase Manhattan primarily, are the owners of Puerto Rico Government Bonds and they are putting pressure on the PR government to reduce the sugar debt because the servicing of it becomes a greater burden to PR each year.

The losses through this sugar debt are a large part of the annual $134 million Puerto Rican Department of Agriculture budget earmarked for "agricultural development." So the government has been following a de-sugarization policy. Many sugar mills have been closed and sold, literally piece by piece, to Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela.

Another subsidy that inhibits agricultural development is for cows. Over half of all PR farmland is devoted to the cow, both the dairy cow and the meat cow. It's painfully obvious that an island with 1,000 persons per square mile cannot devote so much of its land to cows if it wishes to pursue a policy of food selfreliance.

Cows are a way that a large land owner can say that he is producing agricultural products and pay less land taxes. If I own 500 acres on the outskirts of Caguas, I can put six cows out on it, and I don't have to pay land taxes or at least I receive a reduced rate. I can put out five cows, a hundred cows, any amount of cows, but I then qualify as an agricultural enterprise.

The dairy cow is subsidized in Puerto Rico, according to José Rasado, an economist at the Inter-American University of Puerto Rico, to the tune of $305 of public funds per cow per year. This is more than the cow is worth.

Big dairy owners in Puerto Rico also qualify for a labor subsidy plan where 60 percent of the wages of a dairy are paid for by the government. The farm economy is completely artificial and supports absentee landlords who maintain marginal operations. The rich have their subsidies while the poor have their food stamps.

FM. There is a new government agency, the Administracion de Fomento Desarrolo Agricola, whose charter, as its name indicates, is to promote and develop agriculture. How is it doing?

GASKINS. AFDA is an arm of the PR Department of Agriculture. It was created in 1977 with the New Progressive Party, the Pro-Statehood Party, in back of it. It is the powerhouse of the drive for modernizing-at-all-costs agriculture. With so much unemployment, often 60 percent in rural areas, it is inappropriate to talk about labor substitution by mechanization. Let me give you two cases.

In 1975 the government undertook an experimental rice project on the west coast and the north coast. It proved that rice can be grown economically in PR. But no rice has been grown since then because it's become a political football. One design on the drawing boards calls for an average production unit of 500 to 850 acres. Obviously, the small farmer in Puerto Rico will never be included in that scheme. It is designed for large vested interests with the ability to amass capital or to apply capital. The Bank of America has offered to provide part of the funds and the government appears interested.

But the model contemplated makes no sense in our situation. The California model talked about requires 12 man-hours per acre to prepare the soil, plant the rice, cultivate and harvest the rice and reprepare the soil. Whereas in Taiwan, labor-intensive methods require 1200 hours, China 1400 hours per acre and the rice yields are significantly higher and the quality greater. The present rice scheme as AFDA outlines it, would be producing a product identical to the California white rice, polished rice, talcum-powder added rice, that's presently being imported and represents 75 percent of our rice consumption.

The government has offered the California interests the milling of the rice in PR. This would eliminate any chance that our rice would be sold at a lower cost than presently imported California rice.

AFDA also has a vegetable project in Santa Isabel, where 5,000 acres were withdrawn from sugar production in 1977 and distributed to 17 farmers. One farmer has 64 acres, one has 1,015 acres. Most are large.

FM. Yes, the administrators of AFDA have told me that they intend to produce winter vegetables for the U.S. market-particularly crops they feel can compete with Mexico for the New York market.

GASKINS. Tomatoes have not been effective in competing. However, okra, winter cucumbers, peppers, are promising. For instance, 1,000 acres of cucumbers are now in production in the Santa Isabel area, yet only third-grade cucumbers are sold on the local market through the super-market chain. The first and secondgrade cucumbers are exported. The farm equipment and irrigation system of the former cane plantations are made available at subsidized rates to those farmers. But we, the small mountain farmers, don't receive such services.

We also now feel competition from those favored farmers for the traditional crops we grow in the hills. But the favored farmers receive technical assistance, marketing specialists, even a packing house which was built by the government. These are services no mountain village has seen.

We can't compete with their prices but for us it is a livelihood. For many of them, it is big business. Many are absentee owners who live in San Juan or Mayagüez and hire consulting firms from Florida to operate the farms. In fact, some of these consulting firms have farms of their own in the Santa Isabel project.

Production levels may have risen but it is certainly not encouraging a food self-reliance on the island.

The agribusiness model employed here is being criticized by more progressive persons at the Agricultural Sciences College in Mayagüez who charge that these companies do not have a vision of long-range soil fertility but only of short-term profit.

FM. What about the USDA?

GASKINS. The USDA uses PR as a guinea pig. Many USDA programs have just been U.S. AID subcontracts to the University of PR. Most of the research

which my union of small farmers in Carite has dug up on the development of the passion fruit for our area was originally conducted in PR, but it was never released here. It was applied in Brazil under an AID program, in Hawaii by R. J. Reynolds (who dominates the Hawaiian passion fruit for Hawaiian Punch, etc.). We don't benefit from research done on our lands.

Some USDA research, in fact, goes against us. For the spring wheat experiments the USDA imported diseases from the U.S. Their aim was to develop better resistant seed varieties for other areas. In the process those diseases were introduced to our environment and one wheat crop was contaminated.

FM. Is there hope for the smaller farmer, then?

GASKINS. The work cut out for us is to do just that, preserve the small farmer tradition, maintaining the wealth of knowledge about how to farm the mountains and plains with an appropriate technology. My neighbors and I will continue because we believe in these traditions and the future of this way of life. But the system is against us. It is designed to benefit others. Puerto Rico's small farmers could be her greatest asset. But we are ignored.

[Reprint from New York Times, Feb. 17, 1981]

PUERTO RICO'S AGRICULTURAL WOES REFLECT DANGERS OF RAPID GROWTH

(By Jo Thomas)

SAN JUAN, P.R.-West of the capital, past the sprawling suburbs, the interminable auto graveyards and an abandoned sugar mill, 5,000 acres of prime farmland lie idle, plowed under several years ago to make way for an ambitious government project to grow rice.

After years of false starts and $21 million in spending, a rice mill is in the final stages of construction, but only about 200 acres of rice are in cultivation. Under the most optimistic plans, it will take three years to bring 12,000 acres under cultivation so the mill can break even.

The difficulties encountered in the island's efforts to grow rice, a staple now imported at a rate of 380 million pounds a year, illustrate much about what has gone wrong with Puerto Rican agriculture in recent years and the damage that can be done to a people in trying to move too quickly toward an industrial society. Farm jobs were abandoned, but the new industrial growth could not provide enough work quickly enough to replace them and keep up with the population growth. Nor could wages keep up, and the food stamps that were meant to help the Puerto Rican poor have helped also to destroy agriculture production in an economic cycle the nation has been unable to halt.

SUGAR YIELDS FELL

"We might serve as a horrible example to any underdeveloped country that wants to move too quickly," observed José Vicente-Chandler, an agronomist who is author of the current administration's plan for modern agriculture.

The vehicle for movement was Operation Bootstrap, an economic development plan in the 1950's and 1960's that succeeded in expanding industry and giving Puerto Ricans one of the highest standards of living in the Caribbean.

But as the condominiums and hotels and shoe factories and pharmaceutical plants went up, the tobacco crop virtually disappeared, vegetable production plunged and bananas and citrus fruits were left to grow wild on semi-abandoned coffee plantations that produced some of the lowest yields in the world.

Farmland disappeared at a rate of 4,000 acres a year, dropping in 25 years from 90 percent of the island to less than 60 percent.

Sugar cane fields yielded half as much per acre as they had 25 years earlier, and the State Sugar Corporation, set up in 1973 and now the owner of 62 percent of the sugar land and seven mills, ran up a debt of $450 million that has been passed on to consumers as a tax of seven cents a pound on sugar.

Moreover, as workers left the island's plantations and small subsistence farms for jobs in factories, hotels and construction projects, the agricultural work force shrank to 4.8 last year from 36 percent in 1950. On the mainland, the agricultural work force dropped from 12.2 percent to 3.4 percent in the same period.

Puerto Rico, which has good soil, abundant water and two growing seasons, no longer cares to farm. Each year it imports $1.2 billion in food from the United States at prices that are higher than on the mainland, and 62 percent of all fam

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ilies here will pay their share of that bill with food stamps, part of the $3.3 billion in United States transfer payments that keep the island's economy afloat.

"People look at farming as something no intellectual person would do-it's O.K. for my dumb cousin," said Mr. Vicente-Chandler.

COMPETITION ON TWO FRONTS

Only the local livestock and dairy industries, which depend on imported feeds, have thrived.

Because of their ties to the United States, Puerto Rican farmers have been caught in a bind in the competition for both local and export markets.

The purchasing power of food stamps has increased the popularity of supermarkets. Local farmers have to compete in quality, reliability and price with hightechnology, high-volume farming on the mainland, as well as with the occasional but ruinous dumping of agricultural products here by the United States.

Local growers must also compete in pricing with foreign producers who keep costs down by paying subsistence wages. Field workers in Puerto Rico receive the United States minimum wage and double time for overtime.

RICE PROJECT WAS TO TURN TIDE

The rice project was originally conceived as a highly mechanized undertaking for high-yield, low-cost production which, without shipping costs, could compete successfully with outsiders.

A four-year study by a team headed by Mr. Vicente-Chandler at the University of Puerto Rico Agricultural Experimental Station showed that the island could get rice yields as high as on the mainland, at least two crops a year and, by saving three cents a pound on shipping, could easily compete with the mainland.

In 1973 Ruben Berrios Martinez, leader of the Puerto Rican Independence Party and then a member of the Commonwealth's Senate, introduced a bill to study rice growing on a commercial scale, and it was passed. A total of $600,000 was spent. Some went to Texas A & M University to review the Puerto Rican study. Some went into studies which showed that Puerto Rican shoppers would accept the island's rice. The rest went into planting 135 acres and setting up a small Japanese rice mill.

Salt water got into the fields, herbicides and pesticides were poorly used, the mill was inadequate and yields were about half what Mr. Vicente-Chandler's group had produced. In 1976 the project was abandoned.

With the election that year of Gov. Carlos Romero Barcelo and his New Progressive Party, the rice project was revived under the government's Agriculture Development Corporation.

SERIES OF FALSE STARTS

Puerto Rico has 50,000 acres in humid coastal valleys that have water for irrigation. Initially the corporation decided to develop 16,000 acres that, when ready for commercial production, would be turned over to farmers who could underwrite a farm of 250 to 500 acres and learn and apply high-technology farming methods.

After a series of false starts, the government negotiated an agreement under which Comet Rice, a subsidiary of Early California Industries Inc. of Houston, agreed to build and operate a mill in Puerto Rico. Meanwhile, the government signed up 16 farmers willing to rent government land and a Mississippi engineering concern to get the land ready at a cost first believed to be $500 an acre and now believed closer to $1,500 an acre.

A dispute arose over whether the land should be contoured, as it is in southern rice-growing states, or leveled, as it is in California, a method that produces higher yields but is more expensive. The government wanted the land leveled. The Mississippi concern left.

"We wanted to assure the maximum production," said Antonio Velez Ramos, Under Secretary of Agriculture. "Also the land belonged to the government-we wanted to make it perfect initially."

WATER RAN OUT OF FIELD

Two hurricanes struck the island, destroying the first seed farm. A record 126 inches of rain (the average is 60 inches) bogged down heavy equipment. Outside experts, brought in by Comet Rice, which was anxious to have rice to put in the

mill it was constructing, used computers, laser equipment and local engineering firms to level the land. But the slope was wrong, and when the first field was planted, the water quickly ran out.

"If a person waits until everything's perfect, he never gets started," said Mickey Such, 42 years old, a former entertainer, singer, candlemaker and farmer who put up $16,000 of his own money, took out a $100,000 loan, rented 326 acres and became the first farmer on the project.

"Everyone underestimated the size of the project," said Jack M. Swagerty, a consultant who was brought into save Mr. Such's first field and has taken over efforts to get the other rice fields ready.

He has declared some $1 million in equipment now parked near Mr. Such's fields "inadequate" and has ordered $6.5 million in new equipment to level land and another $1.2 million in farming equipment. So far, it has not arrived.

The rice mill, near Arecibo, which will now cost about $15 million, is to be finished in July. There will be very little rice to put in it. For that reason, the Farmers Home Administration, which initially agreed to guarantee up to 90 percent of the financing through the Government Development Bank, has been having second thoughts.

Meanwhile, farmers are still waiting for land, and Mr. Such is among those who believe it will be a profitable venture.

"Right now we could produce 80 percent of the rice we'd consume," said Mr. Such, who contended that "the most important thing a man can do is raise food."

PUERTO RICO FACT SHEET: HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

(By O. Lamourt Valentin)

The Island known today as Puerto Rico first came to be known to the Western world as "Caniba" or "Cariba". The inhabitants of the island, however, refer to it as Boriquen and call themselves "Boricuas" and "Jibaro"-the modern descendants of the people called by Christopher Columbus, "Canibaro" (this word entered European parlance as "cannibal" after his sighting of the island in 1493). Historically, in English, Puerto Rico was known as "Caribee Island". In general the whole area became known as the Caribbean and its native peoples, Caribs.

Up to that time and Columbus himself gives testimony to this-these people and those of Hispanola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) as well as those of eastern Cuba, engaged in a commerce with the surrounding islands (the West Indies and the Bahamas) which trafficked in cotton, thread, cordage and dye products among other things.

The existence of this trade implies that such an industry existed on what, by any standards, would be called practically "desert island" (for example in the Bahamas). People lived and prospered by growing non-edible commodities which they exchanged with the people of the larger islands, which grew a surplus of foods or elaborated commodities, products of complex methods of processing or manufacture.

The Europeans, on their arrival, appreciated the implications of these trading interests and, naturally, wanted to take possession of them. The Europeans fell upon the local commerce in such a way as to destroy it, and with the loss of the maritime supremacy of the local traders, this way of life and civilization which it nourished naturally fell apart. Historically it is well known that this was done by gist of outright piracy and brute aggression.

The Europeans, whose economic thinking was limited to their own experience, thought that the native peoples used gold as a standard of value, such as the Europeans used in their currency. Believing this, they seized upon gold in order to control the way of life, whereas it merely transformed itself. Thinking that people represented the standard of value then, they branded the people so that they could count them, those that belonged to one or another. But they had transformed themselves again, having fought the Europeans in the War of 1511, which taught the Spanish that it was better to leave the people alone.

Having irremedially antagonized the population, the Spanish colony in Puerto Rico became a small enclave, with no means of exercising any form of competence in a poliitcal, economic or social sense among the people it purportedly ruled over. For the next 357 years, its history can only speak for itself, since throughout that period its efforts were directed at conquering the remainder of the island and the population. Each region essentially would work out-with more or less success-its relations to the city behind the walls and fortresses of its castle.