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Sustainable Urban Agriculture in Cuba . By S. Koont. Gainsville, Fl, USA: University Press of Florida (2011), pp. 236, £64.28. ISBN 978-0-8130-3757-8.

This book’s nine chapters capture the environment of this complex political agro-economy: Historical background and key concepts; The nature and organisation of Cuban agriculture; Foundations in education, research and development; Restructuring worker training, preparatory education and material inputs for urban agriculture; Creating material and moral incentives to motivate workers; Technological innovation in urban agriculture: examples from protected and semi-protected cultivation; Case studies of urban agriculture; Evaluating the success of Cuban urban agriculture; Looking to the future of urban and sustainable agriculture: Cuba and Worldwide. A selection of photographs indicates some of the physical and biological diversity of the wholly organic systems that have emerged from small home gardens (patios) through parcels of land to larger, collectively or state-managed units. The author meticulously sets out the very special political, economic, institutional and social conditions that enabled Cuba to survive the ‘Special Period’ following the sudden ending of Soviet Union support and the previous period of external food import dependency. The country has created an alternative food and farming paradigm that has many important lessons for the rest of the world as more and more countries begin to realise that current systems of globalised, multinational company-dominated corporate food and farming systems are not sustainable. The key elements of this success can be summarised as: education of all stakeholders, a strongly scientific research and development capacity which evolved over many years, cooperative networking by government institutions, the organisational structure of urban agriculture, training systems in new, employment generating technologies, a network for organic input provision, decentralised production units and moral and material incentive structures that generated enthusiasm among many dispersed producer–workers. The book deserves careful reading and consideration by producers, educators and policymakers.