Preparations for the sixth congress of Cuba’s ruling Communist Party (PCC), to be held in late 2009, may speed up the structural changes promised by President Raul Castro and pave the way for a development strategy more suited to present conditions, experts say.
Economists consulted by Ipsnews.net say that the Economic Resolution of the Fifth PCC Congress, held in 1997, has been overtaken by events and no longer reflects reality.

Cuba must advance towards a development strategy that includes a wide range of simultaneous measures, from monetary policy to those directly related to industrial and agricultural production.

Each party congress is meant to reflect on the previous five years and decide guidelines for the next five-year period.
The sixth congress, due in 2002, had been postponed.
Omar Everleny Perez Villanueva, the deputy director of the Centre for the Study of the Cuban Economy (CEEC) at the University of Havana, said one example of change in the Cuban economy is that the country now earns sizeable revenues from professional medical services, which was not the case in the late 1990s.
According to statistics, sales of medical services generate between five and six billion dollars a year, which is used to finance strategic imports such as fuel and foods, or to buy equipment and medical technology for the National Health Service.
CEEC researchers say that in the last few years, the economy has developed in an improvised fashion in response to urgent problems, like the energy crisis in 2004, which forced a change of energy policy towards savings, greater efficiency and use of renewable sources.
According to Perez Villanueva, Cuba must stop going from crisis to crisis, with solutions thought up on the spur of the moment, and advance towards a development strategy that includes a wide range of simultaneous measures, from monetary policy to those directly related to industrial and agricultural production.
“We need a program, a set of guidelines that defines where we are going and marks the stages, and that sets out the tasks involved in building socialism,“ said economist and CEEC researcher Armando Nova, who pointed out that Cuba has had to work under the pressure of the US embargo for over four decades.
Nova agrees with Perez Villanueva and other academics that, among other things, “productive forces need to be freed up,“ with clear rules.
The market needs to expand to provide incentives for production and work, and excessive centralization and financial and productive restrictions on businesses should be eliminated, he added.
One of the measures being implemented that could lead to structural changes in agriculture is, in fact, the creation of shops where small farmers can buy what they need directly, instead of having to use the centralized distribution system that existed before, Nova said.
According to CEEC studies, it is a good move to begin with measures in agriculture because of the multiplier effect the sector has on the economy as a whole.
Among the essential changes advocated by the experts are the decentralization of planning and the creation of an environment that stimulates production.
The current plans to distribute more land to farmers are important, the experts say, but they stress that land reform must go hand-in-hand with markets, credit and an attractive rate of exchange.
The authorities are considering granting farmers land, without title, because it is estimated that about 50 percent of the cultivable land on the island is lying fallow. According to Nova, 200,000 hectares have been granted on those conditions since the 1990s.
In general, the beneficiaries were private small farmers engaged in family farming, and agricultural cooperatives.
The government is prioritizing changes in the agricultural sector, and regards increased food production as a matter of national security. Specialized media have said that the restructuring process being carried out now is to be completed by the middle of this year.

World leaders looking for ways to ease global food shortages may have found one answer in warehouses dotted around Japan where a rice mountain is standing idle. The United States is considering relaxing a trade agreement between the world’s two largest economies to allow Japan to sell imported US rice on the global market, AP reported.
Tokyo is already preparing to ship 200,000 tons to the Philippines, but that is just a fraction of the 1.5 million tons of imported foreign rice that is stored in sacks piled high in airconditioned government warehouses.“We have a big stockpile of Japanese rice, so we can export rice for poor people worldwide to save their lives in an emergency,“ said Nobuhiro Suzuki, an agriculture professor at Tokyo University.
Rice, a staple food for the Japanese, was scarce following the end of World War Two but as agricultural advances boosted global harvests, Japan erected barriers to protect its farmers.
Under pressure from heavyweight trading partners, Tokyo agreed in the early 1990s to open the door to a minimum amount of imports, and now accepts 770,000 tons of foreign rice every year.

The United States is already in a recession and it will be longer as well as deeper than many people expect, US investor Warren Buffett was quoted by TradeArabia as saying.
He said in an interview the US was already in recession and added, “Perhaps not in the sense that economists would define it’ with two consecutive quarters of negative growth.“ But the people are already feeling the effects, said Buffett, the world’s richest man. “It will be deeper and last longer than many think.“
But he said that won’t stop him from investing in selected companies and said he remained interested in well-managed German family-owned companies.
“If the world were falling apart I’d still invest in companies,“ he said.
Buffett also renewed his criticism of derivatives trading. “It’s not right that hundreds of thousands of jobs are being eliminated, that entire industrial sectors in the real economy are being wiped out by financial bets even though the sectors are actually in good health.“

European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet said the shocks to Europe’s economy from financial market turmoil and rising food and commodity prices aren’t over, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Europe is facing a protracted period of high inflation rates, the newspaper quoted Trichet as saying. Trichet also said the ECB would deliver price stability in the medium term, the newspaper said.
The ECB has refrained from following the US Federal Reserve and Bank of England in lowering interest rates to shore up growth after an increase in borrowing costs. While euro-region inflation slowed to 3.3 percent in April from a 16-year high of 3.6 percent in March, it’s still above the ECB’s 2 percent limit.
Trichet also called for a single European market for financial services in order to optimize the central bank’s policy instruments and to improve the cohesion of European monetary union, the newspaper reported.
Trichet pointed to a recent survey in which forecasters predicted euro-area inflation would be 1.9 percent in five years.

Spanish airlines are facing growing pressure on their domestic routes from the expansion of the country’s high-speed railway network, which the government says will be the world’s most extensive by 2010.
State-owned railway operator Renfe opened a bullet train service between Madrid and Malaga on the Mediterranean coast in December and between the Spanish capital and Barcelona, Spain’s second-largest city, two months later, AFP wrote.
“We have the largest amount of high-speed rail under construction, with five times more than the next country, Japan, and in just two years we will have the most kilometers of high-speed in operation,“ Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa de la Vega said.
The government plans to have 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) of high-speed railway track in place by 2020, meaning 90 percent of Spain’s population will live less than 50 kilometers from a bullet train station.