An old agreement to supply GB seed potatoes to Castro's Cuba has been revisited after delegates recently signed off a deal during negotiations in Scotland. At www.freshfruitportal.com we speak with the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) Potato Council's head of seed and export, Robert Burns, to find out more.

The new and improved agreement between Scotland and the communist island marks the beginning of a resurgence into the Caribbean market, according to Burns who works in partnership with the Scottish government, Science and Advice for Scottish Agriculture (SASA) and the Potato Council to boost export opportunities.

Burns was in the Cuban capital Havana earlier this year to kick-start talks, and last month the Cuban delegation - consisting of plant health and agricultural officials - visited the U.K. to ink the deal as part of a wider Cuban government pledge to prioritize food security.

"It's a joint venture with the Scottish government; this is what we do, we work together with the government to open new markets," Burns tells www.freshfruitportal.com.

"We used to have a very good market with Cuba a number of years ago and it dried up and the agreement with them lapsed unfortunately. The reason why they (Cubans) wanted to go through the whole arrangement again was to ensure that we could negotiate a better agreement and that is exactly what we have done.

"We sat down around the table to sort out the details of the imports and requirements, printed them off in both English and Spanish and signed them that day."

Later this year between eight to ten varieties will be dispatched for trials in Cuba.

"We will have to see how these trials go. The agreement is based on the Scottish minimum tolerance plus a few extra bits to do with various organisms, which were not included before.

"One thing that we did manage to put in our agreement was a field tolerance for blackleg disease which was not there before and this will help our exporters quite a lot.

"Now that it has been signed off it is open ended deal. It is now in place, although it’s still subject to plant health documents and so on. We are all very excited and happy to have made a success of this."

Cuba pushing for better food security

The ailing Cuban economy has led to several governmental reforms over recent years with some relaxing on historic prohibitions such as trade and travel embargos, and restrictions in the use of state-owned agricultural land and the cultivation and selling of fresh produce.

Simultaneously, President Raúl Castro has pledged to do more to combat poverty and improve the food supply chain in general. In addition, the country is looking at reducing its food imports and becoming more self-sufficient in the longer term.

"Cuba had an import replacement policy to try to drive their foreign exchange requirements and they tried to produce some Cuban varieties but they didn’t work out that well which is why they are now coming back to European markets," Burns adds.

"I gave a presentation to the ministry of agriculture officials where I explained the Egyptian model of importing high quality seed, multiplying it once and then multiplying it a second time for a domestic supply chain.

"This seemed attractive to them because obviously you are getting two crops out of it which more than pays for itself. So they seemed to like this idea and I think this is the model they will probably use."

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