CONTRIBUCIÓN AL PERFECCIONAMIENTO DE LOS SERVICIOS TÉCNICOS DE APOYO A LA AGRICULTURA A ESCALA MUNICIPAL Some contribution to improve technical services for supporting agriculture at a municipal level

The European socialist block collapse in the early 90's provoked a deep crisis in Cuban food system. In response to this difficult situation, a diversified agriculture emerged, replacing chemical inputs by biological ones, that is, a more intensive agriculture using local resources and the simultaneous application of scientific as well as traditional knowledge, which was officially supported by the definition of some measures, such as decentralizing productive structures and strengthening technical services to achieve a sustainable agriculture, starting from the fact that it is not enough for farmers to know and want to assume a new agricultural management, but also it requires to have skilled technicians and encouraged decision makers, who are able to provide them technical assistance with an available set of technical services for strengthening and sustaining the advance from an input agriculture to a processing agriculture. Therefore, this paper shows the results of a work performed in five municipalities participating in the aforementioned project entitled "agroecological joint: a design of sustainable choices for local food security" (Bejucal from Mayabeque province, Cienfuegos, Ciego de Avila, Camaguey and Las Tunas provinces), with the aim of knowing to what extent farmers are satisfied with currently available scientific-technical services, as a starting point towards redesigning them at a municipal level, to meet the needs of inputs, resources and technical assistance at the productive base. The main goal of this system is to succeed in joining local technical services with part of farmers' own demands and that the productive model to be extended should have the premise of a sustainable agriculture on agroecological bases; thus, three services prioritized by participants (seed-producing farms, territorial laboratory of soil preservation and management, municipal fruit and forest nurseries) were selected as well as some units with the social aim of providing technical services for pest control, like Plant Protection Stations, Entomophage and Entomopathogen Reproduction Centers and Farmer's Shops for agricultural input purchase in each municipality.