Food prices in Cuba shot up by nearly 20 percent last year as the cash-strapped government cut subsidies and imports and agricultural reforms failed to crank up domestic production, according to a new government report.

The report by the National Statistics Office reflects Cubans’ long-running complaints that while some food items have been appearing with more frequency in stores, the prices have been so high that few can afford them.

Cuban leader Raúl Castro, trying to reform the stagnant Soviet-style economy, has put heavy emphasis on the need to increase agricultural production by leasing fallow state lands to private farmers and allowing them more freedom to grow and sell their products.

But the report, titled Sales on the Farm Market, showed that produce prices soared by 24.1 percent during 2011 and meat prices rose by 8.7 percent for an average increase of 19.8, Reuters news agency reported.

Reuters added that although the reforms could increase agricultural production down the road, output increased just 2 percent last year and fell 2.5 percent in 2010. Overall agricultural production in 2011 remained below the levels of 2005.

Dissident Havana economist Martha Beatriz Roque said the government figures reflect “stagflation” — stagnant productivity coupled with inflation — and the failures of Castro’s efforts at agricultural reforms since he replaced brother Fidel Castro in 2006.

Midway through last year, the newspaper Juventud Rebelde reported that overall food prices had risen by 7.8 per cent, compared to the first six months of 2010, while food sales had dropped by 6 percent in the same period.

Castro has been pushing hard to increase domestic food production so that he can slash state spending on food subsidies and imports in an island that in 2010 paid $1.5 billion to import an estimated 60 to 80 percent of the products it consumed.

Imports from U.S. farmers, for instance, dropped from $710 million in 2008 to $366 million in 2010. And several items were removed from the ration card, which once provided basic goods at highly subsidized prices. Now those items are available only at much higher prices usually set by the laws of supply and demand.

Castro also leased 3.4 million acres of fallow state lands to 170,000 private farmers, who produce much more efficiently than state-owned farms. Farmers now can sell directly to consumers and tourist centers, getting better prices.

Yet nearly 2 million acres remain fallow and farmers have complained regularly about the state’s failure to deliver promised supplies such as gasoline and fertilizers as well as difficulties in transporting their products to market and getting paid on a timely basis.

Roque said she was not surprised by the official figures because Cubans felt the increases throughout 2011. A pound of pork that cost 30 pesos in the summer, and perhaps 35 pesos during the end-of-year holidays, now costs about 45 pesos, she said.

Officially, the average wage in Cuba stands at about 475 pesos per month — roughly $20 — although many of the island’s 11.2 million people receive cash remittances from abroad, and many have under-the-table businesses that give them unrecorded incomes.

Roque and former political prisoner Arnaldo Ramos Lauzurique issued a detailed report on the ration card last month, saying food provided by the ration card lasts about 13 to 14 days for the average family. After that, the family must spend the last of its income buying food on the open markets that will last only another seven or eight days.

“By the 30th or 31st day of the month these people have spent several days without anything to eat,” Roque told El Nuevo Herald by phone from Havana.