Last year, Cuba spent over $1.6bn£1bnbn) on food imports, an unsustainable amount for an economy that has been struggling since the end of the cold war and the collapse of its trading partner, the Soviet Union, through which it also lost 80% of its pesticide and fertiliser imports.
Finally, the music stops, as it has now, as both debt and import levels become unsustainable.
This is counter-productive as it will create something unsustainable and we are already importing both from abroad.
Yet leading economists point out that the current level of imports would become unsustainable if oil were to drop to $75.
Britons buy 60,000 tonnes of barbecue charcoal a year, 95% of which is imported mostly from unsustainable sources such as tropical forests and cleared mangrove swamps.
Without these steps, L.A. County's reliance on 58% imported water is unsustainable.
In place of unsustainable borrowing to fuel consumption of imported goods, they would like to sell more goods and services to those countries.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who took office in December, says nuclear power remains essential, even with a surge in generation capacity from solar, wind and other renewable sources, and that the mounting costs from importing gas and oil are unsustainable.
The European Union has moved to restrict imports of palm oil grown in unsustainable ways.
Money is needed to patch the fiscal hole burned by an unsustainable energy policy: power plants that run on imported fuel oil.
