Cuba's top leader Raul Castro urged the nation's top agricultural producers to increase fruit production and eliminate the need for expensive imports, local media reported Wednesday.

Presiding over the closing of the 3rd National Meeting of Fruit Cooperatives, held in the town of Bejucal, south of Havana, Castro told farmers to work together with related sectors and pool their knowledge and technology to boost production.

For their part, the farmers stressed the difficulty of producing all the fruit demanded by the population to limit imports.

The tiny island nation imports about 60 percent of its food needs, annually spending 1.5 billion U.S. dollars to 2 billion U.S. dollars, a figure that might increase due to rising agricultural prices worldwide.

Over the past four years, the government has promoted a national program to increase agricultural output by, among other measures, putting a million hectares of idle state-owned lands to work in the hands of thousands of farmers, reducing bureaucratic procedures and granting credits to producers to purchase seeds, machinery and other materials.