Cuba will carry out free-market policies in its second largest island, as a test, in a bid to increase national food production, official media reported Wednesday.

The choice of the Isle of Youth in May would make it easier for the government to control and track the experiment of the new policies, which will deregulate the farming business so as to increase productivity. The project is expected to begin in January 2014.

"The main problem of limited food production in Cuba is lack of inputs and how they are distributed, and that is what this project aims to change," state-run daily Juventud Rebelde quoted Vice President Marino Murillo as saying.

Official figures released earlier this month showed Cuba imported about 80 percent of its food last year, at a cost of more than 1.9 billion US dollars.

Murillo, who heads the Comprehensive Development Plan, said Cuba could save millions of dollars for food imports annually if large tracts of land were more efficiently exploited.

The Agriculture Ministry is currently working to develop the methodology to be applied in the district, and ways to overcome local drawbacks such as limited shipping and storage capacity.

Thanks to the economic reforms launched in July 2008, as much as 70 percent of the country's agricultural land is operated by cooperatives and farmers who lease the land from the government.

The government has distributed 523 billion hectares of idle land to more than 174,000 local farmers. The figure is expect to rise in the coming months.