This story was initially revealed by The nineteenth and is reproduced right here with permission.
Sommer Sibilly-Brown didn’t got down to be a part of the meals sovereignty motion. The motion discovered her.
In 2012, Sibilly-Brown was working as an elementary college trainer in St. Croix, a part of the U.S. Virgin Islands, when her college students introduced an thought at an agriculture truthful to carry regionally grown meals to their colleges.
Via engaged on their presentation, the scholars discovered of a nationwide initiative that might do exactly that. It’s referred to as the Nationwide Farm to College Community, and it’s a nonprofit group that works to attach native farms with college cafeterias — a mannequin that each bolsters native meals methods and gives more healthy college lunches for youths — a win-win for farmers and their communities.
However the community didn’t attain the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Sibilly-Brown remembers one among her college students asking: If this system was nationwide, why didn’t it attain their territory?
“That query has been the query that has pushed my work,” Sibilly-Brown mentioned. “If we’re america, why not right here?”
It set her on a path to seek out solutions and options to an essential drawback — an over-reliance on imported meals. She wished her college students to have the ability to eat meals grown close by and for the U.S. Virgin Islands to attain a stage of meals sovereignty, or the power to provide wholesome and culturally related meals on the islands.
Sibilly-Brown is just not alone in her need to see native meals methods develop. Throughout U.S. island territories, girls are forming connections with each other and dealing to make sure that their communities might be resilient within the face of local weather change and future pandemics.
In Guam, one of many few locations the place matrilineal traditions nonetheless run robust, girls are empowered to make the choices that lead their communities and their houses. And in Puerto Rico, girls have been on the forefront of the community-building points of the native meals system.
The identical is true of the Virgin Islands, the place Sibilly-Brown mentioned she principally encounters girls within the meals methods work she’s been doing. “I completely assume this can be a girls’s motion,” she mentioned.
“It comes from issues as non secular and inherent as childbearing the place that seed turns into a child, Or making one thing out of nothing within the kitchen that’s scrumptious for our households,” she mentioned. “We harness the ability of transformation actually, rather well, and I see it every day inside the meals system.”
Whereas these territories are technically part of america, Sibilly-Brown says it’s extra correct to think about them as possessions. They share a selected form of invisibility, considered as strategic navy areas and trip locations, however neglected in the case of supporting their native economies.
That is notably true within the context of meals and sustainability. Presently, the U.S. Virgin Islands imports between 95 and 99 p.c of its meals from the U.S. and different nations. Different island territories have equally excessive charges, with Guam at round 90 p.c and Puerto Rico at 85 p.c.
Rising the native meals system is a method by which territories can deal with vulnerabilities attributable to importing meals. Local weather change has fueled extra intense hurricane seasons, which have an effect on transport; supply-chain points attributable to the pandemic confirmed the necessity to have extra native manufacturing. Moreover, a prevalence in well being issues like diabetes, brought about partly by the extremely processed meals being dropped at the islands, has illustrated a have to reconnect with historically grown vegatables and fruits.
So Sibilly-Brown and her college students set to work on a year-long service studying mission to carry native meals again into the college cafeteria. She started to see essential methods by which the islands and america mainland had been disconnected — and nonetheless are.
“I spotted that there was this large hole of information between all of those totally different actors within the system,” she mentioned. A few of the individuals she has to work with by way of america Division of Agriculture (USDA) are based mostly in Virginia and Florida, for instance. “I sought to develop into the bridge that might join individuals, similar to a pollinator, buzzing across the place and speaking about meals methods.”
After efficiently integrating the U.S. Virgin Islands into the Nationwide Farm to College Community, she began a nonprofit, referred to as the Virgin Islands Good Meals Coalition, to assist and advocate for insurance policies and funds that assist farmers on the Virgin Islands.
In Puerto Rico, Crystal Díaz has taken an identical strategy, searching for methods to strengthen and assist native meals manufacturing by connecting farmers with shoppers.
The devastation wrought by Hurricane María in 2017 illustrated the necessity to bolster the native meals methods. The primary port that sends meals to Puerto Rico is in Florida, and it, too, was broken by the storm. “Hurricane Maria was a slap within the face for everyone,” mentioned Díaz, who just lately spoke on a discussion board with Brown about meals sovereignty on U.S. territories. It was then that many individuals realized the extent of their reliance on boats to herald the meals. “Supermarkets began to have their aisles empty. That was a wakeup name for lots of people,” she mentioned.
Via an app she co-founded in 2018 referred to as PRoduce, eating places and residents are actually in a position to order native produce instantly from small farmers on the island. Thus far, the app has been in a position to hyperlink 400 producers with over 70,000 shoppers.
She sees meals safety as one technique to construct resiliency in opposition to future storms and says the kind of agricultural practices farmers make the most of might be essential too.
“We have to do it in a resilient, sustainable method, utilizing soil conservation practices, agroecology and sustainable farming practices that then permit us to be resilient in the direction of local weather change,” she mentioned. “Hurricanes are going to proceed to hit the island, and they will get stronger, apparently, due to local weather change.”
For Ursula Herrera, who works on the Guam Division of Agriculture, meals sovereignty isn’t nearly surviving local weather change however is a device to reclaim a cultural connection to meals that has been eroded by colonialism.
Via her work with the division, Herrera connects native farmers to microgrants from the USDA which can be aimed toward growing the amount and high quality of meals grown on Guam. Different initiatives embody beginning up a neighborhood meals financial institution equipped with produce by a farmers coop and selling seed saving.
Herrera, who’s CHamoru — an Indigenous individual from Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands — mentioned additionally it is about discovering methods to coach the subsequent era. She takes youth teams on medicinal plant hikes, for instance, passing down the data that she discovered from her grandmother. “[I point out] the crops that heal us and assist us and simply reclaiming our cultural identification with the land,” she mentioned.
Earlier than occupation by the Japanese throughout World Warfare II, the place CHamoru individuals had been despatched to focus camps, Herrera mentioned most households in Guam – its Indigenous title is Guåhan [GWAH-hahn] – practiced subsistence farming. “Each home had their very own yard backyard,” she mentioned. “We bartered with each other. After which comes the conflict and the lack of prime agricultural land for the [U.S.] navy bases.” The financial system additionally turned cash-based.
Loads of her work is about bringing that hyper-local meals manufacturing again. “We’ve got a nursery, and we’ve the bottom costs on the island in order that we are able to assist our meals progress,” she mentioned. “We’ve got all these meals crops and fruits, but additionally, we’re carrying conventional natural drugs, natural crops.”
However for this work to proceed and develop, locations like Guam, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands and different U.S. territories want authorities funding and to be higher served by the USDA and the sources it could present to farmers, Sibilly-Brown mentioned.
Lately, she’s targeted on reaching authorities officers on the mainland. Most just lately, she visited Washington, D.C., in February to lift the visibility of the wants of territories whereas lawmakers labored on the Farm Invoice, a chunk of laws handed each 5 years that units nationwide coverage on fields corresponding to agriculture, diet, conservation and forestry.
“As a result of we’re remoted geographic areas, there are limits on our illustration,” she mentioned. The U.S. Virgin Islands, for instance, has one nonvoting delegate within the U.S. Home of Representatives however no counterpart within the Senate. Different territories additionally ship somebody to the Home to signify their voices, however they can’t forged votes on laws.
So it’s as much as grassroots teams to advocate for their very own wants.
Step one for Sibilly-Brown and her allies is elevating the profile of the territories within the Farm Invoice. “We’re looking for voice and partnership and visibility amongst our nation,” she mentioned.
Outdoors of the microgrants that the USDA has put aside for territories and that max out at $10,000, farmers on the islands are in any other case in a aggressive pool for extra strong funding with farms on the mainland, the place there are extra sources and investments already. “How will our proposals ever really measure up?” Sibilly-Brown wonders, when farmers have much less contact with USDA officers and fewer assist placing collectively purposes.
It’s why she’s begun advocating for an Workplace of Territorial Affairs to be created on the USDA — one that might meet the distinctive wants of island territories.
She’s not below any illusions that will probably be created any time quickly. But it surely’s about planting the seed for what an workplace may accomplish as a liaison to raised serve farmers in remoted territories.
“What I need individuals to grasp is we’re not asking for exceptions as a result of we’re territories; we’re asking for inclusion in what ought to be afforded to each producer who’s producing on this nation,” she mentioned. “We’re asking them to contemplate small farms at scale. Like what does scalable hyperlocal farming appear to be [in order] so as to add meals safety and work on the intersections of atmosphere and well being that our communities really want?”