“I do this because I like to stay occupied,” Tham (pictured above) says in Vietnamese. “I like to grow my own food, but it’s hard work,” especially now when the unusually heavy rains have damaged many of the crops. On some days, she is here from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m., helping to tend to the cooperatively owned garden that produces the bulk of vegetables sold by the Village de L’Est Green Growers Initiative, known to most as VEGGI Farmers Cooperative.

The average American urban farmer is younger and whiter than Tham, but she’s representative of what an urban farmer in New Orleans East, just 15 miles from the historic French Quarter, looks like. From fleeing war to surviving major hurricanes and rebuilding after one of the worst man-made disasters in the U.S., the roughly 14,000-strong Vietnamese community of New Orleans East knows what it means to be resilient.

Formed after BP’s oil spill in 2010 decimated the shrimping industry, which employed a large number of Vietnamese-Americans, the Mary Queen of Vietnam Community Development Corporation (MQVN CDC) created VEGGI to provide an alternative form of employment for the community. With seven full members growing on two acres, as well as in their backyards, VEGGI now harvests 10,000 pounds of produce a year; they also grow flowers and make home-made tofu.

Before the pandemic, they sold to restaurants, farmers’ markets, and community-supported agriculture programs (CSAs) around the city. Now, the restaurants and markets have closed, but the CSA membership has grown and VEGGI is looking at ways to get more of its produce to the local community.

The farm is not only a demonstration of their resilience as a community, but like many small urban farms around the country, it has helped makes them more resilient in the face of disasters. Now, the combination of climate change, coronavirus, and an aging community are testing them once again.

New Orleans East is one of two neighborhoods in the city that have been hardest hit by the pandemic, and although the Black population in the district has seen a disproportionate number of cases, the fallout has also been felt among the Vietnamese population. Many of those in New Orleans East community who work in the hospitality industry have been laid off. Also, most families in the community depend on school lunches for children, so school closures have increased the burden on those families. For these reasons, VEGGI is currently trying to raise funds for the farmers to provide produce to the local community.

Tham was one of 120,000 Vietnamese people who fled to the U.S. after the Viet Cong claimed Saigon in 1975. Many arrivees were Catholic, and with the help of the local Roman Catholic church, a small community settled east of New Orleans, making their new home in the Versailles Arms Apartments, a public housing project located in between suburban sprawl and undeveloped floodplains. In a semi-tropical climate not unlike what they had grown up with, it’s not surprising that many would decide to grow their own food.

Thanh Nguyen (Photo by Sarah Sax)

“Even before we started the co-op, people were growing their own food—that mentality has always been a part of our community,” says Khai Nguyen, who works at MQVN CDC, helping to administer the farm, as well as coordinating other economic development and environmental programs.

“The vegetables [we] are growing might not be available in a grocery store,” Khai says. “And for the community members here, it’s natural to grow food. It’s a form of resilience, and it’s also deeply cultural.”

That resiliency goes beyond just increasing food security and access to fresh produce. The co-op has provided a diverse form of income for its members, and has become a central way for the community to organize and engage with climate change.

A History of Rebuilding from Disasters

To get to New Orleans East, you pass rows of strip malls, undeveloped marshes, floodplains, and the Six Flags New Orleans amusement park that was abandoned after Katrina, still broadcasting the “closed for storm” sign at its entrance. It was in part the physical and political isolation that forced the community together in the first place. When, six weeks after the storm, authorities gave the residents permission to “look and leave,” many residents of New Orleans East stayed and started to rebuild, even though the city had made other plans for the area.

“After Katrina, the redevelopment authority didn’t realize there were people here, that people had returned much quicker than in other places in the city,” Khai says. In the storm’s immediate aftermath in 2005, the city originally drafted plans to revert much of New Orleans East to wetlands and create a landfill for storm debris.

Khai Nguyen. (Photo by Sarah Sax)

But having already put in so much time in creating this community from scratch, people weren’t willing to leave their homes. “We were invisible in some ways before the storm, [and] that forced us to come together to fight this project and to advocate for ourselves,” Khai says.

Though the MQVN CDC was created in 2006 to address the immediate challenges following Katrina, founders saw an opportunity to address more systemic and long-term challenges as well. They originally envisioned a 28-acre farm, but it fell through because of zoning issues.

Less than five years later, however, the BP oil spill sent roughly 4 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, destroying the fishing industry and particularly devastating the Vietnamese- American Village de L’Est community.

“People lost their jobs practically overnight,” Khai remembers. “But beyond jobs, it also affected people’s subsistence—people may not have been directly employed as a fisherman, but they were selling the products, and they were fishing and bartering.”

This time, the farming co-op became a reality. With grants from OXFAM and support from MQVN CDC, the community built neighborhood greenhouses and trained former fishermen to manage aquaponic growing systems, giving them an alternative form of both income and subistance food.

In 2013, 16 farmers banded together to formally create a farmers’ cooperative to sell the produce, fish, and tofu from their backyard gardens and aquaponic systems, with some farmers even reaching their pre-BP oil spill income levels.

Climate Change, Coronavirus, and an Aging Membership

While some members have since gone back to fishing, seven members continue to sell vegetables—including bok choi, rau lang, shiso, and ginger—herbs, tofu, and flowers grown in their backyards and on co-op land, using largely organic methods. The beds are elevated and mixed with compost and seedlings are grown first in boxes and then transplanted close together. They also use integrated pest management practices to control pests.

Beyond providing food for the community, the farm has become an informal gathering spot for the farmers, and a place for them to, quite literally, ground their own culture. The farm also partnered with local nursery and primary schools to offer field trips and educational experiences for children.

While there are talks of expanding VEGGI, one of the biggest problems is attracting younger people who are dedicated enough to stay in a place that otherwise offers few prospects; almost all the farmers that manage the co-op are elderly, and most of the young, educated community members have left to study or find employment. But some stay, and Khai remains hopeful that initiatives like the farm will be part of what entices more young, diverse community members to stay.

“We are lucky in that we have community members in the program who are very passionate and diligent—that really is key for the success of any program,” says Khai. “As long as the people in the program are able to stay dedicated and provide produce…it will keep on working.”

But in addition to the impacts of the coronavirus, the effects of climate change are often top-of-mind. Walking past a rain garden on the border of the farm, Khai mentions that because they are below sea level, flooding from any rainfall event affects the farm.

“In the last three years especially, [flooding] has become more frequent,” he says. “Part of the problem is that there is nowhere for the water to drain out.”

New Orleans is one of the rainiest cities in the country, with an average of 62 inches of rain each year. And since the 1950’s, New Orleans has seen a 62 percent increase in the number of heavy downpours, with average inches per rainfall event trending upwards. With levees surrounding much of the city, it essentially forms a shallow bowl, collecting water at the lowest parts.

VEGGI, meanwhile, sits at 0 feet above sea level, one of the lowest parts of the city. It is also considered one of the areas in New Orleans most vulnerable to climate change—not just because of its geographic location, but also its lower socio-economic status and relative isolation.

In recent months, Khai has helped lead community meetings that have introduced long-term projections of water levels in the community. Sea level rise is predicted to reach almost two feet by 2050 in New Orleans, and Khai knows that the farm will see increased flooding. But as a small organization with limited funding, Khai recognizes there is only so much they can do alone.

Khai now serves as a representative of MQVN CDC in South East Louisiana VOICE, a coalition of community-based and environmental organizations. He is advocating for more community inclusion in state environmental programs and for more services, like translators, to let the community have a direct say in what kind of projects get prioritized and how they get implemented.

“Environmental concerns have always been important to the community, so of course with climate change, people are concerned,” he says. “We have always had to rebuild—we had to fight a landfill that was being placed in our backyard, and more recently, the community was fighting a new gas plant.”

The community is facing the double threat of climate change and the coronavirus much the same way, Khai says. They want to know what they are up against so they can do what they have always done: plan, adapt, and build more resilient systems.

The post A Vietnamese Farmers’ Cooperative in New Orleans Offers a Lesson in Resilience appeared first on Civil Eats.

The nine-cuerda (slightly over 8.5-acre) farm is perched on the top on the Monte Carlo neighborhood of the island. Scattered in between fruit and nut trees, beehives, and fallow land, Pérez Quintero and Jorge Cora grow organic vegetables on around 40 beds, laid out over two sides of a gently sloping hill.

The view of the Caribbean Sea from the top of Finca Conciencia. (Photo © Sarah Sax)

Home to roughly 10,000 residents, Vieques has no major, commercial source of locally grown produce, so Finca Conciencia is trying to fill that gap and build a food sovereignty movement on the island. In addition to growing vegetables, they do that by keeping bees, giving workshops, saving seeds, and holding community kitchen events through a collective they formed in 2015 called La Colmena Cimarrona—the Maroon Beehive—a name that hints at their unique strain of runaway bees, their politics, and their own histories.

“If we can produce more ourselves and become more food sovereign, maybe that can lead to an awakening in the political sphere in Puerto Rico—and even more so in Vieques,” Pérez Quintero explains.

The half-dozen rustic buildings at various stages of disrepair, lined strategically at the highest point of the farm to catch the view of the Caribbean Sea in the distance, are a reminder of the devastating impact Hurricane Maria had when it tore through the island in 2017. While the farm is slowly rebuilding, its main focus is on growing vegetables for the farmers’ own consumption and to sell to restaurants on the island.

Most of the vegetables that Finca Conciencia sells are leafy greens. Many of them go to the island’s growing restaurant businesses. (Photo © Sarah Sax)

The 30,000-acre island has long struggled with food access and availability. Puerto Rico, which consistently ranks higher for food insecurity and hunger than most other parts of the U.S., imports roughly 85 percent of its food—that number jumped to 95 percent after Hurricane Maria. Food insecurity on Vieques is compounded even more by an irregular and unreliable ferry service. Earlier this spring, for instance, both cargo ferries to the island were broken, cutting off residents’ access to gas, milk, eggs, and fresh produce.

In addition to food insecurity stemming from its remoteness, Vieques has been battered in many ways over the years. The U.S. Navy used half of the island as a weapons test site for more than six decades before finally ending in 2003, eventually turning that half into a National Wildlife Refuge that is also a Superfund Site. And Hurricane María slammed into Puerto Rico in September 2017, killing 3,000 people and cutting off electricity, gas, food, and supplies for weeks to Vieques.

Jorge tends to lettuce grown under a shade net with beehives in the background. (Photo © Sarah Sax)

“What Jorge and Ana are doing is both unique and necessary,” says Sylvia de Marco, who runs a vegetarian boutique hotel on the island and sources greens and other produce from the farm. “Vieques has so much potential—we can grow year-round—it’s amazing not more people are doing it.”

Raising Produce and Pollinators

Originally from the city of Arroyo, Puerto Rico, Cora has been working with bees since 1996. He came to Vieques to buy queens from his predecessor, Mike Diaz, after Hurricane George destroyed his hives in 1998, and he never went back home. Diaz gave the land to Cora when he retired, marking the start of Finca Conciencia, 12 years ago.

Pérez Quintano, also from Puerto Rico, arrived five years ago to participate in a workshop. Inspired by what Jorge was doing—and the very obvious need for more food sovereignty on the island—she decided to stay as well.

The “agro-api-artisanal farm,” still recovering from the Hurricane María, currently produces around 150 pounds of food per week, mainly green leafy vegetables that it sells to residents, restaurants, and hotels twice a week in the island’s port town of Esperanza. The farmers, and the day laborers who help work the land, consume the rest of their produce.

Jorge Cora working on the beehives. (Photo courtesy of Finca Conciencia)

The farm is part of La Colmena Cimarrona, the larger collective that Pérez Quintano and Cora founded to create agroecology training opportunities, as well as provide administrative and fundraising support for like-minded organizations. In addition to teaching workshops on composting, organic farming, and seed-saving, the collective runs a community kitchen, community gardens, and a group for women working in food security. Its long-term goal is to train enough farmers around the island to eventually have a local farmers’ market.

The collective also runs an apiary, spearheaded by Cora, that raises Puerto Rico’s unique hybrid bees—a hybrid of “killer” African bees and a European strain that is gentle and resilient to many of the parasites that plague European honeybees. “They call them wild, or ‘killer’ bees,” says Pérez Quintero. “But they’re not. It’s the same kind of racist discourse that was used to describe indigenous and enslaved people.”

Cora, who has been developing different hives to keep the smaller, hybrid bees, agrees. “The bees are a hybrid, like us Puerto Ricans. You can’t manage the hybrid bees the same way you do European bees.”

Around 80 percent of the island’s 150,000 bee colonies were wiped out during Hurricane Maria. To save their dozen beehives during the storm, Pérez Quintero and Cora strapped them to pieces of wood and tied them to the sturdiest trees.

Since then, however, the apiculture side of their business has slowed down a bit as they focus their efforts on ramping up vegetable production. But both are adamant that there is no separating bees from agriculture. “We live inside of the bees; they are connected to everything we touch and eat and use,” Cora says. “We can’t live without them.”

‘Banks of Life’ and Seed Saving

I’ve come during the dry season, but even so, because of the winds, low rainfall, high levels of evapotranspiration, and lack of irrigation, farming on Vieques is a challenge.

“There isn’t much to see at the moment,” says Cora. “On the main island, the earth is productive when it rains, but in Vieques it’s harder—the soil is drier, and the rain is less. In reality, the climate here is more like a desert.”

To get around that, Cora developed a type of narrow, long, raised vegetable beds based loosely on traditional farming techniques used by the indigenous Taíno, in which long furrows collect and hold water when it rains. They look similar to double-dug beds used in bio-intensive agriculture, but they are longer and higher. The farm doesn’t adhere strictly to any one system, but is adamant about not using agrochemicals or industrial techniques.

The beds are designed to retain as much water as possible. (Photo © Sarah Sax)

“We call these ‘banks of life,’” says Pérez Quintano. “During the hurricane, for the most part they stayed intact,” even if much of their farm didn’t.

A view of the farm’s double-dug beds. (Photo courtesy of Finca Conciencia)

About half the beds are currently growing leafy greens, eggplants, and peppers, and the other half is going to seed. Pérez Quintero has been dedicating herself to generating seeds that are locally adapted to the conditions in Vieques since she came to the farm five years ago—both to lessen dependence on outside sources and to generate seeds that will flourish in the unique local climate and soil conditions of the islands. For now, the seeds are mainly used on the farm and exchanged at the workshops the farm regularly holds.

In the Wake of Natural Disaster

Recovery from Hurricane Maria was even harder for Vieques than for the rest of Puerto Rico; electricity didn’t fully return there until January 2019, and the hospital still operates some of its services out of trailers.

“We effectively had no health services, no dialysis, [and] no diabetes medication after the hurricane,” remembers Pérez Quintero. “It was a real crisis.”

Despite the damage the farm took from the hurricane, access to fresh food wasn’t as much of an issue. They harvested everything they could and distributed some of the provisions, built a model garden at the Catholic church, and started a women’s group through the collective to work on food security and health issues.

Pérez Quintero and Cora saw Maria as a way to bring awareness to the issue of generating more food security on the island. “That’s what we want to tell the people here,” Cora says. “There are going to be more times where there is no ferry and no food—and they have to be prepared.”

Food Sovereignty as a Political Statement

The land on which Finca Conciencia is built is what is known locally as “rescued land,” or land that belonged to the Navy but was overgrown and not in use. Residents like Cora’s predecessor Mike Diaz came and cleared the land, effectively laying claim to it.

A sign in the reserve below Finca Conciencia reminds visitors that Vieques was used for 60 years for war games by the U.S. Navy. (Click image for a larger version) (Photo © Sarah Sax)

While that land is recognized by the government, it has no clear titles, making it easy for people to claim and sell it. The most lucrative buyers are eyeing land for hotels and vacation homes for one of Vieques’ main industries: tourism. Because the island was inaccessible for so long, development has been slow, making it a paradise for off-the-beaten-track travelers. The surge in wealthy, absentee owners, however, means that prices for land have skyrocketed and buying land for farming has become all but impossible.

For Pérez Quintero and Cora, the history of Vieques ties in with what they are trying to do today with their farm. La Colmena is in the process of setting up a community land trust to claim some of the remaining, unsold land to use for food production.

“Agroecology and agriculture in general is, in its own way, a way to rescue Vieques from the gentrification, land speculation, and displacement that we are seeing,” Pérez Quintero explains. “We have a lot of absentee owners—we need more people that are actually here in order to change things.”

Finca Conciencia and its associated collective hopes that its work will advance social, economic, and environmental justice and sensitize people to the issue of food—and political—sovereignty.

One of the anecdotes Pérez Quintero likes to tell is from just after the hurricane. The farm had started a soup kitchen using radishes and arugula, ingredients that produce rapidly, “things that before the hurricane people would have potentially found gross,” she says. After eating canned food for weeks and seeing little aid and help from elsewhere, one of the men on the island turned to her and said, “Look, I’m not actively fighting for independence right now, but I think we need more of it.”

That seems to be the essential mantra of the farm: To free ourselves, we have to feed ourselves.

“It’s not an easy way to make a living,” Cora concedes, sitting and watching the Caribbean Sea break on white sand beaches in the distance. “But someone had to show that it could be done. And we’ve done that—aquí estamos—we are showing that it is possible. And that’s not nothing.”

The post Finca Conciencia Is Building Food Sovereignty on Vieques Island appeared first on Civil Eats.