Recommendations for Hurricane Dean Reconstruction under the Agriculture Segment

Replanting with Hurricane resistant crops/plants: That the government and farm sector work with the DAAS and other scientific organizations to identify hurricane resilient plants. It takes 9 months for the banana to be harvested, from the time of planting. Short term vegetable crops should be identified now, such as lettuce, carrots, cabbages and spinach should be targeted. The restaurant and home menu would benefit from that target. The surplus could be exported to the French territories and the OECS.
Hurricane Cash Relief Should be carefully targeted: Such relief should be targeted to the farmers to provide seed, and inputs, with a focus on best practices. The technical assistance should be provided to ensure that the inputs are used and intended. Simply giving cash to farmers without such management should not be countenanced. Where there is need to provide a subsidy to the farmer to tide over the shortfall in income that should be done on a need basis, but tied into the conditions noted above to ensure that our food sector becomes less prone to the bad weather.
Bamboo Proliferation and Reforestation: Bamboo is a fast growing plant with little need for pesticides and fertilizer. As a matter of urgency, Government and private farmers should be focused on introducing bamboo as windbreaks and riverbank preservation, along with our soil conservation efforts. Our rivers were able to eat into their banks because we have not systematically seeded our river banks with bamboo and other tight root plants. Students, youth organizations, farmers, even visitors and visiting Dominicans can be encouraged to engage in such planting to ensure soil conservation. The state college should be the site for a plant propagation facility to proliferate bamboo and other plants with commercial value and/or utility. The type of bamboo with good prospects for furniture, tiles, and windbreaks should be identified. Reunion 2008 should be the platform to reforest our island with fruit and other trees. We can mobilize to do so every weekend and more. This could be funded by public/private sector partnerships, by DAAS and other organizations - at home and abroad - under an "Adopt a Tree" program. The individual donation of $25 could fund the plant and the planting.
Every School Should have a Farm Plot: My observation is that most Dominican students are totally disconnected from the agriculture industry. For that reason most farmers are elderly, or Haitians are increasingly the farm workers. Too many of our young are idle by choice or circumstance; or engaged in the drug culture. We will have a better quality of life where students have a relationship with agriculture. The Chinese, Taiwanese, Cubans, and the US states where agriculture is a major industry all promote a link between the school and the farm. Future Farmers of America is one program which has made the USA the breadbasket of the world. Yet, many have miss that fact in understanding US success in agriculture - i.e. the link between education and research at the highest level and agriculture. Due to the vestiges of mental slavery Dominican parents have associated farming and fishing with exploitation and poverty and the government and non-government sectors need to do much more to stress farming. Now is the right time to change the mind set of our people. We ask that the national leadership stress that with computer technology and modern irrigation agriculture and fishing are desirable career choices. The school farm program will become a training ground for new entrepreneurs in agriculture. We have to change the culture by promoting our farmers and fishermen who feed us as role models. Such respect and marketing via the internet will allow us to embrace farming and fishing as desirable business and career choices. The DAAS can be part of that drive by featuring successful farmers and fishermen on our website and networking them with skilled persons, resources and markets. We can also begin to honor farmers as the RDF did in 2002 and add farmers and agro business people (hucksters etc) to that list. Again, the theme “every school a farm or factory” is essential to work force development to carry our people away from mental slavery and toward business owning productivity - not simple dependence on government or others for a job.
Funding for Small Scale Agro Industry: The Government and private lending agencies should lend assistance to the development of small and medium size agro industry, such as juices, fruit bottling, fruit drying and packaging of natural snacks entities. Such industry would be more resilient to the challenges of our weather patterns and allow the new agro business sector to warehouse, plan and market more effectively. With no dried pineapples, bananas or plantains, we are more prone to be left defenseless when winds blow down the fresh fruit. Where we have agro industry which process fruits etc; we will have the warehouse capacity to literally ride out the storm. Storm damage will not, therefore, create havoc with our ability to feed ourselves or earn income. A review of history shows that European and Asian progress arose where farmers developed the technology of drying, canning, and storing food produce. Domfruit, started by Leopold Emmanuel and Bello, started by the Bellot family, are to lauded for keeping that option alive. Now we have to build on that heritage and mobilize the funds and technical know-how from the DAAS and others sectors to fashion a strong agro industry. The funds we seek from our foreign allies should focus on agro industry so that it is not wasted on short term, reactive, hand outs. If we were to do so, we would once again lose the opportunities presented after Hurricane David in 1979, where we became even more dependent on hand-outs and foreign food-aid, instead of building up our self-reliance capacity.

Conclusion: Hurricane Dean's passage allows us a unique opportunity to work across party lines to build the country. Natural disasters do not respect party or sectarian divisions and equally inflict hardships across the board. However, let maximum wisdom prevail at this time, and may we focus on long term planning which restructures our agriculture away from a mono-crop economy to one which does provides for value added processing.

The next report will focus on the need to make our upcoming Independence and Reunion celebrations, fund raisers for the national rebuilding effort. To that end let us see the reconstruction as a long term project, where business development and productivity, with government support and partnership, is the focus.

Gabriel Christian
DAAS Emergency Relief Committee