SUBHEAD: Puerto Rican farmers to envisage agriculture not reliant chemical companies and fossil fuels.
Image above: A hillside at Plenitud Teaching Center in Puerto Rico, that grows ginger, turmeric, taro, string beans, and bananas. Plenitud uses practices such as terraces, swales, berms and other permaculture methods to manage stormwater and reduce erosion. From (https://www.nationalgeographic.com.au/people/puerto-ricos-farms-were-wiped-out-heres-how-theyre-bouncing-back.aspx).
The island languished for months as an insufficient emergency response campaign attempted to restore basic services like water and power.
After a recent independent study, the official death toll was raised from the initial 64 to 2,975 through analysis done by The New York Times, citing malnutrition and other food-based ailments as possible culprits for surging mortality in the storm’s aftermath, estimated that number could be over 4,000.
In the wake of the storm, people stood in lines for hours and walked barely-stocked aisles looking for canned, non-perishable foods.
Many relied on emergency responders and Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) meals, made of packaged and processed foods that require little to no preparation, like the beef jerky and crackers you’d expect to find in a vending machine.
In harder-to-service rural areas on the island, the threat of starvation loomed large.
“They say that during Maria, Puerto Rico only had enough food for one week,” says Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, who became an international figurehead after calling out President Trump for his inadequate response to the crisis.
The story of Puerto Rico’s food production is also the story of the island’s own colonial history.
Large-scale plantations replaced native farming during Puerto Rico’s days as a Spanish colony, resulting in the consolidation of agricultural land and landholding, as well as the number of crops being grown on it.
When the United States took over the island in the wake of the Spanish-American War in 1898, economic restructuring meant that the remaining agricultural activity focused only on cash crops like sugarcane and coffee.
Then, in the 1940s, Congress launched Operation Bootstrap, a campaign to overhaul the Puerto Rican economy that focused on manufacturing and tourism—moving even further away from agriculture.
Subsequent tax breaks and economic initiatives to encourage investment in these sectors solidified these moves.
Deliberately, over the course of years, an import-driven food system was put in place in Puerto Rico, and all other farming fell by the wayside.
Still, Puerto Rican local farming had been experiencing the beginning stages of a renaissance even before the storm hit, spurred by the economic crisis of 2006.
According to statistics provided by the governor’s office, farm income grew 25% from 2012 to 2014, while the number of acres under cultivation rose by 50% between 2012 and 2016, generating at least 7,000 jobs.
That progress was short-lived: 80% of the island’s crops were destroyed in the storm. But, despite those losses, the seeds of a local agricultural had taken root. Some took the storm as inspiration.
At farms like Cosechas Tierra Viva in Las Piedras, run by Eduardo Burgos and Franco Marcano, where they grow kale, arugula, green beans, and eggplant for local farmers’ markets, the storm kicked them into high gear.
Just a month after Maria’s landfall, they converted the farm to run exclusively on solar energy and shifted their irrigation system’s source to rainwater.
Agroecology—defined by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations as both a movement and practice of socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable development—is an approach to farming that promotes diversity through crop rotation, polycultures, or livestock integration, and uses natural systems and local knowledge like planting flowers to attract insects that keep pest levels under control.
Using agroecology has allowed Puerto Rican farmers to envisage an agriculture system not reliant on external inputs from chemical companies and fossil fuels. And the idea is rapidly taking hold in farms, schools, and community groups across the island.
Already, organizations like the Puerto Rico Resilience Fund are supporting the movement by establishing sites like the student-run farm at the University of Puerto Rico’s Río Piedras campus, while networks like the Organización Boricuá de Agricultura Ecológica de Puerto Rico are helping small farms like the Pachamama Bosque Jardín find their feet.
These projects are crucial for the island’s food security, but also for its protection from storms that are likely to grow in intensity and frequency due to climate change.
Surveys after hurricanes in the late 1990s in countries like Nicaragua and Cuba have shown that diversified, small-scale farms suffer less damage than bigger farms practicing conventional agriculture.
Already, the movement is making a noticeable difference. The Puerto Rican Department of Agriculture is aiming to have food imports down to 65% to 75% by the end of the year, which could represent as much as a 20% decrease on pre-Maria levels and a 30% drop from the island’s post-Maria peak.
Ricardo Fernandez, CEO of Puerto Rico Farm Credit, sees signs of the transformation. People are flocking to farmers’ markets; university students are signing up for agricultural classes.
“There’s a resurgence now, because we have to re-invent ourselves,” he says in a recent interview with NPR. For an island facing serious questions about its own colonial legacy and territorial status, local food may well be the first step towards a more independent Puerto Rico.