Rebuilding a Sustainable Food System starts with Malanga?
Nothing is as fundamental as agriculture. It's the foundation of society. It has allowed humans to settle in cities, and cities to industrialize. It has allowed arts and culture to flourish. It has also allowed us to disconnect completely from the food system. As we industrialized, we didn’t have to think much about where our food came from, the hands that picked it, or the miles it traveled to get to our plate. We were taught that large, global supply chains were secure, and that we shouldn’t question why we can find beautiful tropical fruit in a supermarket in the dead of winter. Indeed, it’s an achievement of our global, interconnected food system, and it works until a pandemic hits or natural disasters strike and we encounter through firsthand experience how vulnerable our food system truly is. Vulnerable to a ship getting stuck in the Suez Canal. Vulnerable to a bug that threatens essential farm workers. Vulnerable to an outbreak at one of the few remaining meat processing plants. Vulnerable to rising sea levels, wildfires that burn farmland, drought and finite water reservoirs in the American West.
In Puerto Rico, we’ve felt the insecurity of our food system. Our island has endured hardship after hardship since 2017. First Hurricane Maria, then earthquakes that rocked the southern coast in 2020, followed by the pandemic, then Hurricane Fiona in 2022. We’ve seen empty supermarket shelves every hurricane season. We’ve had to stand in line for limited supplies with a maximum allotment per person.
Our food system is broken. A shocking 85% of the food Puerto Rico consumes is imported. At grocery stores, there is a limited local produce section. If you look closely at the labels, most of the food is from the mainland USA, picked and packaged in California, trucked five days to the Port of Jacksonville, then shipped on an ocean freighter to the Port of San Juan, then distributed to supermarkets. The food has been harvested for weeks by the time it hits our shelves. A small clamshell of lettuce, for example, frequently costs over $6. By the time you get home you have maybe a day or two before it goes bad. Food prices in Puerto Rico are twice the cost of food in Florida, and the average GDP per capita is just over $20,000. This is an issue of economic and food injustice. On an island where agricultural land sits vacant, the health of Puerto Rican consumers, and our environment takes a toll. When disaster strikes such as a hurricane which forces our main port to be closed, there is a finite amount of food on the island. In 2017, a few weeks after Hurricane Maria struck in Maricao, the town where I live in the southwest mountains, the community was given MREs from the military to eat until regular shipments of food could be consumed. That is unacceptable.
The hurricanes have wreaked havoc, not only on the land, but also on the farmer population. Rebuilding a battered food system that has experienced a massive exodus of farmers and working-age population over the past few decades isn’t easy. Statistics from the 2020 Census just came out showing a sharp increase in the average age of our overall population, now 45.2 years old, far higher than the US national average. For the agricultural industry, the average age of a Puerto Rican farmer is 60.8 years old.
Our food system is at a crossroads, as it is throughout the United States. But in the context of Puerto Rico, supporting the development of local agriculture makes sense because we are a small island in the Caribbean with a climate that allows us to grow 365 days a year. The alternative doesn’t work. We can’t overly depend on imports. Importing food costs the consumer more; the food isn’t as fresh, negatively affecting our health; and the environmental cost of shipping all of that produce from thousands of miles away is enormous. The development of a truly sustainable, local food system would do wonders for rural communities and the Puerto Rican economy. Those dollars spent on local produce at the grocery store would stay in Puerto Rico, support the local farmer, who then supports the local hardware store, the local farmhand, and so on. Increasing local food production in Puerto Rico by just 2% would generate $144M in the local economy. What would that mean for Puerto Rico? For our planet? It would mean more jobs for rural communities, more small farmers that are able to make a living, a healthier and more just, circular economy. How do we do it?
We can’t afford to lose any more young people. Puerto Rico is losing its population, and especially those between 18-25 who are frustrated by the lackluster economy, the difficulty in finding gainful employment, and the daily challenges of unreliable and expensive electricity. They are relocating to the mainland US. How do we convince them to stay? We have to first demonstrate that small-scale farming is possible; provides a good income, and is of incredible importance to the community, the culture and the island. Becoming a farmer should be a choice that is socially well-respected, encouraged, and celebrated, not a last resort or a one-way ticket to continuous debt and isolation. We start by supporting those who are farming and making way for those that want to farm.
Monte Azul’s Academy of Sustainable Agriculture and Innovation is open to anyone interested in farming. Lifelong farmers and those just starting out farming have joined our programs. I often hear people complain about how “young people don’t want to farm.” I’ve found that young people are interested in farming. We have to keep them interested, make becoming a farmer easier, and provide easier access to technical assistance, seed, equipment, and land. We must provide support and resources to help them succeed, and help them through the challenges along the way.
One unexpected outcome of bringing lifelong farmers and wanna-be farmers together is that it creates community and a sense of belonging. This wasn’t even on my radar when we created our Academy of Sustainable Agriculture and Innovation. We were focused on creating high-value content for both seasoned and new farmers that would be useful, practical, and applicable to as many farming operations as possible. But now I see that farmers who have been through our programs value the community that has been created for them equally as much as they appreciate the educational content. Farming can be a lonely and isolating profession, especially in the face of the unpredictable weather we experience on the island. Bringing people together with a common goal to support farming and increase local food production has created new friendships and new opportunities to lend a hand or share some seed. One of my favorite takeaways during our first cohort of our Agricultural Entrepreneurship 101 course was when one farmer needed malanga (taro) seeds and another farmer had some sitting in their field. This newly formed friendship resulted in one farmer being able to diversify. .
We have to inspire hope in farmers as their work is arduous, and their income depends on unreliable and unpredictable events. Because of this, we have to provide a healthy outlet for farmers to vent, and we have to listen. Who truly knows and understands the issues farmers face? Other farmers. Bring them together in a room and encourage them to dream and solve problems together. Give them inspiration and positive encouragement and support. These are difficult metrics to measure but incredibly impactful for farmers.
I recently saw how impactful positive encouragement and support can be with a 24 year old farmer in Yabucoa. One day as we walked through his field, he told me about his hopes and dreams for the farm, and we started talking about crop diversification. He has been rotating four to six different vegetables into his operation, and I asked him if he had thought about growing malanga. Monte Azul is focusing on helping farmers grow more root and tuber crops such as malanga, yautía, yuca, ñame and batata, which serve as the base of the Puerto Rican diet. “No, you can’t grow malanga in Yabucoa,” he told me. I was surprised by his response and asked him why he thought it wouldn’t grow. He said that many of the older farmers had tried many years ago to grow it, and they ran into issues with pests and disease. I immediately encouraged him to try his own experiment because his farm was unique and has its own microclimate. So he did, and when I returned to the farm, he couldn’t stop talking about how much he loved his two rows of malanga, and that he had plans to plant more. With a little encouragement and an openness to try new things, he successfully diversified into a new crop.
I’ve already learned so much from working with farmers, and I am encouraged by what I have witnessed. While there is still much to learn, what I know for certain is that we can bring small farming back to Puerto Rico and create a sustainable food system on the island. It starts with individual farmers. We have to walk with them in the fields and listen, observe and encourage. And if we can inspire one young farmer to plant two rows of malanga, imagine the impact we could make with 100 farmers?
Andrew M. Hermann