World Food Day: CWS program yields more than fruit and vegetables in the Dominican Republic
October 15, 2007--When Eloy Ramirez brought in his last crop, the harvest yielded a triple bounty: Food, income, and a better standard of living.
âI sold a value of RD$30,000 (about $900.00), in addition to what we were able to consume at home. We even gave some to neighbors and friends,â Ramirez says. This, in an area of the Dominican Republic where many people live on the verge of hunger and are extremely vulnerable to natural disasters like drought, flooding and hurricanes.
A community leader in the Yabacao community in the southwest region of the country, Ramirez is the head of one of nearly a thousand households participating in a Church World Service-sponsored program to improve food security.
This World Food Day (October 16), he says his entire community has made great gains over the last year. âWe organized ourselves and worked toward the process of preparing the land and planting crops.â With the help of agricultural experts provided by the program, Ramirez says the planting brought forth a generous crop of corn, yucca, sweet potatoes, squash, tomatoes, green beans and other fruits and vegetables.
Some of the immediate beneficiaries are the children. An improved diet of a variety of fresh foods and additional protein from the eggs and chickens harvested through poultry farming also is solving the problem of malnutrition.
Now in its second year, the project has accomplished more than just increasing crop quality and yield by teaching good farming techniques like soil preparation and crop diversity.
Beyond subsistence
Ramirez and the other men and women who participate have gone beyond subsistence farming to producing crops that generate income. The economic boost is giving the families--many of them Haitian refugees--access to goods and services that in the past were beyond their reach.
Jose Pena, who farms in AB-4, another of one of the 24 rural Dominican Republic communities served by the program, says the Church World Service-supported initiative has reached right into the lives of these struggling farm families.
âThey have improved the development of the families by 90 per cent, especially the children we send to school. For the simple reason that with the fruits of our harvest and what we were able to sell, we now buy them shoes, notebooks and pencils. In many occasions the income helps us go to the doctors and buy medicine.â
This program is administered locally by Church World Serviceâs Dominican partner Servicio Social de Iglesias Dominicanas (SSID), with additional support from the Presbyterian Hunger Program and the Foods Resource Bank. It is one of dozens of food security projects CWS supports worldwide in developing rural areas, where 70 per cent of the worldâs poor and hungry people reside.
Following a June 2006 visit to the Dominican Republic, where an influx of refugees from Haiti has long been a source of tension, Church World Service Executive Director John L. McCullough called SSIDâs work âa model for how all of us should respond when our neighbors come to us desperate and in need."
The response in this Dominican region goes beyond tending to just the immediate needs of the Haitian refugees who have settled in this area of the Dominican Republic.
The new, improved agricultural and management skills the small farmers-both Haitian and Dominican-are bringing to their soil preparation and seed planting are making possible lasting improvements in the quality of life for families who depend on crops for food on the table and money in hand.
âI am very happy because we are obtaining cash to resolve problems,â says Ramirez. âI can pay for my health treatment and am able to buy household items, as well as other food items.â
In observance of World Food Day Church World Service is sharing other stories of comm unities where people are eating better because they are learning ways to ensure a dependable supply a food.
Aimed at heightening public awareness of the plight of the worldâs hungry and malnourished and encouraging people to take action against hunger, World Food Day is celebrated on October 16 in more than 150 countries. The date marks the 1945 founding of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
To support Church World Service hunger and poverty fighting programs visit https://secure.churchworldservice.org/catalog/display.php?category_id=33
Church World Service is also asking people to support local CROP Hunger Walks (http://churchworldservice.org/CROP/index.html), the CWS community fundraising appeal that helps alleviate hunger and poverty locally and globally.
Media Contacts
Lesley Crosson, (212) 870-2676, lcrosson@churchworldservice.org Jan Dragin - 24/7 - (781) 925-1526, jdragin@gis.net