Resilience is actually about empowering communities to stand on their own feet, says Ilimeleki Kaiyanuyanu, the Adventist Development and Relief Agency’s (ADRA) lead officer on the Fiji Pro-Resilience Project.
Kaiyanuyanu, who is Project Manager, says the objective of this project is to improve the resilience and adaptive capacity of communities in terms of food security.
“We empower communities to make decisions...on good agriculture practices such as how they can continue to do their planting when water is limited; they do mulching, they do composting.”
He says these good agricultural practices also include using natural insect repellents instead of using chemicals and even doing inter-cropping “just to break the cycle of some of the pest of crops”.
The project is currently being implemented in two provinces, Macuata and Bua, benefitting at least 10,000 subsistence farmers, 3000 of whom are women.
“Drought is a different type of disaster because normally when we have drought, we don’t know when it starts, we just know it’s a prolonged dry weather and then we also don’t know when it will end; it will only end when we have rain,” Kaiyanuyanu said.
Kaiyanuyanu said in some ways, COVID-19 had been a “blessing in disguise” due to the number of people who have turned to backyard gardening.
“We also assist the farmers in terms of infrastructure like water tanks, irrigation system, solar water pumps you know for the community to start,” he said.
One of the issues ADRA had faced in the initial stages of the project was access to land for those in communal settings.
“Some villages they don’t allow villagers to plant around their backyard. There’s a village by-law that you are not allowed to plant at your house in the village, you have to go and plant in your garden which is a bit far,” he said.
But, he adds that through the training, villagers are realising the importance of allowing these farmers, particularly women, to farm around their home.
Kaiyanuyanu says living in urban areas shouldn’t deter people from raising seedlings:
“You have plastic bottles that you can plant in and that’s part of this training too because we know that there are families that don’t have any backyard garden but they still can raise seeds, raised in plastic bottles or tyres (old tyres) where you can raise your own vegetables.”
This project is supported by the European Union. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is collaborating with the Ministry of Agriculture to implement this project as well in the provinces of Bua, Ra, Nadroga/Navosa.