“We feed the country. We must have a voice.”
That was the message farmers delivered at OPODHA’s General Assembly in August, where 400 grassroots leaders pressed the Haitian government and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to build smallholder farmers’ priorities into a $47.9 million agricultural project.
A month later, the Ministry and the Bank agreed to change the project. It will now fund community seed banks, work with local communities to study where irrigation is needed, and give smallholder farmers a formal role in monitoring how the three-year project is carried out.
OPODHA’s director, Rev. Florcie Tyrell, and its 5,500 members refused to accept that decisions about their future would be made without them. Now they are organizing to make sure the Bank keeps its word.
