Business as Usual
- courtney3769
- 7 days ago
- 2 min read
At JP, it's business as usual. Since the rains commenced in November, we have recommenced our march to plant 100,000 trees. We used the final month of the dry season to recruit additional families and are already working with 10 new farm households. At JP, everyone appreciates the trust these families place in us. On our instructions, they are abandoning some of their practices and learning new ones, which can be unsettling, especially for people who rely entirely on what they can grow.
Our goal is to plant 15,000 trees by the end of January, bringing our total to 65,000 trees. While the number of trees is essential and serves as our guidepost, our real accomplishment is transforming deteriorating farms into productive ones. In the meantime, our agronomy staff have been following up with the households from the first 50,000 trees planted to make sure their success is sustained. This is time-consuming but essential. You don’t learn to play the piano with one lesson, and the same goes for good farming.
At JP’s headquarters near Terrier Rouge, we are finishing construction of a cassava bread plant that JP will operate to produce cassava bread for the local market, where it is hard to find. We hope a better supply will improve the local diet, dominated by imported white rice and pasta, and replace imported food with locally grown farm commodities. Diets heavy with refined rice and pasta are associated with diabetes, hypertension, and a lack of dietary fiber. You’re as healthy as what you eat. The fact is, the diet of rural Haiti is more nutritious than that of urban Haiti, which now includes the population of Terrier Rouge, half of whom are children. We hope that cassava, along with yams and sweet potatoes, will regularly appear in school lunches, thereby contributing to public health. As for rural folk, their food problems stem from inadequate supply due to poor farm production, which is the focus of our effort to increase food crop production on Haiti’s predominantly small family farms.
At Partner For People And Place, we are busy laying our plans for 2026 and, as always, are
grateful to be a part of Bethlehem Ministry’s mission.
Rob
Rob Fisher, Executive Director
Partner For People And Place/JP Haiti
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