Hello everyone today. I'll be presenting my master of Sustainability
Solutionss culminating experience project on increasing socio-economic
resilience of Utuado farmers through agritourism. My name is HOA and
here's a list of my project partners without which this project would have
not been possible.
Bottu Puerto Rico is a region that has witnessed many natural hazards and
most notably of which is hurricane Maria that hit the island in 2017 and
irrevocably altered its landscape to this day. But what causes certain
groups of people and not others to experience natural hazards as disasters.
This is the level of vulnerability that a group of people has to major
impacts in Utuado. This looks like a lack of livelihood opportunity, a
large proportion of citizens living below the poverty line. A lack of
access to basic necessities and high quality food, increasing farm
abandonment and out migration and a high level of dependence on imported
food. Not to mention inadequate government support and histories of
political injustices.
However, this disaster has also opened up a window for citizens to rise up
and self organize for the building back better of their shared communities
and spaces in the agricultural sector. This is manifested as a drive
towards a stronger regional economy and the building of food sovereignty
through agritourism. In Utuado, agritourism is an emerging economic
activity that combines agroecological methods and tourism for diversified
livelihood, potential, sustainable practices, cultural preservation and
appreciation and smaller scale food sovereignty displayed. Here are an
array of exemplary agritourism, farms and enterprises around Puerto Rico
and in the US, which I will mention again later based on the
transformative potential of agritourism for the utuado community in terms
of positive public health outcomes, social and environmental resilience
and disaster risk reduction. Local utuado farmers could benefit from
increased agritourism knowledge dissemination and practice with the
building of a stronger regional economy.
In order to support this movement, my project involves three major parts
in part one, I identified regional sustainability solutions which involve
developing surveys for preliminary data collection on key actions, tools
and resources for farm success. Creating a list of criteria for the
identification of sustainable farms and enterprises and conducting
background research on those identified regional sustainable farms and
enterprises. In part two, I reconstructed transition pathways to success.
A regional sustainable farms and enterprises which involved developing
interview guides for a more detailed follow up of a few exemplary farms
reconstructing transition pathways based on the information collected so
far and creating a list of criteria for the successful transition or
development of a farmer enterprise. In part three, I developed an
educational program to support other farmers in learning from this
experience, which involves identifying the pertinent theory of change,
focal risk factors as well as program scope and stakeholders and
developing a program addressing main elements and indicators, pilot
programming measures and training and implementation based on
reconstructed pathways to success. In part one, I first delineated a
method to identify regional sustainability solutions. The criteria for
farm sustainability that you can see here is adapted from the framework
for analyzing assessing and improving enterprises towards sustainability
as developed by Dr Week and Dr Basil in 2020 the principles for a
sustainable local food economy as developed by Dr Week in 2020 and the
weak enforced 2021 solutions template. The final set of criteria for
agritourism integrity was developed from the University of Vermont and
Virginia co-operative Extension definitions of agritourism. In this
project, a total of 10 identified exemplary enterprises have been assessed
by this list of criteria. Research points to the fact that
self-organization is a powerful tool for building community resilience.
And in Utuado communities, this has converged around the building of food
sovereignty for its transformational potential in addressing food
insecurity and the need for increased access to healthy and high quality
food. I highlight a few of these exemplary, sustainable farms and
enterprises in the region of Utuado like the one we see here, Finca Amaar
and in other regions nationally as well. And I present them using the
criteria for farm sustainability in order to better understand their
sustainability features, their contributions to the regional economy and
by extension their areas potential improvement. You'll notice that
information gaps or areas of potential improvement are indicated in
italics in creating an inventory of exemplary farm and enterprise features
locally and in viewing the strengths of different enterprises. In
conjunction, we're able to begin the first step for the transfer of
sustainability solutions to other up and coming farms and enterprises in
the region.
The exemplary farms that I have studied in depth profiled using the
criteria for farm sustainability and analyzed through pathway transition
reconstruction are Amaad Instituto de Perma, Cultura de Puerto Rico and
Planit Air. The first two exemplary enterprises were selected by virtue of
being participants of the ser project. And the third was selected by
virtue of being the most exemplary of the exemplary cases profiled.
Earlier here you can see the reconstructed transition pathway of FINCA
Amaar. The rectangular bubbles indicate specific actions while the
diamonds indicate output, the small bubbles that you see indicate actor
types while the small triangles indicate barriers. As we can see in this
case, networking played a major role in the success of Finka Maar the
Forest. And week 2014 framework for pathway transition reconstruction is a
highly valuable tool to be able to create a basis for the transferring of
these evidence based critical success factors to other enterprises. Part
three of my project involved the development of a place specific
agritourism educational program when it comes to the most successful
models of farmer learning. Research shows that farmers tend to value
social learning or peer to peer learning the most as compared with
individual or institutional learning. And social learning also allows for
greater participation by women and by other marginalized groups of the
population as well. In fact, this type of learning also presents an
opportunity for a good balance between placing due value on local
traditional or experiential knowledge while allowing for collaboration
with researchers in participatory research programs. As in the example of
the University of California Agroecological Program. It's on this basis
that I developed the farmer learning community as detailed here with two
of the 12 weeks that you can see on this slide. The main concept of this
participatory program is to provide opportunities for aspiring farmers to
visit a different agritourism farmer enterprise site each week where they
can observe and experience firsthand the best practices of the farm while
building their network as they go along. The intended outcomes for this
project included increased socio-economic development and livelihood
opportunity, increased resilience through farm and visitor readiness for
less developed farms, increased engagement in education on and resource
sharing. With regards to agroecological farming practices and increased
social integration between regional farmers in contribution to greater
resilience in a strong regional economy
based on my different project deliverables. Thus far, I've received the
following feedback. In part one of the project I worked in close
collaboration with our project partner from PTC Nilda Loin Gonzalez to
identify contact and collect information from exemplary farms and
enterprises throughout Puerto Rico, MS Gonzalez reviewed the criteria for
farm sustainability and in doing so revealed that the list of criteria can
be a powerful tool to gain a more holistic understanding of important
information on enterprises that has not been previously considered. This
kind of information can help create connections and add support for
sustainable enterprises as by professionals like MS Gonzalez in their
networking roles. In part two of the project involving the reconstruction
of transition pathways, Dr Katia B provided valuable feedback on the
utility of this tool for increasing the understanding of regional economy
players, their interconnections and functions among the communities and
farmers. In part three of the project involving the training program, Dr
Lisa Chase, Professor at the University of Vermont and Director of the
Vermont Tourism Research Center, commended the training program for its
farmer to farmer learning approach, its place based nature and its
sustainability framing. While it's too early in the project to determine
its specific outcomes, these interactions with project partners and
subject matter, experts point to the promising nature of this project once
piloted. What made this project most fulfilling for me was the opportunity
to put into practice much of what I've learned over the semesters in my
MSs program such as sustainability problem identification from the
advanced sustainability problem solving course with Dr Week transitions,
pathway reconstruction from the disasters as opportunities course with Dr
Brander's regional economy, framing and training best practices from the
sustainable food economy course with Dr Week and the TSC criteria from the
transformational sustainability enterprise course with Dr Week and Dr
Basil. Two of the original main components of my project were current
state surveys for regional farmers and in depth interview guides for more
detailed pathway reconstruction. However, due to COVID related delays with
our project partner IRB Institution, it took a period of around two months
to receive an initial response for amendments which have recently been
submitted opportunities for improvement in this regard include making IRB
submissions the first project item with later amendments allowing for
project details to be filled in as the project progresses.
A combination of my own short term continued work on this project for the
completion of surveying and interviewing as well as future MS student
continuation can yield the following next steps. Firstly, the
operationalization and delivery of developed surveys and interviews upon
receiving RV approval. Second, the expanding of the pool of exemplary
enterprises for which to reconstruct transition pathways. And third, the
piloting of the developed training program with Dr Bib upon completion to
better inform the later program implementation phase. Thank you all for
taking the time to listen to my presentation today.