“International NGOs should expand
efforts to recognize and promote the leadership of local communities, local aid
groups, and, where appropriate, affected governments in recovery from major disasters;
they should also make the strengthening
of local capacity in recovery from an emergency a priority equal to that of service
delivery.”
As many of
you know, I’ve been blathering on about sustainability in this blog because I
really have come to the conclusion that the word has lost all its meaning and
is just trotted out in grant proposals and political speeches to get people to like
whichever project or business or candidate or product is marketing itself. To us, in Aceh, sustainability means the
continuation of a practice long after outsiders have left. It’s carried on by future generations,
who decide to stick around instead of escaping at the earliest possible
opportunity from a life that has always been too hard, too poor, too boring, too
dangerous.
One of the
things JMD keeps asking its women cocoa farmers is: do you think your kids will
want to do this? Not only do the farmers
in Aceh Timur have to want to follow tradition, they have to re-invent that
tradition after its nearly 30-year coma.
Imagine if
all during your childhood you were told that your family were fishermen, but
the ocean was off limits and your parents never went out on the water. You heard about it all the time from your
grandparents. Then when you’re 30, the
ocean becomes open for business, someone points you to the family boat (up on
blocks and rotting) and says “okay, go continue the tradition.” You want to.
You know it’s your legacy. But
you don’t have a frigging clue.
Welcome to
cocoa farming in Aceh Timur.
As Field
Officer Robert said, “The only reason people are still here growing cocoa is
that their families really loved growing cocoa.”
It’s one of the most labor-intensive crops on the planet, and if it
doesn’t show you an increased return, well, after a while you just have to give
it up--if not for you, for the sake of your kids.
So ever
since the 2004 tsunami, JMD has been helping people across Aceh with small
projects that the communities thought
were important. and then we leave, and come back every year or so to see how
everyone’s doing, and if they are still doing it, or if if they have modified
it to respond to natural or demographic changes, then it’s still
sustainable.
When we came
back to Aceh Timur in 2009 after giving an integrated agriculture training the
previous year, there had been an incredible flood that washed out one of the
beekeeping projects. That’s when the
first group of women approached us and asked for some help re-starting their
cocoa fields. Since then, the projects
have been community-led: JMD doesn’t decide what people want; they tell us, and
we see if it’s manageable, and we develop a model that can be replicated in
other parts of the district or the province, because we figure, if it plays in
Peoria, it might find success somewhere else.
That’s when
a company called Cocoa Ventures from Medan contacted JMD and asked us to please
replicate a really incredibly successful training we had developed, in what’s
called IPM—integrated pest management.
Cocoa ventures wanted to purchase large amounts of beans from a group of
villages to the east, almost on the border of Aceh Utara, where the land was
exceptionally fertile. Problem was, no
one was helping those farmers with any type of cultivation, harvest and pest
control assistance. They had lots of cocoa trees, but no idea how to
recondition and maintain them.
This was a
great opportunity—JMD could take its pest control clinic on the road—possibly
even set up a duplicate project in the area around Pante Bidari.
First,
however, JMD researched the possibility that there had been projects in that
area. If it was so fertile, if cocoa was
so important a commodity, surely some of the post-tsunami Multi-Donor Fund
money would have gone there.
And sure
enough, we found a project, funded by EDFF/The Economic Development Financing
Facility, which was the “umbrella” mechanism set up to disburse the remaining
$50 million of the tsunami assistance Multi Donor Fund/MDF. As its title suggests, it focused more on
development and less on post-disaster reconstruction. Its object was to disburse the remainder of
the fund as quickly and as easily as possible, and so its allocations were in
the $3-10 million range.
Gosh, I do
go on.
But first, a
word about the EDFF funds. Like their
big brother the MDF, EDFF funds were primarily allocated to large foreign NGOs
such as IOM, Mercy Corps, Oxfam, DAI, World Wildlife Fund, etc., the rationale
being that these agencies had large enough administrative and fiscal
departments to adequately track the awarded funds and to file appropriate
reports. In other words, the MDF/EDFF
did not trust any of the local Acehnese agencies enough to directly award them
the funds. Instead, one of two things
happened: the international NGO would subcontract with a smaller local agency
(IOM did this with JMD for its coffee improvement project), or it would simply
poach staff from the existing local agencies, paying them far more than the
local agencies could, gutting those agencies until they folded and then turning
their Acehnese employees loose at the end of the project. As far as we know, and we have done
extensive research on this, there was never any money devoted to improving the
administrative capacity of any local agency so that it could continue the work
of reconstruction after the foreign NGOs had left. Why? Because those NGOs had no intention of
leaving until the last rupiah was extracted from the World Bank’s coffers. And there were billions and billions—not of
rupiah but of dollars. “But we trained
Acehnese staff!” they will whine, from their air conditioned HQs. Yup,
you trained ‘em all right. And where
will they go work now? All the local
agencies are gone. So the best talent
Aceh has . . . leaves the province because there is no agency there to support
them.
So the EDFF
has $50 million and JMD gets busy developing proposals, based on all the
successful projects they’d done since 2005: an extensive goat fattening and
dairy project, a sustainable livelihoods initiative in the protected forest, a
cocoa improvement project for widows and fighting age males, a Robusta coffee
revitalization project that included a professional coffee consultant.
And -–funny story--each
of these projects was approved and adored.
They just
didn’t want dinky old JMD to be the agency to get the majority of the funds.
So they took
the dairy project model and gave it to then-governor Irwandi’s wife, who
thought she’d like to do something like that; they asked Fauna and Flora
International to implement a community forest ranger training program with
JMD’s livelihoods model, they asked IOM to replicate JMD’s Robusta project,
only in central Aceh and for Arabica, and they showed JMD’s model to an agency
called Action Aid Australia (AAA), and gave them $6.7 million to implement a
cocoa improvement project in five districts including Aceh Timur. All of these projects have a story. All of them made me seethe. But the one that is so exquisitely sleazy, the
one that is indeed impossible to believe, is the story of AAA and the $6.7
million that vanished without a trace, and how no one seems to be too worried
about that. I’m going to tell you about
all of them. But tomorrow we’ll start with
AAA and the 3,000 imaginary cocoa farmers.
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