Jeremy Lakin

Jean-Pierre Rousseau

Winrock has worked in Tanzania across a variety of sectors over the past 40 years, and much of its work there over the last decade has been dedicated to improving water resource allocation and management to ensure sustainable, equitable access to water for all.

Water security has always been a priority for Tanzania, especially increasing access to drinking water. Since the introduction of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals in 2000, followed by the subsequent Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, access to drinking water has more than doubled from 27 percent to 56 percent as of 2017. Though significant progress has been made, insufficient investment, poor operations and maintenance, and under-capacitated water governance institutions continue to hinder sustainable access to water. These challenges are the focus of Winrock’s approach to water security in Tanzania.

From the village level to the national stage, Winrock has partnered with Tanzanian communities, districts, water basin offices and the national government to build their capacity to plan, finance and deliver safe water services to over 720,000 people. The key to Winrock’s success has been coupling our expertise in water resource infrastructure with sustained, systems-level improvements to water access. Our approach builds partnerships and accountability between the multiple layers of water governance, from water users to communities to the national government. 

Sarai Jacobi of Nyakonge, Tanzania, right, by the new pump that brings water to her village.

Winrock has worked with and shaped strong community-based water supply organizations, water user associations, and basin water boards as key stakeholders to enact Tanzania’s Water Supply and Sanitation Acts (2009, 2019). These efforts began at the community level under the Integrated Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (iWASH) Program (2010-2016). In recent years they have been scaled up district-wide through partnerships with local government authorities, and later, the Rural Water and Sanitation Agency (RUWASA) under WARIDI (2016-present) and the basin level in the Mara Basin under the Sustainable Water Partnership (2016-present). 

Winrock’s work on the iWASH program used a multiple-use water services (MUS) approach to facilitate co-investment by communities in nearly 600 water points and wells. MUS is a consumer-oriented approach to water service delivery which takes into account people’s multiple domestic and productive water needs as the starting point for planning, financing and managing water services. The new water facilities lessened conflicts between farmers and pastoralists and reduced the distance to water sources by half for a majority of households. As a result, men and women could dedicate more time to livelihood activities.  

These improvements have made a major impact on the lives of beneficiaries, such as Lavina Venance. 

“I now have easy access to clean water less than 10 minutes away from my house,” Lavina said. “As a result, we now have as much water as we need, whenever we need it.” 

From the village level to the national stage, Winrock has partnered with Tanzanian communities, districts, water basin offices and the national government to build their capacity to plan, finance and deliver safe water services to over 720,000 people.

Like many others, Lavina has used this extra water to invest in a vegetable garden that not only feeds her family but also provides additional income. To ensure sustained community ownership and management of the new water infrastructure, iWASH facilitated the development of Water Point Management Groups and Community-Owned Water Supply Organizations (COWSOs). iWASH also invested in building a market for rope pumps, hand-drilling technologies, and WASH products. This experience working at the community level informed Winrock’s approach in subsequent activities, which scaled up training for COWSOs to manage water resources with guidance from the community’s water users. 

Winrock’s work in Tanzania addresses the next layer of water governance and strengthening community management structures by coupling institutional strengthening with construction and rehabilitation of water infrastructure. At the center of this approach are the COWSOs, which manage and operate water infrastructure. By coupling COWSO establishment and operational support with technical assistance and infrastructure development, Winrock’s work has enabled COWSOs to improve water service delivery, reliability and revenue collection for over 50 schemes. Under the new Water Act, these COWSOs are being clustered into Community-Based Water Supply Organizations (CBWSOs), and will be key to sustainably scaling water service delivery to many more Tanzanians.  To date, this activity has supported RUWASA to form 15 CBWSOs under the new Water Act. 

The key to Winrock’s success has been coupling our expertise in water resource infrastructure with sustained, systems-level improvements to water access.

Winrock has also engaged urban water supply and sanitation authorities (WSSA), particularly in Iringa. Winrock completed a rapid assessment of five WSSAs to develop a list of potential investment projects and, based on a number of selection criteria, four projects in peri-urban areas of Iringa were selected. Iringa Urban Water Supply and Sanitation Authority (IRUWASA) was actively engaged throughout the design and construction process and also invested heavily in the project, paying for trench digging, securing materials and extending distribution lines from the mainline improvements made by Winrock’s team. 

“Because of the project’s contributions, we are able to further our mission in bettering the lives of the communities through enhanced access to potable water,” said Iringa WSSA Managing Director Gilbert Kayange. “Your support has helped us to equally increase the water network system and customer base.” 

Tanzania’s nine regional Basin Water Boards (BWB) represent an additional key layer in water governance, serving as stewards of the crucial water resources that supply villages and towns with water for drinking and productive uses. Winrock is working with the Lake Victoria Basin Water Board under the Sustainable Water Partnership to develop its capacity to safeguard access to water for communities living in the Mara Basin and create a transboundary cooperation mechanism for water governance actors in Kenya and Tanzania that share the Mara Basin.  

Winrock further supports these actors with science-based decision-support tools designed with activity partner SEI, which have enabled Winrock to help Tanzania’s ministries develop the country’s first water allocation plan. “This water allocation plan is an important milestone in the process of forging a harmonized plan between Tanzania and Kenya to cooperatively manage this important resource,” said Lake Victoria Basin Commission Executive Secretary Dr. Ally-Said Matano. 

Winrock’s approaches to basin development have enabled the Lake Victoria Basin Water Board to prioritize investments in infrastructure development and water resource management and coordinate with local water users. Similar to our approaches with WSSAs, the Mara BWB can serve as a model for Tanzania’s other Basin Water Boards.

Winrock remains committed to scaling up water access for all Tanzanians by building strong water governance institutions at the community, district, basin and national levels. “The thing I am most proud of,” said Muganyizi Ndyamukama, Water Services Technical Lead for our current activities and formerly WASH Technical Lead of iWASH, “is that we are improving the lives of people.”

Poverty, lack of domestic employment and increased income opportunities outside the country have driven Nepali youth to foreign employment. For a few years the numbers of female migrants have been steadily rising, too. The age restrictions the government places on women who want to migrate to India and the Gulf states for domestic work means they are more likely to fall victim to smugglers and traffickers.

According to Nepal’s Department of Foreign Employment, more than four million Nepalis obtained work permits in the last decade. Remittances account for nearly one-quarter of the entire GDP of Nepal and was also what Nepalis relied on economically after the devastating earthquake of 2015 and the undeclared blockade imposed by India in the same year.

Nepali migrants are usually employed in the tourism, hospitality and construction sectors as well as at shopping malls. The global pandemic affects these sectors and businesses, resulting in migrant workers facing unemployment in several destination countries. Nepali workers are expecting support from their government because they have exhausted their savings during the lockdowns. Even more vulnerable are the workers who were trafficked or smuggled through unofficial channels and are staying illegally in the destination countries, unable to access help from either origin or destination countries. These, the most vulnerable and exploited among migrant workers, must be prioritized for rescue soon.

A good way to go about this is to coordinate with embassies to develop a list of migrant workers who need emergency support, rescuing those who are in the poorest condition, including those who need health and psychosocial support in addition to financial help. A list of workers with detailed information and addresses would make it easier to trace and provide health support.

All of these steps need preparatory groundwork. The official process of migration requires that workers obtain work permits and fly out of Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu. However, some workers, especially female workers who are attempting to evade the age ban and the domestic work ban in several countries, are using road entries into India and then moving on to reach the destination country. Therefore, there is no accurate data about the actual numbers of workers who have migrated for work to these countries. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced many Nepali nationals to return home, has also provided us with an opportunity to collect information and improve data-collection mechanisms, processes and systems.

The Government of Nepal should be prepared for quarantine, health and employment generation before repatriating workers back to Nepal. Local and provincial governments have an opportunity to establish and/or improve the data-mechanism system related to foreign employment. It is very important to keep careful records of returned migrants and their families. These may help us to design employment and livelihood programs based on the skills of workers. Foreign employment-related government stakeholders should have coordination channels and should share data and other information among them when they design the program for returned migrants. Foreign employment helps Nepali society bring back different levels of skills. Respecting those skills may help to  plan and design community livelihood-related programs.

Will all workers be repatriated? Can local government generate employment opportunities in the current situation? Are local governments implementing agriculture-related livelihood programs to support returned migrants specifically? Do we have a market-management policy and a preparation and action plan to move forward regarding the livelihood-related programs?  If not, when will this happen? These are the questions the local and provincial governments need to look into and answer. All three levels of government must coordinate effectively to generate employment opportunities and suitable livelihood projects. If today the government is able to stand for returned migrants and support them effectively, we may not have to see the coming generations queuing up for permits to work abroad or taking desperate steps through unofficial migration channels to work in foreign countries, making themselves vulnerable to trafficking and exploitation.

Winrock International is helping restore Indonesia’s peatland in a way that will mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, slow land subsidence, combat the threat of fire, and support the tens of thousands of people who live and work there. I recently returned from a trip to Indonesia, where obstacles — and opportunities — are both in full view.

Michael Netzer, GIS and Remote Sensing Carbon Analyst at Winrock International

A land of oil palm, acacia and peat

From a small rise in elevation the Kampar Peninsula spreads before us, dominated by row upon row of oil palm trees. Beyond the horizon stretch plantations of acacia trees, feeding one of the largest pulp and paper industries in the world. Decades ago, a vast wetland forest covered this land, located about 85 miles west of Singapore on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Known as peatland, the forest grows atop a thick layer of spongy peat moss, which formed over tens of thousands of years as organic matter accumulated without decomposing in the marshy, coastal conditions.

Today, the 700,000 remaining hectares of peatland in the Kampar are draped over the mineral soil as deep as 10 meters in many areas. These peatlands, however, are threatened by the expansion of the oil palm and acacia plantations that now cover over 70 percent of the landscape — the result of cheap available land, corporate and economic interests, large government incentives, and corruption that allowed large areas of land to be granted by local leaders to the highest bidder.

Oil palm and acacia threaten the natural peatland because these crops are not native to wetland environments and therefore require extensive ditching and draining of the peatland. When peatland is drained, the land shrinks and subsides — a process that threatens almost half of the current production land in the Kampar with collapse in the next 50 years. It also dries out the top few meters of peat, accelerates its decomposition, and releases large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Once these waterlogged soils dry out, they then become susceptible to fires that on dry years can become catastrophic.

The collapse of peatlands due to subsidence exacerbated by fires leaves only two options for Indonesia: restore the peatland through rewetting and finding alternative wetland tolerant production systems — or continue as usual until the collapse of both the ecosystem and the socioeconomic systems it supports.

Much of Indonesia’s peatland has been cleared to make way for oil palm and acacia plantations. Photo By Michael Netzer.

The situation is complex. The oil palm and acacia pulp and paper industries support the livelihoods of most of the smallholder farmers and constitute a large economy that the government relies on. Yet fire and land subsidence threaten these systems, and local and national governments are now keenly aware that alternatives to current peatland management need to be found. The question becomes, can these peatlands be rewetted and restored, and can the remaining wetland forest be protected without destroying the local economy? The answer to that question is critical to the future of Indonesia’s 14.9 million hectares of peatland, which accounts for a staggering 36 percent of the world’s tropical peatland. And that’s the question we have set out to investigate.

‘My Forest, My Breath’

As we drive east, we spot a plume of smoke from a fire. One of my local colleagues says it has been burning for a few days — a big fire for the wet season. After we move on, I overhear him calling the local authorities. Since the fires of 2015, the local government has initiated a number of programs to combat fire, including citizen alert systems like the one he is calling.

We’re going to a “Hutan Desa” (village forest), an area of forest that has been granted to the local villages as part of a government program meant to increase local authority of the land and foster better environmental stewardship. My motorbike guide puts on a dust mask that reads “Hutanku Napasku” or “My Forest, My Breath,” demonstrating the degree to which people in this region value forests.

Our motorbike guide dons a dust mask reading “Hutanku Napasku” or “My Forest, My Breath.” Photo By Michael Netzer.

On our way to the forest we pass a large, desolate clearing where an illegal oil palm plantation is in the initial stages of development. Where a wetland forest once stood there are now a series of large canals, still being dug by backhoe, and neat lines of oil palm seedlings planted among fallen logs. The wetland soil is now dry from draining.

This type of development is prohibited under Indonesian law passed after the fires of 2015. My guide explains that his village made a formal complaint to local authorities when they learned about the concession development, but the complaint clearly was not enough to stop it. These concessions only provide low-paying labor, he says, and his village is far more worried about the threat of fire. Despite changing policies and some encouraging national trends regarding peatland protection, this plantation is a stark reminder of how the push for development is always ready to continue its march forward.

However, oil palm is not the only culprit. Acacia trees that feed the massive pulp and paper mills to the south also drive land conversion and peatland forest loss. Acacia plantations account for over 70 percent of all the plantation land in the Kampar. These non-native trees grow quickly but require deep and well-organized drainage systems, which have caused some of the worst environmental impacts in the peninsula. Despite sustainability commitments from the pulp and paper industry, very little has been done, and around 35 percent of the acacia land is projected to collapse in the next 50 years.

There is an alternative to this plantation model. Fast-growing, wetland-tolerant trees species like mahang (Macaranga pruinosa) and geronggang (Cratoxylum arborescens) are economically viable and could replace acacia. The challenge is that even fast-growing wetland species grow at about half the rate of acacia, an unfortunate biophysical reality for the anaerobic nature of wetlands — and this modest loss in short-term profits is hard for the pulp and paper industry to accept even if it means long-term gains.

When I mention this perplexing lack of business forethought to local experts, most shrug in a resigned way. They remind me that in Indonesia the companies do not actually own the land, leasing it from the government instead for 50 to 100 years. By then, many of the leases will expire, and the companies will move on, leaving the cost and the damages to the local people and the government.

We reach the forest edge, park our bikes and begin to hack our way along an overgrown forest path. The forest canopy provides thankful refuge from the sun. Under a thick layer of leaflitter, the soil becomes spongy and our boots sometimes break through the top layer into the wet underneath.

We make our way into the peatland forest, which provides local communities with many sustainable products. Photo By Michael Netzer.

This forest does indeed provide the local communities with sustenance — or “breath.”  Our guide points out edible durian fruit growing from the canopy trees, and a type of guava called punak that provides a sweet and sour snack as we hike. We also munch on a small bitter leaf that apparently gives you energy while hiking. The forest also provides a number of economically valuable species, including sago palm (Metroxylon sagu), which produces large amounts of tasty starch that is commonly used in Southeast Asian noodles and breads; jelutong (Dyera costulata), a latex-producing tree that produces a high-quality food grade rubber; and nipa palm (Nypa fruticans), which produces light sugar that is not uncommon in Asian markets.

The canals and bits of open water in these remnant natural forests abound with small fish that provide a staple food source and small livelihood for local communities. Fishing was the traditional livelihood of the indigenous peoples of these peatlands. But as the natural forests peel away so do the fish, due to high water temperatures in the exposed canals and frequent fluctuations in water level. The sustenance opportunities supplied by the forest could be established without draining the peatland, all of which could help reestablish a more traditional, integrated and profitable lifestyle for the local people.

Seeking a solution to peatland forest degradation

Together with a number of local NGOS and the local government, Winrock has been developing demonstration plots and building capacity of the local community to re-wet the drained land and grow wetland-tolerant crops. Called paludiculture, these wetland cropping systems present a win-win approach for the region. However, there are challenges with paludiculture. Most local communities lack the resources to either adequately re-wet and restore the peatlands that have been drained, or to know what types of different crops or commodities could be grown on the re-wetted peat.

Winrock demonstration plots for paludiculture offer an alternative to the peatland degradation caused by oil palm and acacia plantations. Photo By Michael Netzer.

This is where Winrock comes in. Paludiculture allows for the restoration of the peatland, and in turn combats fire, land subsidence and greenhouse gas emissions while providing an economically viable alternative income for local people. In these small garden plots, annual crops like pineapple and chili pepper are being planted that can provide the local community with short-term profits. Intercropped with the annuals are longer-term perennials like sago and jelutong. Once mature, these crops have the potential to replace oil palm as the primary income for these local communities. And on the fringes of the demonstration plots grow mahang and geronggang trees. Not just an alternative to the pulp and paper industry, these trees can also serve as a wood-energy crop for markets in Japan and South Korea.

Based on Winrock’s research, these paludiculture perennial crops have the potential, if developed appropriately, to scale into large commodities generating higher profits per hectare than oil palm for the local community.

A truck rumbles through the cleared peatland. Photo By Michael Netzer.

As a reminder of the challenge before us, a procession of trucks loaded with acacia rumble by the demonstration plot. They’re heading to the nearby dock on the Siak River, where they will be loaded onto boats and transported to a local mill. In a sense the trucks symbolize one possible future for this area, one in which the peatland is doomed to collapse. These paludiculture cropping systems offer a different future, replacing business-as-usual with a sustainable, economically viable alternative that restores the ecosystem services that once protected this fragile peatland.

If you have ever been part of designing and implementing a large event you will recognize the need to start well in advance. In our case we started planning the Wallace Center’s fifth National Good Food Network (NGFN) conference — an important biannual networking and programming event — 18 months ahead of time.  We lined up over 40 breakout sessions, five plenaries with 20 panelists, 10 pre-conference trainings and local site visits — and we registered almost 500 people for the event, which was held in New Orleans March 10 ­­– 13. Little did we know that our timeline was to intersect with that of COVID-19.

Perhaps prophetically, we designed NGFN 2020 to recognize that we are at a pivotal moment in food systems change; that after years of seeking to shift the food system to be more healthy, green and equitable, those of us involved in this work would be well served to take stock of where we  have made progress and where haven’t, examine what is working and what is not, and honestly look at who is being left out.  Despite our collective years of work and the gains we have made, there is still a long way to go, which calls on us to be more strategic, collaborative and collective in our approach. Our stated theme and guiding light was “A More Just Vision: Collaborating on the Future of Good Food.”  Now that we are weeks into this global pandemic, it’s clear that we are indeed at a pivotal moment in how we feed ourselves — and a more just vision is what we desperately need.

While in New Orleans for NGFN 2020, we felt the tremors of how business as usual was quickly changing. Although there was no quarantine at the time, dozens of speakers and many funders and public sector allies were grounded with non-essential travel bans. Members of USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service,  a leading conference sponsor, were encouraged not to travel, yet they showed up in force and told participants that the work we were doing together at the conference was “mission critical” and they needed to be there.  Those who manage regional food hubs and processing centers, especially those with significant sales to schools, universities and other food service accounts, had begun to receive notice of canceled orders. They were tasked with calling their farmers to inform them of these disruptions and working with them to find alternative markets. They had to grapple with the overnight loss of 30 to 50 percent of sales and its effect on employees, suppliers and community.

During the conference, over 50 participants swiftly convened in an emergency session to try to make sense of this in real time, to help each other think through how to respond back home and how to catalyze action. The group drafted a call to action to government, philanthropy, companies and others to quickly address the needs of households, farmers, farm workers and small food businesses.  Following the conference, the Wallace Center created a COVID-19 Response Group Listserv, which is connecting over 700 food and farm advocates and conference participants to identify and share innovations and needs as everyone quickly transitions to a new reality.

Currently we are seeing a tremendous amount of innovation and leadership among good food value chain organizations. For example, the Common Market in Philadelphia, which lost a large part of their sales as schools and universities closed, is now adding to their employee roster after being contracted by the City of New York to pack and deliver 3,000 boxes a day of regionally sourced foods for emergency relief. 4P Foods in Virginia has stepped into a regional coordination role utilizing the knowledge and infrastructure of 14 food hubs up and down the East Coast to address food insecurity while steering philanthropic funds into local procurement by connecting farmers to food access points and markets. In New Orleans, a diverse group of leading food systems organizations including Market Umbrella, Recirculating Farms Coalition, SPROUT NOLA, Liberty’s Kitchen and the New Orleans Food Policy Advisory Committee teamed up with community-based distributor Top Box Foods Louisiana to rapidly co-create a multi-farm community-supported-agriculture box for home delivery. Within one week of the city’s stay-in-place order they were distributing hundreds of boxes weekly to community members. Examples like these are popping up all over the country, proving the resilience of local and regional food systems.

This pandemic is showing us that we need a food system capable of responding to a crisis that cripples core links in the supply chain. Various parts of the conventional food system are cracking or breaking down; millions of low-income Americans of all backgrounds rely on the government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the emergency food systems, both of which are constrained by social distancing measures, increased demand, and arcane rules that inhibit adaptation. The current situation is revealing what many have been saying for a long time — that systemic racism has made communities of color more vulnerable to shocks to our basic systems, including shocks to the food system. Most essential workers in agriculture, slaughterhouses, meat packing plants, food service and restaurants are indigenous, black, brown and other people of color working for low wages with no benefits, leaving them with few resources to ride the crises out. Immigrant farmworkers and food chain workers are especially vulnerable, as they have no access to a social safety net.

Two years ago, our team at the Wallace Center committed to center racial equity in our work, and for NGFN 2020 we took this commitment seriously. Starting with a large and diverse conference advisory committee, we set out to elevate and amplify all voices to ensure that the conference reflected the entirety of the good food movement. We were extremely intentional about inviting people of color to speak on plenary panels, about prioritizing breakouts sessions that directly address issues of structural racism in the food system and providing travel scholarships for people from frontline communities who would otherwise not be able to attend.  As a result, 67 percent of plenary speakers and a growing number of conference attendees identified as people of color, and 62 percent of participants were joining us for the first time, indicating that we are expanding our audience. We view this as a significant step toward centering racial equity at the Wallace Center. Check out this short video made from footage at the conference.

If there was ever a time to expand the fundamental goals of our food system to include resilience and equity, this is it. Federal funds via the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act and other vehicles should put in place resiliency plans and ensure procurement practices and safety nets that support more place-based food and farming systems that provide healthy and affordable food, cost-of-living jobs, and wealth creation opportunities in communities across America. There is a very real danger that we emerge from this crisis with an even more consolidated food system that trades resilience and community health and wealth for one that continues to push people on the margin off the edge. Establishing thriving regional food and farming systems begins with reducing barriers to entry for farming, requiring use of regenerative production practices, and investing in innovation and infrastructure for handling, processing and distributing food through a diversity of market channels. These are righteous steps along the path toward “A More Just Vision: Collaborating on the Future of Good Food” — and the Wallace Center is committed to taking them.

In the weeks leading up to my trip last month to work onsite with the USDA-funded Creating Linkages for Expanded Agricultural Network (CLEAN) in Laos, the pandemic that has now interrupted daily life in many parts of the world had not yet reached its current proportions.

It was my first scheduled trip to support a field team in my new role as senior content manager at Winrock, and I didn’t want to cancel. I’d braved dengue, malaria, yellow fever and sleeping sickness while living in Africa and had avoided chikungunya, typhoid, hepatitis and other maladies during a half-decade in Asia. As an old friend from Myanmar wrote before I departed: “Do not worrying about the virus because you had lived in Myanmar for too long, so your immune system has been upgraded to overcome all the viruses.”

Of course, he was only kidding. On the morning of my scheduled flight from Little Rock, I got a call from Global Safety and Security Director Tobias Friedl, informing me that all non-essential Winrock travel was postponed. Since I was already scheduled to depart that day, I could still opt to travel, but must reroute return flights to avoid Korea and China.

I decided to go. I arrived in Seoul at 4 a.m. on February 25, enjoying extra leg and arm room on my flights due to empty seats next to me. At Incheon, I experienced the impact of the virus, with the airport less than 25 percent full, and 95 percent of people wearing masks. I deplaned through a gauntlet of infrared temperature scanners manned by Korean medical personnel wearing masks, gowns and caps. I felt conspicuous without my own personal protective equipment and paid $12 for two paper masks at an airport pharmacy.

As I boarded for Vientiane, the attendant motioned me to pull my mask up, and I later realized I was wearing it upside down. I landed in Laos and arrived at a nearly empty hotel.

Mr. Boonchuy is manager of a dried-sliced cassava aggregation point in Champasak Province in southwestern Laos. Representatives from a grain storage company were able to reach the Lao Cassava Association through a WhatsApp network that connects some cassava farmers to processors, buyers and suppliers. Photo: Timothy D. May

At that point in late February, the CLEAN team, led by Chief of Party Alex Dahan, was aware the virus could soon alter their work plans. Staff were under guidance to keep away if they felt sick, office spaces were cleaned carefully, and hand sanitizer abounded. But with no cases yet reported in Laos, activities continued as scheduled.

I was lucky to attend one of the project’s major events, Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) Inspectors’ training with provincial and district Agriculture and Forestry Departments staff, led by the government’s Clean Agriculture Standards Centre, held in the usually booming adventure town of Vang Vieng. A haven for climbers, spelunkers and tubers on the Nam Song River, the picturesque town was sadly empty. Our hotel had few occupants other than CLEAN and government staff assembled for the training.

Mr. Seng sells his dried-sliced cassava to Thai or Vietnamese buyers who export it. He is interested in learning about GAP strategies to increase yields and protect his soil. Photo: Timothy D. May

Alex Dahan and Phiengphaneth Chanthalansy, the project’s communications manager (who goes by “Pik”), and I monitored the news as the virus escalated in Korea, Italy and Iran, and began to spread through communities in the U.S., eventually reaching even Little Rock. On March 12, when President Trump restricted travel from Europe, I decided it was time to return to the U.S. I was  booked on the first available flight to Singapore, then through San Francisco and Denver back to Little Rock.

Since my return, the first few coronavirus cases in Laos have been reported, but CLEAN colleagues in Laos are adjusting well to changed work conditions. And I’m appreciating the gift I received from Pik right before I left the country — a packet of masks, in case I couldn’t find any in the U.S.