COMMUNITY members in five ex banana-producing communities of St Thomas have been taking the initiative to help with a rural diversification project geared towards sustaining the livelihood of the communities.

The first phase of the project is rehabilitating and providing new check dams to deal with problems of land slippage and flooding when it rains heavily in Somerset, St Thomas.

Elsewhere in Trinityville, Johnson Mountain, Spring Bank and Mount Vernon, the rural diversification project – the EU Banana support Project: Strengthening Capacities for Sustainable Livelihoods – is geared at improving the living standards and quality of life of farmers, farm workers, their families and communities with a wide number of initiatives to help in employment, training and environmental concerns.

The project is implemented by the Women’s Resource and Outreach Centre (WROC) with the support of the European Union (EU) and Christian Aid and the Rural Agricultural Development Authority (RADA).

Ground was broken for the constructio in of a check dam at the Fitzgerald Gully in Somerset on February 17 and excavation work has been completed.

The work is critical as whenever it rains heavily, the large Somerset community is inundated with tons of soil and millions of gallons of water from two gullies – Fitzgerald and Church. This affects farms and houses, blocking roads, and in many cases people are forced to abandon their homes and suffer tremendous losses. Although two check dams were built to address the situation, these have been damaged, due among other things, to the scale of the inflows of earth and water and poor maintenance by the local authorities.

Community members have been helping to build two check dams closer to the most active areas of both gullies. Construction will reduce the velocity of water run off and retard the movement of topsoil down slope.

Workers for the project have been selected from a core group of ex-banana workers and others who stand to benefit from the project. The work on the check dams is being implemented with technical support of the Forestry Department, the Water Resources Authority and the St Thomas Parish Council, said Claudia Sewell, co-ordinator of the project, operating from WROC’s office in Morant Bay.

The work in St Thomas is addressing the inability of these farmers and their communities to access, among other things, alternative employment opportunities and means of securing a sustainable livelihood, problems which mounted with the decline in banana production.

Community meetings held so far have brought out worrying concerns raised by the community leaders, which include teen pregnancy, a need to improve literacy and numeracy, the creation of job opportunities outside farming, the devastation that occurs each time it rains, bad roads and the migration of community members.

The project will help in the development of the communities and provide long-term opportunities by helping to strengthen community-based organisations, provide different economic activities for the communities and residents, create income generation and employment opportunities and help the communities cope better with natural disasters.