Two years ago, Sommer Sibilly-Brown was at the White House discussing locally-grown food’s role in climate-change resilience. On Monday, after 75% of her federal funding was cut, the Virgin Islands Good Food Coalition executive director was ordered to end farmer-assistance programs mid-stride, uprooting 18 months of hard-earned trust.
President Donald Trump’s wide-reaching Executive Order 14151, gutting federal programs meant to bolster diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, froze funding for countless projects Jan. 20, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s two-year-old Regional Food Business Center Program.
Sibilly-Brown reluctantly paused operations meant to assist roughly 150 Virgin Islands food producers incorporate modern business practices, like navigating bookkeeping and business planning, meeting packaging and shipping regulation, and much more. She was certain Washington would release the funds after a program review.
She was wrong.
On July 15, without providing details of its ideological objections, the USDA terminated the Islands and Remote Areas portion of the program, cutting $1.05 million from the Virgin Islands farmers, including $400,000 in technical assistance, Sibilly-Brown said.
The Virgin Islands weren’t alone. Local-food programs in Puerto Rico, Alaska, American Samoa, Guam, Hawai‘i, and the Northern Mariana Islands were also hit. In total, the Island and Remote Area assistance had been allocated roughly $30 million in direct assistance to farmers, she said.
Although the islands may be far apart geographically, they all share similar issues, such as limited resources and dependence on external suppliers, she said.
Virgin Islands Good Food wrote the USDA, appealing the cuts and asking for an explanation. They haven’t heard back.
“They didn’t come back to us and say, ‘Hey, here are our priorities now. Are you willing to redo the work, to say that you align with this?’ No, they just decided to cut,” she said. “It felt like in some spaces it was punitive to us because we’re small organizations. We’re grassroots organizations. We represent, probably, the most diverse population to get the funding. And we were also trying to be really respectful and conservative.”
When funding was frozen in January, Virgin Islands Good Food paused much of its Food Center program work, including delaying deployment of new grant money for a key farmer-facing Business Builder Program, Sibilly-Brown said. Later, federal officials would use the missing Business Builder program as partial rationale for cutting all the territory’s Regional Food Business Center funds.
“We weren’t just granting money to farmers. We wanted to give them the education to move their products into the supply chain,” Sibilly-Brown said. “We were looking at the middle of the supply chain, where the food leaves the farm and either enters into a wholesale market, a retail market, or the processing steps. What does the farmer need to get into a grocery store? What does the farmer need to get into an institution?”
Many like-minded organizations have been afraid to speak up or assist each other because they fear similar funding cuts, she said.
“If we make too much noise, will we still be eligible for federal grants that might still be in the pipeline. Because we still need those resources. We don’t have a large philanthropic base. We don’t have a lot of funds in our government coffers that they’re putting toward our work,” Sibilly-Brown said.
Virgin Islands Good Food has vowed to continue assisting food producers, but it would be far more difficult now, she said.
Turning off funding didn’t just sever paths for local farmers to reduce the territory’s reliance on food shipping in from off island, it reinforced a long-running narrative: Government can’t be trusted; public funds are either wasted or stolen.
“Money is one thing; social capital is another,” she said. “The thing that we cannot afford to do in the Virgin Islands, we cannot seed any more mistrust — not of government organizations, not of philanthropic ones.”
When public works projects or nongovernmental initiatives go unfinished, and the organization or its funding disappears, it only deepens despondency among Virgin Islanders.
“All that leaves for the community is another failed project, another place where we are incompetent, another group of people who didn’t really want to serve us, another place where people feel harmed or taken advantage of,” Sibilly-Brown said. “It’s a tipping point where people need to start seeing the follow-through and the turnover in a positive way.”
It’s a loss Sibilly-Brown said her organization is unwilling to contribute to. In one form or another, she vowed Virgin Islands Good Food would carry on. The hard work of getting people invested and involved was already underway.
“It takes so much more to get the partnership started, like you almost spend all of your dollars getting to the start point. Then, when people are on board, the money is gone because money is only one part of the equation. It’s an important tool but what we can’t afford to lose is social capital,” she said. “In a place where we don’t have capital resources, social capital is king.”
St. Croix Source
Local news
