Greenhouse Project: on-site investigation

Greenhouses built by a retired official just outside the Xinlong/Nyarong county town.

My own mother, a vegetable fanatic, is the originator of this great idea help Tibetans to grow vegetables. I guess she got the idea from all of my discouraging tales of meals comprised of tsampa, yak meat, and noodles. Nutrition is another good reason to improve the local diet. Malnutrition has been scientifically documented as a serious problem in Tibetan Autonomous Region. My experience is that many children in Kham are also undersized for their age.

It is obvious that many veggies will not grow in cold, dry Tibet unless they are grown in a greenhouse. I decided that vegetables are best introduced into the Tibetan diet via a program to construct family-owned greenhouses. Vegetables will be produced not only for home consumption, but also for the local market. In the best Kham Aid tradition, the program solves two problems - poverty and malnutrition - simultaneously.

Migrant Han farmworkers and their temporary dwelling. They were, hired by local Tibetans to teach them how to grow vegetables.

Retired official and his greenhouse crop.

Xinlong County, we are discovering, is a place where both problems are particularly acute. One important reason seems to be lack of arable land. The region has highlands unsuitable for farming, and valleys whose slopes are too steep to be easily terraced. Consequently, it's difficult for families to get enough grain to eat, let alone vegetables.

In Xinlong, economic survival depends on seasonal and temporary employment digging chongcao (caterpillar fungus), collecting mushrooms, and construction. Starting today (May 20), most schools are closed for a 20-day chongcao holiday, so students can contribute to the family purse. August-September is another season when villages empty, and people migrate to the forests to gather songrong, a mushroom fancied by wealthy Japanese connoisseurs.

Construction is an especially big employer this year, as the roads south to Litang and north to Ganzi are both being improved. Construction work pays about 25 yuan ($3) per day, depending on location. Today our team visited the county middle school, and found that enrollment there is only 30% boys. That's because male teenagers are being pulled out of school and sent to work. Some women earn money for their families by spinning wool. Overall, however, the economic situation for Tibetans in Xinlong is very poor.

The Ganzi Prefecture Women's Federation, our partner on two other successful programs, was where I began investigating the possibility of a greenhouse project. Together with the Agriculture Bureau, they designed a program that would build five greenhouses and train five families in their use. But the total cost was much higher than I expected - about US$19,000. That's a lot of money to spend on just five families. Clearly, the program needed to be re-designed.

So here we are in Nyarong, researching the situation and polishing our program and budget. There are many questions How to construct the greenhouse? What to grow there? Which families to choose? How to train them? Can the business be profitable? And, most importantly how to maximize bang for the buck by designing the program not as a one-time give-away, but as a sustainable microcredit lending scheme?

Greenhouses construction. We have visited several existing greenhouses scattered around Ganzi Prefecture to check the construction cost. Despite differences in location, size, and materials, they all fall in the range of US$10-$12 per square meter. A family owned greenhouse should be simple in design, and easy to repair with locally obtained materials That means an arched wooden frame covered with clear plastic.

(Above) Sanjay Dolma's family home and adjacent land, where she hopes to erect a greenhouse.

(left) Sanjay Dolma with a boy from the same village.

Crop selection. Near the Xinlong county seat, at 3,080 meters above sea level, people are already growing cabbage, turnips, and potatoes without a greenhouse. Farmers from eastern Sichuan were just hired this year by some families in Dushi Village to teach them how to grow other things such as lotus root, asparagus, spinach - but no one yet knows if these will be successful. Their tomatoes, painstakingly planted and staked, have already been killed by early morning frost. The daily fluctuation in temperature is too great for many vegetables to be grown in the open.

Greenhouses are not entirely new to Xinlong. At another site near the town, we found a retired official who has put up some greenhouses which he has been operating for some years, in which he is successfully growing spring onions, cucumbers, and even strawberries. Thus, we have a list of successful greenhouse crops and a model to copy for our program.

Family selection. In all cases, the lead person in each family is a woman chosen by the Women's Federation. They used a criteria that we specified the families should not be already rich, they should have some level of education (someone in the house has been in primary school), and of course they must have access to land and be highly motivated to put in the necessary labor. We visited several families and satisfied ourselves that the women meet these conditions.

Training. The prefecture Ag Bureau suggested that the training be given by experts from Kangding, however we found the know-how already exists in Xinlong. We have not yet finalized the choice of trainers, but the options are the county Ag. bureau, Sichuan farmers already working temporarily in the area, and/or soldiers who have set up greenhouses at their bases near here.

Profit potential. Everyone I've spoken to in Xinlong agrees there is a great demand for vegetables in the county town, which is close enough to our two greenhouse villages for easy transport. At present, almost all vegetables consumed in Xinlong are trucked in from Chengdu, two and a half days away! The price is correspondingly high. Our first lunch after we arrived here cost 79 yuan for five people, which may sound cheap but it's about 50% more than I'm used to paying in other parts of Kham for the same food. The strawberries grown by the retired official go for 17 yuan per kilo, which makes them a luxury good. His 1.4 mu of greenhouse space earns him 16,000 per year after labor costs are subtracted. The Tibetan villagers we spoke to said they would happily increase the vegetable component of their diet, if only if they could afford to. Townspeople would certainly do the same.

Sustainability. This is crucial. It is simply unfair to choose ten families and give them a big fat freebie while neglecting other families in the same villages. Therefore we are insisting that the investments be given as a loan, not a gift, through a revolving fund and a mandatory repayment schedule . When money is paid back by the first families, it will be used to get other families started in this business. The women we've spoken to are agreeable to paying back 20-25% each year for 5 or 4 years (the exact details will be decided later).

Plans. In 2003, we will start ten families with greenhouses, tools, seeds, and training. Each year one or two additional families will be brought into the program using the monies paid back by previous families. We are still polishing the budget, but are confident that we can achieve these goals with an initial investment of less than $1500 times ten families, or $15,000.