July 2017 — April Hnit Oo was born in Burma, grew up in Hawaii, and is a recent graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, where she studied Public Policy and Food Studies. Her main interests are in public health, nutrition, and food sovereignty for minority populations. April has been working with Transplanting Traditions since January of this year and was excited to have the opportunity to continue with them this summer. Because April is Burmese and speaks one of Burma’s main languages, she is an excellent liaison for the 38 Burmese refugee families who grow produce at Transplanting Traditions and who normally need an interpreter to communicate with the organization’s staff. This summer, April is working to find more market channels through which the growers can sell their specialty Southeast Asian vegetables, and is also running one of the drop off sites for Community Foodshare – a subsidized CSA program serving 25 families.
During her apprenticeship, April has had the opportunity to experience the local food supply chain from the producer’s standpoint, and has learned what hard work it is to be a small-scale farmer. “It’s really hard for small local farms. The labor is hard, and for them to be fairly compensated is hard,” says April, “The avenues to getting their product to market is not easy. The conventional avenues are usually not open to them.”
April hopes to return to Burma one day to do policy work at the intersection of public health and sustainable agriculture, and explains that “policy affects whether farmers can grow food a certain way or not and how it gets distributed.”
This article originally appeared in the June/July 2017 NC Growing Together Newsletter.