Welcome to the 2021 inaugural edition of the POETCom newsletter; Cultivating Community with this wonderful theme of Breaking barriers in agriculture: Celebrating Women and Challenging Inequalities.

If learning is a lifelong journey, then we have all lived a long life this past year… Looking back on 2020 will forever be an amazing and emotional experience. All of us started out optimistically looking forward to a new decade, new projects, new world leaders, and for many of us, plans to travel abroad to provide technical assistance to our members, visit family, find adventure, or stress relief. What happened was learning new things, new vocabulary like as super-spreader, herd immunity, asymptomatic and lockdown, new rules including as travel restrictions, quarantine and curfews, and new challenges such as working from home, zoom meetings and teaching children about social distancing.

At POETCom we learned many new things; how to work as a team to think more creatively and deliver results, how incredibly important and supportive the POETCom Members, Supporters and Friends network is, and how sometimes it takes a crisis like a pandemic or cyclone to challenge the shortcomings of foundational institutions like industrial agriculture and patriarchal tradition. The most important lesson learned in 2020 was that anything can happen, plans change, and that managing change takes a talented team, a lot of creativity, willingness to take risk, and trust.

Growing up we were taught that pride is a vanity, but as the Coordinator of the POETCom Member network and this team, I will admit to that vanity. I am proud to be leading this team and this organisation, and never more so than through the hoops and over the hurdles of 2020 and into the challenges and opportunities of 2021. This year is optimistically starting out as a year of REs, as in recovery, rebuilding, reunions and returning to “normal”. For the POETCom team our 2021 theme is “momentum”. Despite the aforementioned challenges of 2020, we have managed to get traction and plan a way forward toward the objectives of our 2021-2025 Strategic Plan including to close the gaps and address the opportunities towards achieving gender equality and the empowerment of women, youth and other underserved stakeholders within Pacific region. Together we have managed against the odds to work around travel bans, working with in-country partners to lead workshops and value chain development. More importantly, we have established networks in our project countries that are poised to advance the organic movement as well as gender equality and social inclusion. Most important is the significant progress made with the crosscutting work of empowerment, inclusion, equity, and organics from POETCom throughout LRD, and SPC.

As we finalise and prioritise workplans to engage our ambitious Strategic Plan it is becoming clear how cutting edge the concepts are, and therefore how important the work of promoting and implementing social inclusion and organic infrastructure is for the Pacific as a whole. We again offer our sincere appreciation to the growing network of POETCom-rades, and very much look forward to the challenges and successes that 2021 will bring.

Jim Pierce

POETCom Coordinator