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ECUADOR
Co-op Proves that the
Poor Can Eat Organic, Too
By Gonzalo Ortiz
CUENCA, Ecuador (IPS) - "There is
no reason why we poor people have to eat
badly," says Ecuadorian farmer Juan
Anguisaca. "It’s not true that organic
products have to be expensive. They can
be profitable and within the reach of
the poor," Rodrigo Aucay adds.
Anguisaca and Aucay are both members of
Coopera (Cooperate), an agricultural
services cooperative based in San
Joaquín, a rural parish with a
population of 5,000 on the outskirts of
the city of Cuenca, located in the
Andean mountains 440 km south of Quito.
Anguisaca works in the cooperative’s
collection centre, while Aucay is the
general manager.
The cooperative was founded in January
2004 by eight members who contributed
six dollars each, for a total of less
than 50 dollars. Six years later, it now
has 60,000 members and 28 million
dollars in assets.
Perhaps even more remarkable is that all
of this has been achieved through 100
percent organic production, as Aucay, an
agricultural engineer, emphatically
tells IPS.
Xavier Patiño, vice president and head
executive of the Cuenca Chamber of
Commerce, recognises the "impressive
success" achieved by Coopera. "Not only
do they already account for 10 percent
of the market in Cuenca, with their own
stores, but they have also served to
regulate the market," he tells IPS.
Patiño believes that Coopera and other
cooperatives that operate along a
similar model deserve credit for
stabilising prices in Cuenca, where
there has been zero inflation in recent
months.
This recognition led Patiño, whose
family is involved in agribusiness, to
invite Coopera to open an office in the
building where the Chamber’s
headquarters are located. The office was
opened several months ago.
Coopera was also invited to open an
office in the headquarters of the
Chamber of Agriculture of Guayaquil,
which has traditionally represented
large exporters of bananas, cacao and
coffee. The fact that these small
farmers from San Joaquín have managed to
carve a place for themselves in the
world of agribusiness is further
testament to their success.
The Coopera collection centre in San
Joaquín is one of three operated by the
cooperative. All of the vegetables,
fruit and meat produced by the members
are brought to these centres, where they
are sorted, washed, packed and sent off
to the cooperative’s own stores in
Cuenca and Guayaquil, Ecuador's most
populous city.
Next to the San Joaquín collection
centre there are three hectares of
greenhouses equipped with drip
irrigation systems. "This is where the
agronomists do their crazy things,"
comments Aucay, proudly showing off an
area where they are growing watermelons
- something totally unheard of in the
Ecuadorean Andes, where even the valleys
are up to 2,600 metres above sea level.
"We’re experimenting. They’re still
small," he notes, pointing to the
20-centimetre long melons.
Further along, Aucay shows us an area
where chilli peppers are being dried.
They will be used to make organic
insecticides.
He then points to what look like
mustard-yellow plastic flags placed at
intervals in the plant beds where they
are experimenting with different
varieties of tomatoes. "There are no
organic insecticides that can deal with
the whiteflies that infest tomatoes, so
we invented these flytraps," he explains
with a smile.
The plastic is coated with a mixture of
honey and gum arabic, a sort of natural
glue made from tree sap. Once they are
drawn there by the honey, the tiny pests
are stuck for good.
"This was also our training centre, up
until last year," Aucay adds, "but now
we give our courses and seminars on a
20-hectare farm that has been loaned to
us free of charge by the University of
Azuay."
Ironically, this prestigious private
university was forced to shut down its
agricultural engineering programme
because of a shortage of students, while
Coopera can barely keep up with the
demand for its organic agriculture
courses, offered to cooperative members
and small farmers from other
organisations.
While showing us around the experimental
crops being raised in the greenhouses,
Aucay recounts the story of the
cooperative’s beginnings. It emerged
from a two-year participatory planning
process, headed up by the municipal
government of Cuenca, aimed at
formulating a rural development plan.
The local residents came to a consensus:
that their second priority was to
establish an agricultural services
cooperative, while their first priority
was transportation.
"What people wanted was to establish
some sort of entity, regardless of what
it was called, that could be used to
'recycle' the resources of the area in
order to reinvest them in their own
community, without going through the
banks in the city," Anguisaca explains
to IPS.
The region covered by the initiative, a
valley stretching over an area of 800
hectares, of which barely 300 are
arable, has historically been used for
horticultural production, and has
supplied the city of Cuenca with
vegetables for centuries.
But as the land passed down from
generation to generation of small
farmers and was subdivided among the
heirs, the amount of land owned by each
household had progressively dwindled, to
an average of only half a hectare of
arable farmland per family.
"We weren’t destitute, but we weren’t
doing very well either, and there was a
clear desire to improve the situation,"
Rosa Parra, who works in the greenhouse
as well, tells IPS.
"Essentially, all throughout 2003, the
people made two things clear. The first
was that they didn’t want just another
savings and loan cooperative, but rather
some sort of institution that would
provide services. One of these would be
financial services, but they also wanted
something that would support production,
create businesses, and open up new
prospects" Aucay says.
"The second thing was that among these
new prospects, they wanted to pursue
organic agriculture, because they were
fed up with the rising prices of
chemical products," he adds.
As a result, the cooperative started out
with a totally new kind of approach,
says Aucay, whose personal background as
a small farmer himself and previous
experience in agricultural cooperatives
were decisive in guiding the process.
Along the way, they proved that the
popular belief that organic produce is
more costly is a myth. They set up
experimental farms and hired agronomists
committed to non-chemical farming
techniques, who developed a whole range
of organic fertilisers, fungicides and
pesticides.
When Aucay takes us to the shipping
area, we ask him if the various packaged
goods, such as jars of jam, were sold to
supermarkets. "No way," he replies. "Why
would we want to give away our profit
margin to the supermarkets?"
Coopera recognised the need to operate
its own sales outlets early on. It
started out in Cuenca, then moved to the
western province of Guayas, on the
Pacific coast, and particularly the poor
neighbourhoods of the provincial
capital, Guayaquil, with a total
population of 2.2 million.
"I had worked in a cooperative in
Naranjal (in the province of Guayas),
and so we first tried it out with them.
Coopera merged with that cooperative in
2007, and we have been able to
complement each other’s respective
production and distribution chains,"
Aucay says.
Coopera’s model of making organic
agriculture profitable by offering
high-quality products at affordable
prices was consolidated through a
decision made by the cooperative in its
first years of operation: that its main
market would be the poor.
"We not only involve citizens in their
own development, by rejecting
paternalism and clientelism, but also
strive to provide the greatest possible
benefits to our customers, by offering
them food that is healthy and safe,"
Aucay adds.
In addition to his role as general
manager of Coopera, Aucay is also
president of the National Network of
Popular and Solidarity Financing, made
up of 12 smaller networks that each
encompass dozens of cooperatives,
associations and foundations. |
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