April, 2007
Presidential Commission of Rural Development in Guatemala has commissioned the Food Lab to help assess and expand their approach to addressing rural agricultural poverty.
Guatemala is known for an abundance of biologically significant and unique ecosystems. Twenty-three languages are recognized as national languages. The landscape is as varied as the cultural history but agriculture is life style shared by half of the country’s workforce.
Most of the Guatemala’s farmers are rural and poor. According to the World Bank, 87% of the rural poor depend on agriculture, either as small-scale subsistence farmers or as agricultural day laborers. Poverty puts pressure on both people and the environment as farmers often face the difficult choice between providing for their families or preserving their life-sustaining resource base.
This project builds on the Sustainable Food Lab’s collaborative experience in coffee and green beans. The Sustainable Food Lab will evaluate the first of 16 prototypes that comprise the presidential commission’s new comprehensive effort to improve the living conditions of the marginalized rural communities.
The presidential commission has launched a development effort that taps the three sectors of society (economic, civil and political) in order to set self-sustaining economic systems in motion and remove dependence on government funds. “It has been recognized,” the commission wrote, “that injustice, insecurity and deterioration of the environment are collective problems requiring an equally collective solution.”
The 16 prototypes are at various stages of development with the first one now fully operational. By evaluating the ecological and social benefits of this first prototype the presidential commission will be in a better position to improve the methods and replicate best practices in other communities and beyond.
The approach is to find community “treasures,” such as medicinal plants, vanilla, cocoa or breadnut that can be harvested sustainably and brought to market for life-sustaining wages.
In Totonicapán, commission members have helped farmers switch from growing corn, which caused deforestation and sold at low prices, to harvesting medicinal plants in the forest and natural areas at sustainable rates and selling for relatively high prices. Farmers are now selling one of these harvests, cammomile, to Wal-Mart for a line of shampoos and Wal-Mart is interested in expanding this product line.
Food Lab members will assess whether incomes have improved and what impact this switch has on the community. Through interviews at the farm and family level and all along the supply chain, researchers will evaluate the performance of the new value chain, gather culturally appropriate definitions of “success” and study the governance structures at play. Full chain assessments will also help researchers identify the role and activities of each actor along the chain and the costs and returns associated with each activity.
“We are convinced based on our previous experience in coffee and green beans that supply chain assessments can have a profound impact. There is no substitute for making genuine contact with each actor along the supply chain, building trust and building a team that is oriented towards working together rather than conducting a merely transactional relationship,” said Don Seville, project manager for the Sustainable Livelihoods Initiative of the Sustainable Food Lab.
"Supply chain assessments provide the framework within which existing relationships and system dynamics can be reviewed in a participatory fashion and informed decisions made by multiple stakeholders," said Mark Lundy, Food Lab member and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT)
"The end result of a supply chain assessment is not limited to a list of specific action items but rather the development of shared commitments to move in a common direction with clear rules of the game," he said.
Throughout the world, efforts to alleviate poverty by developing agricultural opportunities carry with them similar questions. The development community is searching for producer organization structures that are financially sustainable, equitable, embedded in community and market oriented. This community is also searching for selling and purchase practices that best support smallholder access. Researchers expect this work to have implications for the 16 Guatemalan prototypes and the wider development community that is seeking to improve the lives of rural producers everywhere.
As each new prototype develops, Food Lab members will ask: Do these new systems work? Are there specific conditions under which they do work? How could they be improved and how could the gains be sustained over time? Are they repeatable elsewhere? How far does the impact reach?
Another prototype in development is the Ramon nut, a nutritious forest product that grows wild in the subtropical Uaxactun community of Petén. Two other Food Lab members are partners in this prototype, ForesTrade and Technoserve.
Lundy said that a major point of tension for these types of projects is how to balance a western ultra-capitalist vision with an indigenous one, for example with a Totonicopan vision which could be characterized by notions of collective action and living. At issue is whether these can be reconciled.
Lundy will lead the formal assessments with colleagues Thomas Oberthur and Sam Fujisaka and support from Don Seville of the Food Lab staff.
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