Sustainable Food Laboratory

Overcoming Barriers

In Central America, unacceptably high rates of poverty, hunger, and environmental degradation are particularly acute in rural areas, where 60–80% of poor families live. The recent passage of CAFTA and the rapid growth of mass retailing have been especially disruptive for small-scale farmers, who generally lack strategies to cope with demands for differentiation of agricultural products (i.e. identity preservation, traceability, segregation). Specific barriers include lack of access to credit, ineffective or inexistent farmer organizations, insufficient market system information, poor communication between producers and food companies, and inappropriate farming practices.

We can reduce rural poverty in the region, while supporting more sustainable food production, by increasing the participation and effectiveness of small-scale farmers and other rural people in food supply chains.

What We are Doing

The Sustainable Livelihoods team:

• develops opportunities for Food Lab companies to participate in projects that either involve their existing supply chains or explore new market access for producer communities; and
• assembles a body of transferable knowledge from the projects that enable us to share with others some general principles for improving supply chains for higher-valued agricultural products.

Through field work, Food Lab members are identifying and addressing barriers to small-scale farmers’ participation in national and international food supply chains. We are looking specifically at ways to assess and improve the social equity and environmental performance of existing supply chains.

In addition, these cooperative efforts are finding new ways to integrate additional small holders in supply chains based on market opportunities, and to build a road map to facilitate small-farmer participation in these and other food supply chains.

Some of our initiatives in the region include:

Assessing and Improving Supply Chains: A partnership among Counterpart International, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), and a major US retailer to assess whether farmers from Guatemala in a green bean supply chain receive a fair return and how the chain can be improved. This project will also document a “road map” for a collaborative supply chain assessment process to be shared with the food lab.

New strategies for market relationships: AgroFrontera, supported by the Rabobank Foundation, is working in the Dominican Republic to build the organizational and productive capacity of producers and their cooperatives and engage in an innovative effort to develop collaborative market relationships with international and domestic food buyers based on a diverse product portfolio. We will document and disseminate the methods and tools and assess the social and environmental sustainability standing of the supply chain after the intervention, with a focus on the impact on equity, poverty, and hunger.

Indicators of Poverty and Hunger: Green Mountain Coffee Roasters is collaborating with CIAT to assess supply chains in Guatemala and Mexico (including SFL partner ForesTrade) and work with producer communities to develop meaningful but simple indicators of poverty and hunger. These indicators are intended to help Green Mountain Coffee Roasters better understand it’s impact on poverty and enable it to be a better partner with it’s producer communities. Preliminary research suggesting indicators was completed in 2006, and those indicators will be piloted in select supply chains in 2007.