Tomasa Chávez, bundled up against the cold of the southern hemisphere winter, works at the Central Market in Buenos Aires, where she was hired in 2021 to separate edible waste that can be recovered. Until then, she went there daily on her own for 30 years to look for food and other recyclable materials among the waste that has now been given new value. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Jul 6 2022 (IPS)

For 30 years, Tomasa Chávez visited the Central Market of Buenos Aires and rummaged through the tons of fruits and vegetables that the stallholders discarded, in search of food. Today she continues to do so, but there is a difference: since 2021 she has been one of the workers hired to recover food as part of a formal program launched by the Central Market.

“Before, I used to come almost every day and collect whatever was edible and whatever could be sold in my neighborhood. Food, cardboard, wood… Now I still come to separate edible food, but I work from 7:00 to 15:00 and I get paid some money,” the short, good-natured woman told IPS.

The Central Market of the Argentine capital is a universe that seems vast and unfathomable to those who venture into it for the first time.

Covering 550 hectares in the municipality of La Matanza, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, it is full of life; to describe it merely as a central market that supplies fruits and vegetables to a metropolis of 15 million inhabitants would be an oversimplification.

In the market there are large companies and small businesses, streets, avenues, warehouses, buildings and even areas taken over by homeless people and a rehabilitation center for people with substance abuse problems. In some places people are crowded among crates of fruit and the noise is overwhelming, but there are also large empty areas where everything is quiet.

Nearly 1,000 trucks enter the Central Market every day to pick up fresh food that is sold in the stores of the city and Greater Buenos Aires. Every month, 106,000 tons of fruits and vegetables are sold, according to official data.

There is also a retail market with food of all kinds, attended by thousands of people from all over the city, in search of better prices than in their neighborhoods, in a context of inflation that does not stop growing – it already exceeds 60 percent annually – and which is destroying the buying power of the middle class and the poor.

View of one of the 12 bays where the fruits and vegetables that supply the 15 million inhabitants of the Greater Buenos Aires region are sold wholesale. The activity begins at 2:00 a.m. and every day some 1,000 trucks enter the market and some 10,000 people work there. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

As a reflection of the social situation in Argentina, where even before the COVID-19 pandemic the poverty rate exceeded 40 percent, a common image of the Market has been that of hundreds of people like Chávez rummaging through the waste, looking for something to eat or to sell.

But since August 2021, much of that energy has been poured into the Waste Reduction and Recovery Program, which is based on two main ideas: to use food fit for consumption for social assistance and the rest for the production of compost or organic fertilizer to promote agroecology.

“There was a social and environmental problem that needed to be addressed. Today we have fewer losses, we provide social assistance and create jobs,” Marisol Troya, quality and transparency manager at the Central Market, told IPS.

Coping with the crisis

The 12 gigantic bays where fruits and vegetables are sold wholesale are the heart of the Central Market, which employs 800 people and where a total of 10,000 people work every day.

At 2:00 a.m. the activity begins every day in the market with frenetic movement of crates containing local products from all over Argentina and neighboring countries, which are a festival of colors. Each bay has 55 stalls.

Three people look for food in a container of discarded products at the Central Market of Buenos Aires, where more than 100,000 tons of fruits and vegetables are sold every month to supply retail stores in the Argentine capital and its suburbs. With the recovery program, the Market seeks to provide environmental and social solutions. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

“The search for food among the Market’s waste was spurred by the economic crisis and the pandemic,” said Marcelo Pascal, a consultant to the management. “We realized very quickly that there was a lot of merchandise in good condition that was discarded for commercial reasons but could be recuperated.

“There were even small stands that used vegetables found in the garbage. A lot of edible products were recovered, but the process was disorderly, so an effort was made to organize it,” he told IPS.

From August 2021 to June 2022, 1,891 tons of food were recovered for social aid, while 3,276 tons have been used to make compost, according to official figures from the Central Market, which is run by a board of directors made up of representatives of the central, provincial and city governments.

“We have reduced by 48 percent the amount of garbage that the Market was sending to landfills for final disposal, which was 50 tons a day,” agronomist Fabián Rainoldi, head of the Waste Reduction Program, told IPS.

Fabián Rainoldi, head of the Waste Reduction and Recovery Program of the Central Market of Buenos Aires, stands in front of one of the mountains of organic waste that are used to produce compost, which serves as fertilizer for agroecological enterprises. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Orderly recovery of edible products

Justo Gregorio Ayala is working in an esplanade next to one of the wholesale bays. In front of him he has a crate of bruised tomatoes, impossible to sell at a store, but many of which are ripe and edible. His task is to separate the edible ones from the waste.

“I live here in the Market, in the Hogar de Cristo San Cayetano, and six months ago I got this job,” Ayala said, referring to the rehab center for addicts that opened in 2020 inside the Market itself.

“There were always a lot of products to recover in the Market, but now we do it better,” added Ayala, who is one of the workers hired for the Program.

He clarified, however, that the scenario varies depending on the temperature. “In summertime, because of the heat, the fruits and vegetables last much less time and the stallholders throw away more products. Now in winter we don’t find so much.”

The workers work in eight of the market’s 12 bays. There are a total of 24 workers, divided into groups of three, who separate the merchandise that the stallholders are asked to leave in the center of the bay.

The recovered goods are loaded onto trucks that are taken to a huge warehouse in the Community Action section of the Market, where they are prepared for use in social aid projects.

Justo Gregorio Ayala is one of the 24 workers who select edible fruits and vegetables discarded by vendors at the Buenos Aires Central Market. Since August last year, almost 19,000 tons of food fit for human consumption have been recovered and have gone to soup kitchens and other kinds of social assistance. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

“We deliver food to 700 soup kitchens, according to a weekly schedule: about 130 per day,” said Martin Romero, head of the Community Action section, where 22 workers perform their duties, as the first vehicles begin to arrive to pick up their cargo.

“We also put together eight-kilo bags, with whatever we have available, which we deliver to 130 families,” he added to IPS.

What is not fit for human consumption ends up in the composting yard, a plot of land covering almost three hectares, where the process of decomposition of organic matter takes about four months.

“The organic waste is mixed with wood chips made from the crates, which absorb water and reduce the leachate that contaminates the soil. The organic compost is donated to agroecological gardens which use it for fertilization and the recovery of degraded soils,” explained Rainoldi.

The goal is a Central Market that makes use of everything and does not send waste to the dump. It’s a long road that has just begun.

Rural Indonesian women selling jackfruit crackers. Photo: Abigail Lee/IPS

By Kanis Dursin
SUBANG, Indonesia, Jun 24 2013 (IPS)

When 45-year-old Kaswati joined an income-generating project in her village in Indonesia’s West Java province in 1999, all she hoped to do was supplement her family’s income at a time of erratic harvests.

But today, 14 years later, her fertiliser and jackfruit cracker businesses have far exceeded those modest plans: they have become the main sources of income for her family of four and are helping to offset the expenses of maintaining their half-hectare rice field.

Water scarcity over the past few years has forced the farming family to “draw water from faraway irrigation canals”, meaning they spend more on pumping water, and on labour, Kaswati told IPS in Pogon, a village in the Subang district of West Java province, a two-hour drive from the capital, Jakarta.

The shortage has also “limited planting opportunities to two each year instead of three, as suggested by the government,” the farmer said, adding that her compost and cracker businesses have “come to (my family’s) rescue.”

“I’ve got an outstanding order to supply 348 tonnes of compost fertiliser this year and since I cannot meet the demand all by myself, I have asked my friends to make compost and sell it to me.”

She buys the compost at an average price of 51 dollars per tonne and sells it for 77 dollars per tonne, thus making a tidy profit while also supporting members of her community.

Kaswati is just one of the many women in Pogon to benefit from an income-generating project that was partially funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in order to help this Southeast Asian archipelago nation tackle the impacts of climate change on the agricultural sector.

Under the programme, which ran from 1999 to 2006, each woman was given a bank loan, worth about 40 dollars, as capital to start a business. The loan carried an interest rate of one percent and had to be repaid in 12-month installments.

When the programme ended in 2006, Kaswati and her fellow women villagers ventured into the compost business. Along the way, however, all but Kaswati abandoned the fertiliser trade. In 2008, Kaswati began a jackfruit cracker business, together with 24 other women in the village.

“The programme taught us how to start and manage a business in order to make a profit. We also learned about bookkeeping,” Kaswati recalled.

Climate change hits hard

Indonesia’s agricultural sector provides 87 percent of raw materials for small and medium-scale industries, contributes 14.72 percent to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), and employs 33.32 percent of the total labour force.

Due to its geographical situation, Indonesia is vulnerable to the impacts of climate change including increased droughts and floods, changes in planting patterns, and increased pests, all of which threaten the country’s food security, according to Hari Priyono, secretary-general of Indonesia’s ministry of agriculture.

“Indonesia has been focusing on increasing rice production from 54.1 million tonnes in 2004 to 69.05 million tonnes in 2012,” Priyono said in his keynote remarks at an early June media workshop on climate change, which was part of an IFAD series for journalists.

“Agricultural development faces increasingly serious challenges due to climate change as well as conversion of fertile agricultural land for industrial estates and settlements,” he continued.

Prolonged drought and an extended rainy season have struck Indonesia more frequently in recent years, leaving farmers in a quandary over when to start planting crops and causing worries about the country’s food security.

In early June, for example, climate experts here predicted that Indonesia would experience rain throughout 2013, even during the dry season that usually runs from May to September or early October.

Given the changes in climate patterns, the ministry of agriculture introduced in 2012 a ‘cropping calendar’ that advises farmers on the best planting periods, seed variety, fertilisers and pesticides. It has launched new rice varieties that can withstand prolonged drought or flooding, or high salinity due to seawater intrusion.

One expert, however, says these innovations may prove insufficient to deal with the impacts of climate change.

“The problem is we don’t have the technology yet that can predict the exact beginning of each dry or wet season or the severity of floods and drought,” said Zulkifli Zaini, International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) liaison scientist for Indonesia.

To make things worse, almost 100,000 hectares of fertile farmland on the island of Java are being converted into industrial estates and settlements every year.

“Rice fields on Java island yield twice the amount produced by rice fields outside Java and this means that the government has to create 200,000 hectares of rice fields outside Java just to cover the loss (of these converted lands),” Zaini said.

According to IFAD, around 70 percent of Indonesia’s 245 million people live in rural areas, where agriculture is the main source of income. A least 16.6 percent of the country’s rural people are poor.

“Millions of small farmers, farm workers and fishers are materially and financially unable to tap into the opportunities offered by years of economic growth,” IFAD’s country manager for Indonesia, Ronald Hartman, said.

But Kaswati’s experience seems to show that diversifying means of income can help rural villagers continue to make a decent living from agriculture.

Kaswati’s businesses have only grown bigger. Early this year, she took out a bank loan worth 4,100 dollars to finance her compost business, which has given her financial freedom and power.

“I no longer ask my husband for money to buy food and other household needs, and more importantly my first daughter now studies at a university,” said Kaswati, who until early 1999 had worked as a farm labourer.

Another woman participant who declined to give her name told IPS that her jackfruit cracker business has allowed her to send her children to school.

“My first child finished elementary school only, my second only finished junior high school, while the third only senior high school – but the fourth is now studying at a local university,” she said.

“Now my husband involves me in decision-making, particularly when it comes to my children’s studies.”

Christina E. is a mother of three who lives in an apartment building in an upscale neighbourhood in Paris. As someone who prepares meals daily, she wishes she had a place besides her household garbage bin where she could put biodegradable waste.

“I feel bad every time I have to throw out vegetable or fruit peels or other organic matter,” she told IPS. “I grew up seeing my family using a compost heap and if I knew of any collective bins in Paris, I would definitely use them.”

Collective compost bins in the town of Besancon. Credit: Jean-Charles Sexe/Ville de Besançon.

If Christina lived in Besançon, a picturesque town in eastern France, she would be able to put her biodegradable waste in a bin provided by the city, and she could even “recuperate” the compost to nurture the plants on her balcony. She could also get a chicken from the town to peck away at the waste.

Located 325 kilometres from the French capital, Besançon is known as the environmental and energy-saving “champion” of France. The area boasts a stunning hilltop citadel – a UNESCO World Heritage site, in fact. It also has the highest amount of social housing of French cities.

As such, it has made noteworthy efforts to involve residents in its environmental actions and plans to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions by 20 percent by the year 2020, which is also a European Union goal.

“From the beginning, we’ve had a big awareness campaign so that people understand all the steps we’re taking. It’s a participative effort. The citizens are totally involved and understand the objective of cutting energy consumption by 20 percent,” said Nicolas Guillemet, vice president of the greater Besançon area in charge of sustainable development of the environment and quality of life.

In addition to providing compost bins to residential buildings and to private homes with space or a garden, the city also collects the compost and uses it to fertilise public parks and other green spaces. Enterprising residents can also accept a chicken from the town to help consume organic waste.

But this support is only a small part of the environmental efforts being taken by this population of 180,000. Since the town’s priority is to reduce energy as well as cut greenhouse gases, everyone has a role to play, said Guillemet.

Each year, the town “follows” a hundred or so families, studying their daily modes of transportation, their home-heating methods, and other habits. The research is aimed at showing individuals how they can change their actions to use less energy, Guillemet told IPS."It's a participative effort. The citizens are totally involved."
-- Nicolas Guillemet

At the end of the study, the findings are released to the public so that others can make similar behavioural changes, he said.

If carrots fail to entice residents, there’s always the stick, where the town adopts tougher measures to motivate residents. Household waste, for instance, is taxed according to how much it weighs – the less waste one produces, the less one pays.

These measures have resulted in a 15 percent reduction of the waste collected for incineration, according to the office of Mayor Jean-Louis Fousseret, a Socialist.

Fousseret is one of the driving forces behind the many changes in the town, but his policies are not without controversy. He has been criticised by opposition politicians for overspending.

A new tramway in the town, scheduled for completion next year, for instance, cost 250 million euros and has caused residents much inconvenience over the past several months. And changing the public street lighting system to use LED bulbs costs 1 million euros a year, according to officials. The estimated savings, however, are 5 million euros annually.

“It’s easy to respond to critics who say we’re spending too much because, yes, it’s a lot of money invested initially,” Guillemet told IPS. “But afterwards, there is a great deal of savings realised. The tramway, for instance, costs millions to create, but it lasts 50 years or more. The same with energy savings.”

“Sustainable development is about long-term vision,” he added. “We’re investing today but it’s for tomorrow and after tomorrow.”

Besançon officials say they were inspired by Germany and Switzerland, which are “way ahead of France” in terms of sustainable energy policy. The town lies close to the borders with these countries, and strong ecology alliances have developed over the years. With German and Swiss help, Besançon has become an example to other French towns, officials say.

At the end of 2012, the city was awarded the “Gold Prize” of the Cit’ergie European Energy Award for “exemplary” achievements in climate and energy action, the first French town to be so honoured.

Despite Besançon’s progress, some experts fear that the town still faces an uphill battle to reduce energy consumption by 20 percent over the next seven years.

“I don’t think we’ll make it if we don’t take more innovative steps,” said Benoit Cypriani, a representative of the green party Groupe Europe-Ecologie Les Verts.

“It’s definitely achievable in the public sector, but things will be more difficult in the private sector where houses need to be renovated to be more energy efficient, for example,” he told IPS.

Cypriani said he hoped the tramway would have an effect on the two-percent increase in “déplacement” (transportation) that the town has witnessed, mostly involving cars. He hopes, too, that at the national level, the French government will take steps to reduce electricity use that will have an effect on Besançon.

France is Europe’s leading consumer of electricity for home heating, but Cypriani believes that wood should be promoted more, as it creates less pollution.

In Besançon’s manual of priorities, cutting energy consumption must be followed by producing energy on a local level.

“We want to be self-sufficient in the territory, and that means renewable energy,” Guillemet told IPS. The town is currently investing in photovoltaic panels and assisting residents who want to install photovoltaic or photo-thermal panels on their own property, he said.

Besançon officials have further identified a wind-energy zone and, in four years, an aeolian (wind) energy plan should be implemented. Water is also being explored as an energy source, as the town lies cradled in the loop of the Doubs River, and there are plans to continue using wood in two communal wood-burning heaters.

Organic waste is gathered to produce compost, which is then distributed among local residents. Credit: Courtesy of the Argentine Network of Municipalities to Confront Climate Change

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Oct 30 2012 (IPS)

Over 30 small and medium-sized municipalities in Argentina are jointly developing policies for climate change adaptation and mitigation. The idea is to raise awareness and work together to help these communities cope with a global problem, say the promoters of the initiative.

“Big municipalities have technical teams. The problem is in the districts with 10,000 to 50,000 inhabitants, which are also isolated,” Ricardo Bertolino, coordinator of the Argentine Network of Municipalities to Confront Climate Change, told Tierramérica.

“Without peers to discuss these issues with, other priorities always seem to take precedence,” added Bertolino, who is also the deputy secretary of the environment in Rosario, in the eastern province of Santa Fe, although this city, one of the largest in Argentina, does not form part of the network.

Through the network, representatives of smaller municipalities are able to receive training and exchange experiences in areas like renewable energies, waste management and sustainable tourism, while making a commitment to address the issues that affect their communities.

“Being part of the initiative and participating in the monthly meetings keeps them involved. They leave with new ideas for sustainable small-scale projects, which they can implement in their own communities,” said Bertolino.

Launched in 2010 in the town of Monte Caseros, in the northeastern province of Corrientes, the Argentine Network of Municipalities to Confront Climate Change was created in response to recommendations from international organisations that address climate change for reducing the emissions that cause global warming and mitigating the impact of this phenomenon.

Up until now, 34 small and medium-sized municipalities have joined the network, although the majority of them are from Santa Fe, Corrientes and the eastern province of Buenos Aires, the country’s most populous. Each pays a monthly membership fee of 100 pesos (21 dollars).

“Nobody is paid a salary and we have no financing. The fees go towards maintaining the website. It’s a small initiative with the goal of putting the issue of climate change on the agendas of small municipalities,” Bertolino said.

At the meetings with municipal representatives, “we don’t give lectures,” he commented. Instead, successful experiences from different municipalities are presented as a means of sharing knowledge and promoting the engagement of the largest possible number of government officials, private companies and civil society.

“We need the different sectors to work in coordination, and for someone from these sectors with the power to make decisions to participate,” he added.

Among the most active members of the network are Colonia Emilia, a district with a population of 1,000 in eastern Santa Fe, and nearby Llambi Campbell, with a population of 3,000. Both are surrounded by cattle ranches and above all by plantations of soybeans, which is currently Argentina’s leading export commodity.

The representative of Colonia Emilia, agronomist Eduardo Paviotti, told Tierramérica that the town is working on the sorting of waste at the source, in order to feed the biodigester at Monseñor Vicente Zazpe College of Agricultural Technology, where he himself works as an instructor.

In Llambi Campbell, also represented by Paviotti, organic wastes are used to produce compost, which is then distributed among local residents. In addition, plastic, glass and paper and cardboard waste is separated for recycling, while used batteries are disposed of in plastic drums sealed with cement.

This community places special emphasis on saving electricity and reducing contaminating emissions. “Since cars are used a lot here, we launched a project to encourage children to ride their bicycles to school,” said Paviotti.

Tierramérica asked Paviotti if he did not think that the efforts of the municipality amount to a mere drop of freshwater in the ocean, since the two municipalities are tiny islands within vast fields covered with genetically modified soybeans. In addition to the threat it poses to biodiversity, this transgenic soy is resistant to spraying with glyphosate, a chemical herbicide which, depending on how it is handled, can contaminate the soil, air and water.

“We, as technicians, believe that soy can be grown without causing contamination, and that the companies that use agrochemicals should adopt less toxic production practices,” he responded. “The problem is that the economic power of these companies is too great to have an influence on them,” he added.

In any event, Paviotti said that he works with rural producers to improve the cleaning of the glyphosate containers that contaminate the urban area. The containers are reused in the region even to transport water, despite the toxicity of their original contents.

“We recommend triple washing, which consists of filling the container with clean water three times, shaking it, and pouring the contents into the sprayer, so that the remains of the product end up on the fields and not in the town,” he explained.

Paviotti, a specialist in environmental education, maintained that the municipality strives to act “in coherence with the preservation of resources,” but confessed that “it is not easy to say no to soy.”

The expert and activist said that the local residents generally cooperate willingly with the sorting of garbage and the safe disposal of batteries. However, it has been more difficult to persuade farmers to commit to the safer management of glyphosate.

“Consciousness raising is difficult. For example, with regard to the containers, the farmers are always in a hurry, and the economic cost of the time spent using the machines for cleaning them takes precedence over the environmental cost,” he lamented.

Nevertheless, despite the challenges, the idea of the network has sparked the interest of other municipalities in Latin America, who have begun to request assistance in order to replicate the experience. Bertolino has already provided training in Ecuador and has now been invited to do the same in Brazil and Venezuela.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

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