Members of the Masehual Siumaje Mosenyolchicauani women's cooperative, who teach weaving and other crafts of the Nahua people, in Cuetzalan del Progreso, central Mexico. Credit: Courtesy of Taselotzin

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Nov 5 2024 (IPS)

What began as a search for fair prices for indigenous handicrafts in 1985 has evolved into a women’s organisation in Mexico that promotes climate justice while advocating for land and environmental rights.

“We set ourselves the very broad goal of achieving access for women to a more dignified life, and we did that through various activities,” Rufina Villa, an indigenous Nahua woman, told IPS.

“We thought we were only going to make handicrafts, but with the meetings we saw that it was important to do other things,” said the founder of the Masehual Siuamej Mosenyolchicauani (indigenous women who support each other, in the Náhualt language) cooperative.“We are constantly training to improve our services. We started learning about the problems of pollution in our environment, to see places with deforestation, damage caused by mass tourism”: Rufina Villa.

These initiatives include women’s literacy, human rights training, product quality improvement, economic autonomy and environmental protection in Cuetzalan del Progreso, in the central state of Puebla, some 297 kilometres south of Mexico City.

Nestled among mountains in the region known as the Sierra Norte, Cuetzalan is a rural municipality, called a ‘magical town’ because of its location, with cloud forests, waterfalls and caves, among other scenic beauties, and a majority indigenous population.

Founded by 25 women, in its first stage the cooperative focused on protecting the environment by separating waste, making compost for their crops and farming with agro-ecological practices. It has also always protected the springs that supply water to Cuetzalan and encouraged energy transition to less polluting alternatives.

“We were pioneers in supporting community tourism to protect the territory. We are constantly training to improve our services. We began to learn about the problems of pollution in our environment, to see places with deforestation, damage caused by mass tourism,” continued the 69-year-old activist and mother of four daughters and four sons.

Although the cooperative does not explicitly link its activities to the search for climate justice, they aim to solve, at least in their community, the environmental and climate problems that others have created.

Cuetzalan del Progreso, in the central state of Puebla. Credit: Secretary of Tourism

Climate justice revolves around economic equity, security and gender equality and seeks solutions to the inequalities created by the causes and consequences of the climate crisis among individuals and groups of people.

After building a hotel in 1997, whose caretaker is Villa’s husband, the organisation invested some USD 20,000 in 2022 in the installation of solar panels, an amount already recouped, in a push for energy transition in an area where hydroelectric and fossil plants supply most of the electricity.

To cut gas and electricity costs, they also installed solar water heaters the following year.

The Taselotzin (Nahuatl for ‘offshoot’) Hotel, set in a nurturing environment, offers private rooms, cabins and dormitories, as well as ecotourism services, highlighting the value of the forest and water sources. On the premises, members of the cooperative also teach how to make and appreciate Nahua weavings and other handicrafts.

It belongs to the Huitziki Tijit (Náhualth for ‘hummingbird’s path’) Tourism Network, which operates in five Puebla municipalities with a majority Nahua population and great ecological value, among them Cuetzelan.

In 1997, a cooperative of Nahua women founded the Taselotzin ecotourism hotel, in the indigenous municipality of Cuetzalan del Progreso, in the state of Puebla. Credit: Courtesy of Taselotzin

Growing risks

Like other regions of Mexico, a country vulnerable to the effects of the climate crisis, Cuetzalan, with some 50,000 people in 2020, is suffering from climate impacts.

Between March and June this year, the municipality experienced severe, extreme and exceptional droughts, which had not happened so far this century, according to the governmental National Meteorological System’s Drought Monitor.

In addition, it lost 1,000 hectares of tree cover from 2001 to 2023, equivalent to a 12 percent decrease since 2000, according to data from the international platform Global Forest Watch. In 2023, it lost 86 hectares, the highest figure since 2019 (108).

“The land is bountiful. We have been through a lot and we are still standing,” said Doña Rufi, as she is affectionately known in the area, which cultivates milpa, an ancestral system that combines the planting of corn, beans, squash and chili peppers, as well as coffee, bananas and medicinal plants.

This century, the communities of Cuetzalan have faced threats to water, such as mass tourism, mining and hydroelectric initiatives, as well as electricity and oil projects of the state-owned Petróleos Mexicanos and Federal Electricity Commission.

A woman weaves on a loom in the indigenous municipality of Cuetzalan del Progreso, central Mexico. Credit: Government of Puebla

The Cuetzalan Ecological Territorial Planning Program, created in 2010, regulates land use in the municipality.

Most of Cuetzalan’s water supply relies on springs. More than 80 community water committees operate and are responsible for water transfer infrastructure and maintenance, but the drought is affecting these sources.

“The drought has been hard, although now it is raining. We protect the springs and that is why we have opposed projects of death”, as the Nahua villagers call works that destroy the environment, said Villa.

The cooperative is made up of 100 Nahua women from six of the municipality’s communities. It is one of some 100 women’s cooperatives, out of a total of 8,000 operating in the country.

Two farmers check the flow of water coming from the springs, the main source of supply for the indigenous municipality of Cuetzalan del Progreso in the Mexican state of Puebla. Credit: Cupreder

Absent

Mexico’s public policies lack a climate justice perspective, which is reflected in the territory.

The latest update of Mexico’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), the set of voluntary climate policies that each country adopts as part of the Paris Agreement, mentions climate justice only once and does not link any of the measures to it.

The same is true of Puebla’s 2021-2030 State Climate Change Strategy.

Hilda Salazar, founder of the non-governmental organisation Mujer y Ambiente, believes the ‘powerful’ concept of climate justice has permeated little in Mexico’s municipalities and communities.

“There has been no vision of climate justice. In recent years, because of the severe impacts, they have begun to introduce the concept, but without much clarity about what we are talking about,” she told IPS in an interview in Mexico City.

“The state and municipal governments have a great lack of knowledge. When it comes to implementation, it is seen as an environmental issue, not as development, and it is divorced from the climate agenda”, she adds.

A banner rejecting megaprojects in the indigenous municipality of Cuetzalan del Progreso, in the central Mexican state of Puebla. Credit: Cupreder

In Mexico, the courts have received at least 23 lawsuits related to climate issues, a far cry from Brazil’s 89 cases. Few have been successful and fewer still were linked to climate justice.

In this scenario, processes such as those of the Cuetzalan cooperative could motivate more local communities to undertake their own.

Villa appreciated several lessons learned from the cooperative’s longstanding work.

“We know how to organize, which one person cannot achieve alone—to continue establishing networks, to know what is happening in other regions, it is important to take care of our environment and our culture, defend our collective rights, our autonomy as women, as people, as indigenous people,” she stressed.

And she believes it is important to pass this on to younger women. “Women used to work at home, but now they go out to sell their products, such as coffee, cinnamon, honey, or work in tourism,” she said.

According to Salazar, who is also a member of the non-governmental Gender and Environment Network, there is a lack of legislation, programmes and land policies.

“It is a structural problem. It does not reach the dimension it should have because of the impacts, and policies divorce economic, technological, social and cultural aspects. There are disadvantages (for women) from access to information to participation and implementation,” she said.

In her opinion, the gender approach has the virtue, in environmental and climate issues, of putting asymmetries and inequalities at the centre. “It strikes at the heart,” she said.

IPS UN Bureau Report

This feature piece is published with the support of Open Society Foundations.

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Excerpt:

A picture of photovoltaic panels in the solar park in the small town of Armstrong, in the Pampa region, the heart of Argentina’s agricultural production. The park belongs to an electric cooperative, which until 2017 only bought energy to distribute, but now generates electricity as well. CREDIT: FARN

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, May 26 2023 (IPS)

When the residents of Armstrong, a town of 15,000 in western Argentina, began to meet to discuss a renewable energy project, they agreed that there could be many positive effects and that it was not just a question of doing their bit in the global effort to mitigate climate change.

“The proposal was to use the rooftops and yards of our houses to install solar panels. And I accepted the idea basically because I was excited by the prospect that one day we would become independent in generating our own electricity,” Adrián Marozzi, who today has six solar panels in the back of the house where he lives in Armstrong with his wife and two children, told IPS.“Community-based projects, which are feasible, have several advantages: they improve local autonomy in the generation of electricity, they allow money to be saved from the energy that is not purchased, which can be reinvested in the city, and they promote the decentralization of decision-making in the energy system.” -- Pablo Bertinat

His home is one of about 50 in Armstrong with solar panels generating power for the community, added to the 880-panel solar farm installed in the town’s industrial park. Together they have contributed part of the electricity consumed by the inhabitants of this town in the western province of Santa Fe since 2017.

This is a pioneering project in Argentina, built with public technical organizations and community participation through a cooperative where decisions are made democratically, which has since been replicated in various parts of the country.

With an extensive area of ​​almost 2.8 million square kilometers, Argentina is a country where most of the electricity generation has been concentrated geographically, which raises the need for large power transmission infrastructure and poses a hurdle for the development of the system.

In this context, and despite the financing obstacles in a country with a severe long-lasting economic crisis, renewable energies are increasingly seen as an alternative for clean electricity generation in power-consuming areas.

Marozzi is a biologist by profession, but is dedicated to agricultural production in Armstrong, almost 400 kilometers northwest of Buenos Aires. The town is located in the pampas grasslands in the productive heart of Argentina, and is surrounded by fields of soybeans, corn and cattle.

How to bring electric power to widely scattered rural residents was the great challenge that the Armstrong Public Works and Services Provision Cooperative, made up of 5,000 members representing the town’s 5,000 households, grappled with for years.

The institution was born in 1958 and in 1966 it marked a milestone, when it created the first rural electrification system in this South American country, with a 70-kilometer medium voltage line that brought the service to numerous farms.

Once again, in 2016, the Armstrong cooperative pointed the way, when it began to discuss in assemblies with community participation the advantages and disadvantages of venturing into renewable energy production by means of solar energy panels.

“Those of us who accepted the installation of panels in our homes today receive no direct benefit, but we are betting on a future in which we can generate all of the electricity we consume. In addition, of course, we care about environmental issues,” Marozzi said in a conversation from his town.

The 880-panel solar park with 200 kW of installed power is currently being expanded to 275 kW thanks to the money that Armstrong saved from energy that was not purchased in recent years from the national grid. The local residents who make up the cooperative decided that the savings from what was generated with solar energy should be invested in the park.

Two workers carry out maintenance tasks at the solar park in Monte Caseros, a town in the Argentine province of Corrientes, in the northeast of the country. The park was inaugurated in 2021 by the local cooperative, which provides electricity to the residents and is also involved in agricultural activity. CREDIT: Monte Caseros Agricultural and Electricity Cooperative

A replicated model

In Argentina there are about 600 electrical cooperatives in small cities and towns in the interior of the country, which were born in the mid-20th century, when the national grid was still quite limited and access to electric power was a problem.

These cooperatives usually buy and distribute energy in towns. But the members of dozens of them realized that they too could generate clean electricity, after visiting Armstrong’s project, and launched their own renewable energy initiatives.

One of the cooperatives that also has a solar park is the Agricultural and Electricity Cooperative of Monte Caseros, a city of about 25,000 inhabitants in the northeastern province of Corrientes.

“The cooperative was born in 1977 out of the need to bring energy to rural residents,” engineer Germán Judiche, the association’s technical manager, told IPS. “Today we have a honey packaging plant and a cluster of silos for rice, the main crop in the area. Since 2018 we have also distributed internet service and in 2020 we partnered with the province’s public electricity company to venture into renewable energy.”

The Monte Caseros solar park has 400 kW of installed capacity thanks to 936 solar panels. It was inaugurated in September 2021 and has provided such good results that a second park, with similar characteristics, is about to begin to be built by the 650-member cooperative, because it supplies only rural residents of the municipality.

“We have done everything with the cooperative’s own labor and the design by engineers from the National University of the Northeast (UNNE), from our province,” said Judiche. “It is definitely a model that can be replicated. Renewable energy is our future,” he added from his town, some 700 kilometers north of Buenos Aires.

Solar panels can be seen in the backyard of Adrián Marozzi, a resident of the town of Armstrong. Neither he nor the other residents who agreed to give up part of their yards or rooftops receive direct advantages, since the energy savings are capitalized by the cooperative, which thus has to buy less electricity from the national grid. CREDIT: FARN

A slow and bumpy road

According to official figures, the distributed or decentralized generation of renewable energy for self-consumption, which allows the surplus to be injected into the grid, has 1,167 generators registered in 13 of Argentina’s 23 provinces, with more than 20 megawatts of installed power.

Electricity cooperatives that have their own renewable energy generation projects operate under this system.

In total, in this country of 44 million people, renewable energies covered almost 14 percent of the demand for electricity in 2022 and have more than 5,000 MW of installed capacity, although there are practically no major new projects to expand their proportion of the energy mix.

Most of the electricity demand is covered by thermal generation, which contributes more than 25,000 MW, mainly from oil but also from natural gas. Hydropower is the next largest source, with more than 10,000 MW from large dams greater than 50 MW, which are not considered renewable.

Pablo Bertinat, director of the Energy and Sustainability Observatory of the National Technological University (UTN) based in the city of Rosario, also in Santa Fe, explained that in a country like Argentina it is impossible to follow a model like Germany’s widespread residential generation of renewable energy, because it requires investments that are not viable.

“Community-based projects, which are feasible, have several advantages: they improve local autonomy in the generation of electricity, they allow money to be saved from the energy that is not purchased, which can be reinvested in the city, and they promote the decentralization of decision-making in the energy system,” added Bertinat, speaking from Rosario.

The UTN Observatory was in charge of the Armstrong project, in a public-private consortium, together with the cooperative and the National Institute of Industrial Technology (Inti).

The expert said that the cooperatives’ renewable energy projects are advancing slowly in Argentina, despite the fact that there is no credit nor favorable policies – an indication that they could have a very strong impact on the entire electrical system and even on the generation of employment, if there were tools to promote renewables.

“Our aim is to demonstrate that not only large companies can advance the agenda of promoting renewable energy and the replacement of fossil fuels. In Argentina, cooperatives are also an important actor on this path,” Bertinat said.

The case of Armstrong also sparked interest from the environmental movement, which is helping to drive the growth of renewable energy in the country.

Jazmín Rocco Predassi, head of Climate Policy at the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation (FARN), told IPS that this is “an illustration that the energy transition does not always come from top-down initiatives, but that communities can organize themselves, together with cooperatives, municipal governments or science and technology institutes, to generate the transformations that the energy system needs.”

Soledad Arnedo is head of the La Negra del Norte cooperative textile workshop, which works together with other productive enterprises of the popular economy in the Argentine municipality of San Isidro, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, May 5 2023 (IPS)

Nearby is an agroecological garden and a plant nursery, further on there are pens for raising pigs and chickens, and close by, in an old one-story house with a tiled roof, twelve women sew pants and blouses. All of this is happening in a portion of a public park near Buenos Aires, where popular cooperatives are fighting the impact of Argentina’s long-drawn-out socioeconomic crisis.

“We sell our clothes at markets and offer them to merchants. Our big dream is to set up our own business to sell to the public, but it’s difficult, especially since we can’t get a loan,” Soledad Arnedo, a mother of three who works every day in the textile workshop, told IPS.

The garments made by the designers and seamstresses carry the brand “la Negra del Norte”, because the workshop is in the municipality of San Isidro, in the north of Greater Buenos Aires.“In Argentina in the last few years, having a job does not lift people out of poverty. This is true even for many who have formal sector jobs.” -- Nuria Susmel

In Greater Buenos Aires, home to 11 million people, the poverty rate is 45 percent, compared to a national average of 39.2 percent.

La Negra del Norte is just one of the several self-managed enterprises that have come to life on the five hectares that, within the Carlos Arenaza municipal park, are used by the Union of Popular Economy Workers (UTEP).

It is a union without bosses, which brings together people who are excluded from the labor market and who try to survive day-to-day with precarious, informal work due to the brutal inflation that hits the poor especially hard.

“These are ventures that are born out of sheer willpower and effort and the goal is to become part of a value chain, in which textile cooperatives are seen as an economic agent and their product is valued by the market,” Emmanuel Fronteras, who visits different workshops every day to provide support on behalf of the government’s National Institute of Associativism and Social Economy (INAES), told IPS.

Today there are 20,520 popular cooperatives registered with INAES. The agency promotes cooperatives in the midst of a delicate social situation, but in which, paradoxically, unemployment is at its lowest level in the last 30 years in this South American country of 46 million inhabitants: 6.3 percent, according to the latest official figure, from the last quarter of 2022.

Women work in a textile cooperative that operates in Navarro, a town of 20,000 people located about 125 kilometers southwest of Buenos Aires. Many of the workers supplement their income with a payment from the Argentine government aimed at bolstering productive enterprises in the popular economy. CREDIT: Evita Movement

The working poor

The plight facing millions of Argentines is not the lack of work, but that they don’t earn a living wage: the purchasing power of wages has been vastly undermined in recent years by runaway inflation, which this year accelerated to unimaginable levels.

In March, prices rose 7.7 percent and year-on-year inflation (between April 2022 and March 2023) climbed to 104.3 percent. Economists project that this year could end with an index of between 130 and 140 percent.

Although in some segments of the economy wage hikes partly or fully compensate for the high inflation, in most cases wage increases lag behind. And informal sector workers bear the brunt of the rise in prices.

“In Argentina in the last few years, having a job does not lift people out of poverty,” economist Nuria Susmel, an expert on labor issues at the Foundation for Latin American Economic Research (FIEL), told IPS.

“This is true even for many who have formal sector jobs,” she added.

On five hectares of a public park in the Argentine municipality of San Isidro, in Greater Buenos Aires, there is a production center with several cooperatives from the Union of Workers of the Popular Economy (UTEP), which defends the rights of people excluded from the formal labor market. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

The National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INDEC) estimates that the poverty line for a typical family (made up of two adults and two minors) was 191,000 pesos (834 dollars) a month in March.

However, the average monthly salary in Argentina is 86,000 pesos (386 dollars), including both formal and informal sector employment.

“The average salary has grown well below the inflation rate,” said Susmel. “Consequently, for companies labor costs have fallen. This real drop in wages is what helps keep the employment rate at low levels.”

“And it is also the reason why there are many homes where people have a job and they are still poor,” she said.

Social value of production

La Negra del Norte is one of 35 textile cooperatives that operate in the province of Buenos Aires, where a total of 160 women work.

They receive support not only from the government through INAES, but also from the Evita Movement, a left-wing social and political group named in honor of Eva Perón, the legendary Argentine popular leader who died in 1952, at the age of just 33.

The Evita Movement formed a group of textile cooperatives which it supports in different ways, such as the reconditioning of machines and the training of seamstresses.

“The group was formed with the aim of uniting these workshops, which in many cases were small isolated enterprises, to try to formalize them and insert them into the productive and economic circuit,” said Emmanuel Fronteras, who is part of the Evita Movement, which has strong links to INAES.

“In addition to the economic value of the garments, we want the production process to have social value, which allows us to think not only about the profit of the owners but also about the improvement of the income of each cooperative and, consequently, the valorization of the work of the seamstresses,” he added in an interview with IPS.

The 12 women who work in the Argentine cooperative La Negra del Norte sell the clothes they make at markets and dream of being able to open their own store, but one of the obstacles they face is the impossibility of getting a loan. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

The high level of informal employment in Argentina’s textile industry has been well-documented, and has been facilitated by a marked segmentation of production, since many brands outsource the manufacture of their clothing to small workshops.

Many of the workers in the cooperatives supplement their textile income with a stipend from the Potenciar Trabajo government social programme that pays half of the minimum monthly wage in exchange for their work.

“Economically we are in the same situation as the country itself. The instability is enormous,” said Celene Cárcamo, a designer who works in another cooperative, called Subleva Textil, which operates in a factory that makes crusts for the traditional Argentine “empanadas” or pasties in the municipality of San Martín, that was abandoned by its owners and reopened by its workers.

Other cooperatives operating in the pasty crust factory are involved in the areas of graphic design and food production, making it a small hub of the popular economy.

The six women working at Subleva Textil face obstacles every day. One of them is the constant rise in the prices of inputs, like most prices in the Argentine economy.

Subleva started operating shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, so it had to adapt to the complex new situation. “They say that crisis is opportunity, so we decided to make masks,” said Cárcamo, who stressed the difficulties of running a cooperative in these hard times in Argentina and acknowledged that “We need to catch a break.”

Elizabeth Cuenca, Jesusa Flores, Flora Huamán and Ángela Oviedo (from left to right) stand in the agroecological garden they tend with 10 other women in Rodrigo Bueno, a poor neighborhood in Buenos Aires. In the background loom the high-rises of Puerto Madero, the most modern and sought-after neighborhood in the Argentine capital. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Apr 21 2022 (IPS)

The space consists of just 300 square meters full of green where there is an agro-ecological vegetable garden and nursery, which are the work and dream of 14 women. Behind it can be seen the imposing silhouettes of the high rises that are a symbol of the most modern and sought-after part of Argentina’s capital city.

But the Vivera Orgánica (Organic Nursery) forms part of another reality: it is located in a low-income neighborhood which has been transformed in recent years thanks to the work of local residents and to government support.

“We started with the idea of growing some fresh vegetables for our families. And today we are a cooperative that opens its doors to the neighborhood and also sells to people who come from all over the city, and to companies,” Peruvian immigrant Elizabeth Cuenca, who came to Buenos Aires from her country in 2010 and settled in this neighborhood on the banks of the La Plata River, tells IPS.

The Barrio Rodrigo Bueno emerged as a shantytown in the 1980s on flood-prone land in the south of Buenos Aires.

It is just a few blocks from Puerto Madero, an area occupied for decades by abandoned port warehouses, which since the 1990s has been renovated and gentrified, experiencing a real estate boom that has made it the most sought-after by the wealthy in Buenos Aires.

The contrast between the exposed brick houses of Rodrigo Bueno, separated by narrow, often muddy corridors, and the slick glassy 40- or 50-story skyscrapers built between the wide streets of Puerto Madero became a powerful image of inequality in Greater Buenos Aires, a megacity of nearly 15 million inhabitants.

However, today things are completely different in Rodrigo Bueno, named after a popular singer who suffered a tragic death in 2000.

It is one of the four shantytowns in the city (out of a total of about 40, according to official figures) that are in the process of urbanization – or “socio-urban integration”, as the Buenos Aires city government describes the process.

Since 2017, streets have been widened and paved, infrastructure for public service delivery was brought in, and 46 buildings with 612 new apartments were built, which now house nearly half of the neighborhood’s roughly 1,500 families.

Many of the old precarious houses were demolished while others still stand alongside the brand-new apartments, awarded to their new owners with 30-year loans.

“When the urbanization process began to be discussed, we started having skills and trades workshops and there was one on gardening, which was attended by many women who, although we lived in the same neighborhood, did not know each other,” says Cuenca.

“That’s how we learned, we organized ourselves and were able to get a space for the Vivera, which we inaugurated in December 2019. Today we sell vegetables and especially seedlings for people who want to start their own vegetable gardens at home. We don’t earn wages, but we generate an income,” she adds.

The paving of streets is progressing in the Rodrigo Bueno neighborhood, which first emerged as a shantytown on the banks of the La Plata River, where previously almost all the houses were accessed through narrow corridors, most of them made of exposed bricks and many of them built by the families themselves. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Bringing home gardens to life – and more

In just over two years, the women of the Vivera Orgánica have achieved some milestones, such as the sale of 7,000 seedlings of different vegetables to the Toyota automobile company, which gave them as gifts to its employees.

They have also sold agroecological vegetables to the swank Hilton Hotel in Buenos Aires, which is located in Puerto Madero, and have set up vegetable gardens on land owned by Enel, one of the largest electricity distributors.

But they have also earned respect from the public. “The incredible thing is that the pandemic was a great help for us, because many people who couldn’t leave their homes started to become interested in eating healthier or growing their own food. We received a lot of orders,” says Jesusa Flores, a Bolivian immigrant who is one of the founders of the Vivera.

She was working as a cleaner and caring for the elderly in family homes, when she lost her jobs due to the restrictions on movement aimed at curbing the COVID pandemic.

“La Vivera has been very important for me, because it is near our homes and we can always come here,” says Flores.

The nursery receives no government subsidies and the 14 women earn little money from it, so almost all of them have other jobs. But they are all confident that they have the potential to grow and that the nursery will become their only job in the future.

“During the worst period of the pandemic, we put together 15 boxes a day with 12 seedlings to sell, but we received 60 orders a day. We couldn’t keep up with demand,” says Angela Oviedo from Peru, who is also a member of the group.

Several women prepare the products of the Vivera Orgánica, next to part of a mural painted on the door of the container that serves as the office of their small business in a low-income neighborhood in the Argentine capital. CREDIT: Ministry of Human Development and Habitat of the City of Buenos Aires

The hurdles thrown up by informal employment

The Buenos Aires city government provides technical support for the Vivera Orgánica as part of the neighborhood’s socio-urban integration process.

Low-income sectors in Argentina have been hard-hit since the process of devaluation of the peso began four years ago, accompanied by high inflation, leading to a steep plunge in purchasing power, especially for workers in the informal economy.

In 2020 the crisis was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused the economy to shrink by 10 percent. And while almost all of the losses were recovered in 2021, the alarming fact is that most of the jobs that have been created since then are informal.

According to data from the Argentine Ministry of Labor, Employment and Social Security, in January this year there were 6,034,637 registered workers in the private sector, down from 6,273,972 in January 2018, before the start of the recession.

The Buenos Aires city government’s Ministry of Human Development and Habitat estimates that there are some 500,000 workers in the informal economy in the capital, who have been the hardest hit by inflation, which reached 6.7 percent last March, the highest rate for a single month in Argentina in the last 20 years.

Many analysts warn that poverty, which in the second half of last year fell from 40.6 percent to 37.3 percent according to the National Institute of Statistics and Census, will grow again in 2022.

A picture of some of the buildings constructed by the Buenos Aires city government in the Rodrigo Bueno neighborhood. A total of 612 new apartments have already been delivered, through 30-year loans, to the families that lived closest to the river and were most exposed to pollution in this poor neighborhood in the Argentine capital. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Assistance in joining the formal sector

“In poor neighborhoods there are many businesses, but the problem is that because of the situation in the informal economy, they face enormous hurdles in order to grow and to be able to connect with the formal market,” explains Belén Barreto, undersecretary for the Development of Human Potential in the government of Buenos Aires.

“One issue has to do with productivity: in general, the entrepreneurs work in their own homes and are not able to scale up significantly. That is why we support the Vivera with technical assistance, so the project can reach production levels enabling it to sell in the city’s formal value chains,” she adds in an interview with IPS.

Barreto says that another obstacle has to do with marketing: entrepreneurs find it difficult to sell their products outside the environment in which they live, despite the growth of on-line sales.

“That is why our focus is on linking these small businesses with companies so that they can become their suppliers in order to earn a more sustainable income and scale up their production through a new market. Last Christmas we held business roundtables and managed to get more companies to buy gifts from the social and popular economy, for a total of 17 million pesos (about 150,000 dollars),” she adds.

Finally, to address the problem of access to credit for informal workers, in 2021 the Buenos Aires city government created the Social Development Fund (Fondes), a public-private fund for the social and popular economy.

The steady growth of the informal economy also prompted the local government to create last year the Registry of Productive Units of the Popular and Social Economy, which allows access to tax benefits and has so far registered some 3,000 self-managed units.

The transformation of the neighborhood has also brought greater opportunities for local residents, who are often victims of discrimination and prejudice.

Cuenca, for example, explains that “we didn’t used to have an address to give when we were looking for a job, and it was very unlikely that we would get called back.”

She sees the Vivera Orgánica as another tool for a more dignified life: “This project is part of the neighborhood and part of us; we now feel that we have different prospects.”

Part of the team of young entrepreneurs of the Maleza Cosmética Natural cooperative pose for photos at their laboratory in the Villa Lugano neighborhood in southern Buenos Aires, Argentina. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Mar 2 2022 (IPS)

“We started making shampoos and soaps in the kitchen of a friend’s house in 2017. We were five or six girls without jobs, looking for a collective solution, and today we are here,” says Letsy Villca, standing between the white walls of the spacious laboratory of Maleza Cosmética Natural, a cooperative that brings together 44 women in their early twenties in the Argentine capital.

Maleza has come a long way in a short time and currently produces 400 bottles of shampoo and 600 bars of soap a week, as well as facial creams and makeup remover, among other products. They are sold across Argentina through the cooperative’s own digital platform and other marketing channels.

The cooperative is a powerful example of the so-called popular economy, through which millions of people unable to access a formal job or a bank loan fight against the lack of opportunities, in the midst of the overwhelming economic crisis in this South American country, where more than 40 percent of the population of nearly 46 million people lives in poverty.

The National Registry of Workers in the Popular Economy (Renatep) lists 2,830,520 people who earn their living from street vending, waste recycling, construction, cleaning, or working in soup kitchens.

A glance at Renatep provides a reflection of which social groups face the greatest disadvantages in the labor market, as there is a majority of women (57 percent) and young people between 18 and 35 years of age (62 percent).

The picture is completed when the numbers are compared with those of registered private sector wage-earners, where both women and young people are in the minority – 33 and 39 percent, respectively.

As part of its social assistance program focused on supporting the popular economy, the Ministry of Social Development granted Maleza a subsidy that enabled it to purchase the glass tubes, thermometers, oil extractors, steel tables and office equipment that today furnish what was once the dismantled warehouse of an old factory.

The young women rented the 213-square-meter premises in January 2021.

By moving out of the kitchen of a house and into a spacious, well-conditioned place of their own, they were able to increase production by 500 percent due to better working conditions and the possibility of stockpiling raw materials.

It took the young women themselves three months to renovate the property, which now has a meeting room, offices, bathrooms, dressing rooms and a large laboratory.

Letsy Villca (left) and Brisa Medina show some of the products made by Maleza. The members of the cooperative work four hours a day for an income equivalent to half the minimum monthly wage, paid by an employment incentive program of the Ministry of Social Development, whose amount will change as their business begins to make a profit. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Changing the future

“’Maleza’ or weed is a plant that is pulled out of the ground and grows back again. A plant that is rejected, but resists, because it is strong and always grows back. That’s why we chose the name,” Brisa Medina, 22, explains to IPS.

The project goes beyond production: the cooperative’s laboratory is also a space for social and community meetings to fight for rights and generate collective awareness.

Maleza’s facility is located on the southside of the city of Buenos Aires, in Villa Lugano, a neighborhood of factories and low-income housing, far from the most sought-after areas of the Argentine capital.

The members of the cooperative – mainly women but also two men – live some 25 blocks (about 2.3 kilometers) from the plant, in Villa 20, one of the city’s largest shantytowns, home to more than 30,000 people.

Most of those who live in Villa 20 are Bolivian and Paraguayan immigrants who work as textile workers for clothing manufacturers in precarious workshops set up in their own homes.

The trade is passed down from generation to generation, as are the harsh working conditions, in exchange for remuneration that is fixed unilaterally by the buyers, without the right to negotiate.

“We wanted to do something else: to have a project that was our own, that we liked, with a decent place to work, that would allow us to study and where we could use our knowledge, because many of us were classmates at a chemical technical school, but it is almost impossible to find a job,” Letsy, 22, tells IPS.

To their technical know-how, acquired through different courses after high school, the young women at Maleza added the ancestral knowledge handed down by their families, to manufacture cosmetics that are free of polluting chemicals and are produced in an environmentally friendly way.

“Since I was a child, I used to watch my mother prepare and sell medicinal herbs and natural products. That’s when I started to learn,” says Ruth Ortiz, who is 23 years old and has a four-year-old daughter.

Ruth adds that the goal was to make a product with which they could dream big in terms of sales, as many in the Villa earn some extra income by baking bread or cooking meals, but sell their goods only to neighbors.

“As soon as we felt ready, we started selling at street fairs and gradually improved our products and packaging,” she says.

The image is from a year ago, when the young cooperative members renovated the warehouse of an old factory to turn it into a cosmetics laboratory. CREDIT: Courtesy of Maleza Cosmética Natural

For many of them the cooperative was more of a necessity than a choice, she acknowledges: “It is very difficult for anyone to get a job, but it is harder for people from the Villa. When you say where you live, they don’t want to hire you.”

Ruth is the only member of the cooperative who is a mother. She started working when her daughter was an eight-month-old baby. She often takes her to the laboratory and they all take turns caring for her, since one of the fundamental premises of Maleza is that women should be able to work outside the home, generate their own income and not be caught in the trap of unpaid housework.

Wages paid by social assistance

Brisa, who used to work as a cashier in a hairdresser’s shop, was left without a job in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out and all non-essential businesses in Argentina were ordered to close. “Maleza was my salvation,” she says.

After the socioeconomic catastrophe of the first year of the pandemic, 2021 was a year of economic recovery in Argentina, although marked by an alarming level of precariousness in labor: official data show that almost three million jobs were created last year, but almost all of them are unregistered employees (1,329,000) and self-employed (1,463,000).

Informal or unregistered and self-employed workers are also the hardest hit by the loss of purchasing power in an economy with an inflation rate of over 50 percent a year.

Against this backdrop, Maleza is looking for a way forward. The factory’s current income is enough to pay the rent of the laboratory plus electricity, water and internet services and other expenses, but still not enough to pay the members wages.

Many of the young women in Maleza’s cooperative were classmates at a technical-chemical school and are using what they learned, as well as the knowledge about medicinal plants passed down to them by their families. CREDIT: Courtesy of Maleza Cosmética Natural

“We are looking for ways to lower costs and increase profitability. Although sales have not yet reached the levels we believe they could, we are making progress in advertising and opening new marketing channels, so we hope to turn a profit by the middle of this year,” Julia Argnani, another member of the cooperative, tells IPS.

Today, Maleza is divided into four work areas: administration, production, marketing and communication, which includes the design and administration of social networking. It also seeks to be a tool for empowering other social cooperatives, by delivering, for example, its products in reusable bags manufactured by another group of women.

All the members of Maleza have a fixed income thanks to the fact that they are beneficiaries of Potenciar Trabajo, a plan for socio-productive inclusion and local development administered by the Ministry of Social Development.

The program gives Renatep registrants half of Argentina’s minimum wage: 16,500 pesos (approximately 150 dollars) a month, in exchange for a four-hour workday.

In this Southern Cone country, 45 percent of the population receives some form of social assistance through a vast network that includes direct economic assistance, food aid, subsidized electric and gas rates and vocational training.

In the case of Potenciar Trabajo, it is currently paid to 1,200,000 informal sector workers, according to data supplied to IPS by the Ministry of Social Development. The 150 dollars a month they are given amounts to a quarter of the income needed to keep a family of four out of poverty, according to the official statistics institute.

“Our goal is also to be proud of where we started from and to show that a women’s cooperative like ours can make quality products,” Julia explains.

One of the Argentine small farmer groups participating in the digital marketing project uses agroecological irrigation and tomato crushing techniques in the province of Mendoza. CREDIT: Nicolás Heredia/Alma Nativa

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Oct 14 2021 (IPS)

“The biggest problem for family farmers has always been to market and sell what they produce, at a fair price,” says Natalia Manini, a member of the Union of Landless Rural Workers (UST), a small farmers organisation in Argentina that has been taking steps to forge direct ties with consumers.

The UST, which groups producers of fresh vegetables, preserves and honey, as well as goat and sheep breeders, from the western province of Mendoza, opened its own premises in April in the provincial capital of the same name.

In addition, it has just joined Alma Nativa (“native soul”), a network created to market and sell products from peasant and indigenous organisations, which brings together more than 4,300 producers grouped in 21 organisations, and now sells its products over the Internet.

“Selling wholesale to a distributor is simple, but the problem is that a large part of the income does not reach the producer,” Manini told IPS from the town of Lavalle in Mendoza province."The aim is to mobilise consumers to buy products from Latin American ecosystems that are made with respect for the environment, while small producers benefit from visibility and logistical support so that local products reach the entire country.” -- Guadalupe Marín

The rural leader argues that, due to cost considerations, farmers can only access fair trade through collective projects, which have received a boost from the acceleration of digital changes generated by the covid-19 pandemic.

Alma Nativa is a marketing and sales solution formally created in 2018 by two Argentine non-governmental organisations (NGOs) focused on socio-environmental issues: Fibo Social Impact and the Cultural Association for Integral Development (ACDI). Their approach was to go a step beyond the scheme of economic support for productive development projects.

“Back in 2014 we began to ask ourselves why small farmer and indigenous communities could not secure profitable prices for the food and handicrafts they produce, and to think about how to get farmers to stop depending on donations and subsidies from NGOs and the state,” Fibo director Gabriela Sbarra told IPS in an interview in Buenos Aires.

Sbarra was a regular participant in regional community product fairs, which prior to the restrictions put in place due to the pandemic were often organised in Argentina by the authorities, who financed the setting up of the stands, accommodation and travel costs from their communities for farmers and craftspeople.

It was only thanks to this economic aid that farmers and artisans were able to make a profit.

“The effort was geared towards finding a genuine market for these products, which could not be sold online because it is very difficult to generate traffic on the Internet and they cannot reach supermarkets either, because they have no production volume. Informality was leaving communities out of the market,” Sbarra explained.

Three cooperatives in the Chaco region, the great forested plain that Argentina shares with Bolivia and Paraguay, are dedicated to honey production and are part of the Alma Nativa project, through which they sell their products to consumers throughout the country via the Internet. CREDIT: Nicolás Heredia/Alma Nativa

E-commerce, the new market

So the founders of Alma Nativa knocked on the doors of Mercado Libre, an e-commerce giant born in Argentina that has expanded throughout most of Latin America. The company agreed not to charge commissions for sales by an online store of agroecological food produced by local communities.

Alma Nativa then set up a warehouse in the town of Villa Madero, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, where products arriving from rural communities throughout the country are labeled for distribution.

“The pandemic has created an opportunity, because it helped to open a debate about what we eat. Many people began to question how food is produced and even forced agribusiness companies to think about more sustainable production systems,” said Manini.

Norberto Gugliotta, manager of the Cosar Beekeeping Cooperative, emphasised that the pandemic not only accelerated the process of digitalisation of producers and consumers, but also fueled the search by a growing part of society for healthy food produced in a socially responsible manner.

“We were prepared to seize the opportunity, because our products were ready, so we joined Alma Nativa this year,” said the beekeeper from the town of Sauce Viejo. Gugliotta is the visible face of a cooperative made up of some 120 producers in the province of Santa Fe, in the centre of this South American country, who produce certified organic, fair trade honey.

Argentina, Latin America’s third largest economy, is an agricultural powerhouse, with a powerful agribusiness sector whose main products are soybeans, corn and soybean oil, which in 2020 generated 26.3 billion dollars in exports, according to official figures.

Behind the success lies a huge universe of family farmers and peasant and indigenous communities. According to the latest National Agricultural Census, carried out in 2018, more than 90 percent of the country’s 250,881 farms are family-run.

But the infrastructure and technological lag in rural areas is significant, as demonstrated by the fact that only 35 percent of farms have Internet access.

The deprivation is particularly acute in the Chaco, a neglected region in the north of the country, home to some 200,000 indigenous people belonging to nine groups whose economy is closely linked to natural resources, according to the non-governmental Fundapaz.

Indigenous artisans from the Pilagá community in the northern province of Formosa, within the Gran Chaco region, have begun selling their baskets online throughout Argentina. CREDIT: Rosario Bobbio/Alma Nativa

New platform for indigenous handicrafts

Communities from the Chaco, a vast region of low forests and savannas and rich biodiversity covering more than one million square km in Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay, which is home to a diversity of native peoples, also began to market their handicrafts over Mercado Libre in the last few weeks.

“This initiative originated in Brazil with the ‘Amazonia em Pé’ programme and today we are replicating it in Argentina, in the Gran Chaco area. It seeks to build bridges between local artisans and consumers throughout the country,” explained Guadalupe Marín, director of sustainability at Mercado Libre.

“The aim is to mobilise consumers to buy products from Latin American ecosystems that are made with respect for the environment, while small producers benefit from visibility and logistical support so that local products reach the entire country,” she told IPS in Buenos Aires.

On Sept. 27, Mercado Libre launched the campaign “From the Gran Chaco, for you”, which offers for sale more than 2,500 products in 200 categories, such as baskets, indigenous and local art, decorative elements made with natural fibers, honey, weavings and handmade games.

It includes not only Alma Nativa, but also Emprendedores por Naturaleza (“entrepreneurs by/for nature”), a programme launched by the environmental foundation Rewilding Argentina, which works for the conservation of the Chaco and now promotes the sale of products made by 60 families living in rural areas adjacent to the El Impenetrable national park, the largest protected area in the region.

“The idea for the project arose last year, after we conducted a socioeconomic survey among 250 families in the area that found that the only income of 98 percent of them comes from welfare,” said Fatima Hollmann, regional coordinator of the Rewilding Argentina Communities Programme.

She told IPS that “people raise livestock for subsistence and sometimes work on fencing a field or some other temporary task, but there are no steady sources of employment in El Impenetrable.”

“That is why we are trying to generate income for local residents,” Hollmann explained in an interview in Buenos Aires. “Our production lines are focused on ceramics, since most people have built their houses there with adobe. Many also know how to make bricks and we have held trainings to teach people to turn a brick into an artistic piece, inspired by native fauna, which transmits the importance of conserving the forest.”

According to the figures released by the expert during the first week of the programme “From the Gran Chaco, for you” in early October, 644 products were offered for sale, of which 382 were sold to buyers from more than 10 Argentine provinces, including 100 percent of the textiles available and 76 percent of the wooden handicrafts.

“The alternative is to cut down the native forests,” Hollmann says. “We are proposing a transition from an extractivist economy to a regenerative one, which contributes to the reconstruction of the ecosystem, and gives consumers in the cities the chance to contribute to that goal.”

Excerpt:

Dorcus Auma weaving sisal fronds into a basket. Her Kenyan women's group has helped provide income to care for her grandchildren, orphaned by HIV/AIDS. Credit: Charles Karis/IPS

By Charles Karis
NAIROBI, Jun 27 2016 (IPS)

Seventy-three-year-old Dorcus Auma effortlessly weaves sisal fronds into a beautiful basket as she walks the tiny path that snakes up a hill. She wound up her farm work early because today, Thursday, she is required to attend her women’s group gathering at the secretary’s homestead.

Except for their eye-catching light blue dresses and silky head scarfs, they would pass for ordinary village women. They are part of the Kagwa Women’s Group in the remotest part of Homa Bay County in Kenya’s lake region.

A recent county profile of HIV/AIDS prevalence by the National AIDS Control Council (NACC) revealed that Homa Bay County leads Kenya in HIV prevalence, standing at 25.7 percent.

Auma joined the group in 2008 when the care of her three grandchildren was thrust upon her shoulders.

“HIV/AIDS robbed me of my three children, leaving me with the burden of having to take care of three children left in a vulnerable condition,” says Auma.

With no steady income to provide for their basic needs, she joined other women who shared the same predicament.

UNAIDS says that microfinance can play a big role in helping households affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and the women’s group at Homa Bay has proved this to be true.

Composed of 28 members, it started as a merry-go-round, which is a self-help group that helps women to save money. The group is supported by World Vision through an initiative to enhance target households through cooperatives.

“Within economic strengthening we are trying to help the families to get economically empowered through the locally available resources. This is a group of old women, they are all grandmas, and they had already started doing their own merry go-rounds. We came in with training on village savings and loaning, which is a simplified model of the savings at the rural level – it’s like a rural bank,” says Jedidah Mwendwa, a technical specialist with APHIA II Plus (pdf), one of the implementing organizations.

Most of the members are grandmothers whose children died from HIV/AIDS, and hence were left to fend for their grandchildren.

“Since the grannies cannot engage in vigorous economic activities, they were introduced into saving and loaning at their own level. They agreed to raise monies for saving and loaning among themselves through locally available resources like making ropes, baskets and mats,” says Mwendwa.

“When they meet on Thursdays, they collect all their material contributions. One of their members is sent to the nearby market, which is Oyugis, a distance of 61km, to go sell their products and the following week, the money that came from the market is what is saved for each specific member,” says Mwendwa.

The savings are rotated to individual members on an annual basis, and since they do not have a secure place to keep the money, they usually loan out the entire collected amount to members who return it with one percent interest.

“Since I joined this group, my life has changed. I have been able to engage in sustainable farming. My grandchildren have a reason to smile as they have nutritious food on the table,” says Auma, as she gives instructions to her eldest grandchild, a 16-year-old girl, on how to separate the sisal strands.

Initially, local people were a bit reluctant to attend the HIV caretaker training sessions because of the real stigma associated with the illness, but most have come around, and their efforts are paying off.

“We offer to the group and school clubs sensitization on adherence and nutrition,” says Rose Anyango, a social worker in the county. “The women and the children are responding well and the stigma no longer exists. Through village savings and loaning they are able to feed their children as well as educate them.”

The group has seen immediate successes in behavior, attitudes and practices regarding cultural dictates and inclusion of people living with HIV/AIDS in development activities. Women are now actively taking the lead in economic empowerment, enabling them to support their families.

The group now plans to increase to increase its impact by involving more members from the surrounding community, which will go a long way in not only empowering of locals but also reduce the stigma of HIV/AIDS.

Of the 195 workers at Vivero Alamar, 46 are women. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ivet González
HAVANA, May 21 2013 (IPS)

“The people are the only thing that matters,” says agronomist Miguel Ángel Salcines, who then goes on to list a series of other “secondary” factors that have turned Vivero Alamar, an urban farm on the outskirts of the Cuban capital, into a rare success story in the country’s depressed agricultural sector.

“We offer flexible hours, relatively high wages, and professional upgrading, among other benefits that make the cooperative an attractive option. This is how we attract high quality human resources, who are crucial today in order to produce more organic food,” said Salcines, the president of Vivero Alamar, where production has been chemical-free since 2000.

The cooperative’s recipe for success also includes transparent accounting, equitable profit sharing, interest-free loans for the workers, free lunches, and support for women workers with young children or others in their care: they are allowed to arrive up to an hour later than the official beginning of the work day, at seven in the morning, Salcines told Tierramérica*.

Human capital played a decisive role in raising production at this urban agriculture venture, founded in 1997 on an initial 800 square metres of land in the community of Alamar, around 15 kilometres east of downtown Havana. This is why Salcines believes that the key to achieving food security in Cuba lies in agricultural workers with a “vocation” for farming, as well as training.

In 2012, world food prices skyrocketed as a result of poor crop yields in various centres of agricultural production, such as the United States. The Caribbean countries, which are net food importers, suffered the greatest impact in the region, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

Less than five percent of the population of Cuba suffers from malnutrition, but the country was forced to spend over 1.633 billion dollars on food imports last year, an unsustainable expenditure for an economy in crisis for more than 20 years, specialists say.

Reducing this massive expenditure by raising domestic food production remains a challenge for the government of President Raúl Castro. In fact, in the first quarter of this year, the National Office of Statistics and Information reported a 7.8 percent decrease in agricultural production other than sugar cane.

“There is a big demand that needs to be met, which is why we are able to sell everything we grow,” said Salcines, one of the founders of the cooperative, which now covers a total of 10.14 hectares and produces more than 230 different crop varieties (primarily garden vegetables, as well as some fruits, grains and tubers) in greenhouses and open fields.

In the midst of a generally inefficient agricultural sector, Vivero Alamar has achieved consistent growth for more than 15 years, thanks to the constant upgrading of its organic farming methods, which have even earned the praise of the director-general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), José Graziano da Silva, who visited the cooperative earlier this month.

In 2012, they produced 400 tons of vegetables, 5.5 tons of medicinal and “spiritual” plants (used in religious rituals), 2.6 tons of dried herbs and spices, and 350 tons of worm manure.

They also produced 30,000 ornamental plant and fruit tree seedlings and three million vegetable seedlings, some for their own planting needs, others for sale to other farmers, reported Salcines.

Fresh vegetables, especially lettuce, are the products most sought after by the local residents in Alamar, who have begun to learn in recent years – like people in the rest of the country – about the benefits of including more greens in the traditional Cuban diet of rice, beans, “viandas” (starchy tubers and plantain) and pork.

“The first time we planted cauliflower, in 2000, it all got left in the fields, because nobody knew what it was,” plant health engineer Norma Romero told Tierramérica. In her view, one of the most important contributions made by the more than 33,000 urban and suburban farms in Cuba has been the expansion of access to and consumption of vegetables.

Thanks to a new initiative at Vivero Alamar, recipes for the preparation of different vegetables and mushrooms accompany the lists of products available at the cooperative’s sales outlet, as part of its business and educational strategy. The shelves also stock pickled vegetables, fruit preserves and garlic paste, produced through its own small industry sideline.

Although organic produce can be prohibitively costly in other countries, the organic fruits and vegetables sold by Vivero Alamar are actually priced lower than those produced with agrochemicals and sold in private farmers markets, where the prices are set in accordance with supply and demand.

“The affordable prices are the biggest attraction. A head of lettuce costs four Cuban pesos (five cents of a dollar) here, and everywhere else they charge 10 pesos,” regular customer Sonia Ricardo told Tierramérica. “The vegetables here are fresh, they have no pesticides, and the service is really fast,” she added.

Despite these low prices, the cooperative is able to earn good profits, production chief Gonzálo González assured Tierramérica. Eighty-five percent of its products are sold directly to the population, and the rest go to restaurants like La Bodeguita del Medio, a major tourist attraction in Havana.

Since it first started out with just five people, Vivero Alamar has progressively moved towards a closed-loop farming system that reduces waste and environmental damage.

“We try to buy as few inputs from outside as possible,” explained González, which is what led to “the idea of producing our own manure and various bio-pesticides and fertilisers.”

Vivero Alamar raises bulls to obtain manure, has set up “worm bins” to produce earthworm castings, another organic fertiliser, and breeds mycorrhizal fungi (which attach themselves to the roots of plants and promote their growth) as well as insects and microorganisms that can boost crop yields naturally. The cooperative has also established links with 17 scientific centres for the incorporation of new organic farming techniques and products.

Today, the 195 people who work here are striving to raise production by 40 percent to reach the farm’s full potential output, and have also expanded into raising rabbits and sheep, in order to include meat in its sales to the public and improve protein consumption among the neighbouring population, some 30,000 people.

The staff is made up of 175 cooperative members and 20 employees, and boasts a high overall level of education, with 92 university graduates and 42 technical college graduates. Women currently account for only 46 of the 195 workers.

“A farm can do much more than produce food,” commented Salcines, as he watched a group of foreign tourists who had booked a guided tour and organic lunch at Vivero Alamar.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

Over the past two years, millet production has reached record levels in Dya, a rural community in the Kaolack region of central Senegal, where the Agricultural Value Chains Support Project (PAFA) is supporting two farmers’ collectives.

PAFA is a six-year initiative launched in 2010 in four regions of Senegal’s groundnut growing basin: Diourbel, Fatick, Kaffrine and Kaolack. It’s a joint project of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’ Fund for International Development and the Senegalese government.

The project provides financing and technical training to farmer collectives producing millet, sesame, sorghum, black-eyed beans, vegetables and poultry.

Millet production has reached record levels in Dya, in central Senegal. Credit: Tonrulkens/CC BY-SA 2.0

“The 7,650 producers who have been trained in this region are women, young heads of households, people with disabilities, small producers unable to guarantee their own food security – in short, the most economically vulnerable. They’ve been chosen by a committee headed by the governor of their region,” PAFA coordinator Sémou Diouf told IPS.

In Dya, 200 people have been selected and organised into two cooperatives, which between them grow millet on 400 hectares.

The producers each make a contribution of between 44 and 64 dollars to the collective, which entitles them to 200 kilos of fertiliser and various items of agricultural equipment. Each group is supported by two technical advisors trained in crop monitoring.

“In 2011, we sold 30 tonnes of millet at 190 CFA francs (38 cents U.S.) a kilo – earning a total of 11,400 dollars,” said Ibrahima Ndiaye, the treasurer for the Manko cooperative, which groups growers from five villages.

“In 2011, we expected to harvest 800 kilos per hectare. We found ourselves with an average yield of 1.2 tonnes per hectare. We have never harvested so much millet,” Ndiaye told IPS. “This year, our estimate of one tonne per hectare has also been exceeded. So we’ve signed an agreement with a distributor, to sell him 60 tonnes of millet when the crop comes in.”

Harvesting this year’s millet will begin at any moment, and Aïssatou Ndiaye, from the Bock Mbotay collective, says Dya has achieved self-sufficiency in food. “Despite planting my seedlings late in 2011, I had a record harvest. In fact, my family is still eating last year’s grain,” he told IPS.

The treasurer of the Bock Mbotay group, Cheikh Ndiaye, said the group’s combined output was expected to rise from 160 tonnes in 2011 to 200 tonnes this year, because this year’s seedlings are better.

“Just two years ago, we were facing hardship, because the harvests were insufficient,” he noted. This year, the collective has a contract to supply 60 tonnes of millet to a distributor.

Omar Guèye, a member of the Manko collective, is also happy. “Our yields have never been so good. It’s thanks to this project,” he commented to IPS.

But, he added, “There’ve been some problems with training because the trainers have been hard to get hold of and the fertiliser was sent to us a bit late.”

Besides helping with production and marketing, PAFA is also helping producers set up grain stores for millet, which is the staple food in this part of Senegal.

“This is a project which is contributing to food security and raising income for the most vulnerable people in rural areas. We’re seeing excellent results. At Dya, the beneficiaries have not only achieved food security, they’re selling a healthy surplus,” said Samba Gaye, PAFA’s liaison at the National Agency for Rural and Agricultural Advice.

Gaye told IPS that a total of 2,020 hectares of millet and 600 hectares of sesame were planted by project beneficiaries in Kaolack and Kaffrine, with production of millet amounting to 1,880 tonnes, and the sesame harvest coming to 250 tonnes.

“We have high hopes for 2012, because the season has gone well and the fields look great,” he said.

Madieng Seck, an agriculture journalist, believes this project can allow farmers to “fly with their own wings”.

“The best thing this project can do for producers is to ensure they get good technical training so that they can sustain themselves,” Seck, director of the private monthly journal Agri-Infos, told IPS.

Ndiaye admits that it will not be easy to manage on their own, but sounds a confident note. “We have truly learned a lot from the project’s trainers, and we are ready to take over when PAFA ends.”

Like many other young Senegalese, Pape Mokhtar Diallo long dreamed of escaping his rural home in northern Senegal for a better life. Three times he tried and failed to go overseas. But the establishment of an agricultural cooperative here in the village of Boyinadji has put another dream within his grasp. The 25-year-old has a job now, a humble one that doesn’t pay well, but he feels he is a part of an initiative that has caused him and other young people here to imagine a future working the land.

“I work as the security guard for the cooperative’s store. I’m earning 25,000 CFA (50 dollars) per month; and more than that, I’m part of a cooperative. I’m not thinking about leaving any more,” he told IPS.

The cooperative he’s speaking of is called a SIPA – a Société intensification de la Production Agricole – an initiative under Senegal’s national programme for investment in agriculture.

Boyinadji’s SIPA was set up in 2010, with 400,000 dollars of financial support from the government and partner institutions like the West African Development Bank and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). It’s one of a set of agricultural cooperatives nationwide intended to help young men and women who might otherwise join the exodus from rural areas to organise themselves into coops and earn a living.

Thirty hectares were assigned to 150 smallholders who set about growing a variety of crops for sale, as well as vegetables for their own consumption.

“Last year, we produced eight tonnes of watermelon, 12 tonnes of maize and three tonnes of groundnuts… After selling our harvest and paying off our creditors, the cooperative was able to earn two million CFA francs (around 4,000 dollars),” said Mamoudou Thiam, the Boyinadji SIPA’s manager.

He said he hoped that 2012 would be even better, with plans in place to also grow tomatoes, cabbage, okra, peppers and lettuce.

Over the past two years, the cooperative has extensively developed the land. Its lush green fields are fenced off, cleared using tractors, and irrigated by a sprinkler system supplied by motorised pumps drawing water from a borehole.

Thiam says the project is providing jobs for village youth. “Two pump operators, a manager and a security guard have been chosen. At the moment, we can’t pay them a great salary, but 25,000 CFA a month… at least they’re earning something,” he said.

IPS met Aïssatou Dia at work with a hoe in the coop’s fields. She explained that in addition to being a member of the SIPA, she is also the leader of another agricultural association in the village.

“We formed an association of women,” the 25-year-old said, “and each of us has got a plot where we grow okra, melons and watermelon to earn income, improve nutrition for our families and create jobs at the local level. Last year, I earned 80,000 CFA (160 dollars) from the sale of our produce. And beyond that, I grew a lot for my own use,” she said.

Abdoulaye Baldé, another member of the SIPA coop, agreed that the project had enabled youth to support themselves and stay in the countryside, but said that for the project to be sustained, it would need government support to commercialise and build up production capacity.

“We want to work the land. But we’ll need support to help us turn a profit. Right now, we need electricity to run the borehole pump, and increase our production,” he told IPS.

“This would allow us to save on money we’re using to buy fuel. I think the well could be equipped with solar panels. This would also be another revolution, if they would help us to strengthen certain capacities of our farmers,” Baldé said.

According to Abdoulaye Diakité, from the National Agency for Rural and Agricultural Extension Services, in order to develop agriculture in this region, it is vital to carry out an inventory of land available for cultivation, and then to determine what crops are appropriate.

“What Senegal is lacking is an agriculture project worthy of the name, one with precise goals and objectives,” he said.

Six months have passed since the beginning of the United Nations International Year of the Cooperatives (IYC). There can be no doubt it has fallen far short of its goal of calling the world’s attention to this formidable instrument of social production.

While there has been a rise in the dissemination of information related to cooperatives, it is minuscule in comparison to the vast importance and potential of the cooperative movement worldwide.

Cooperativism emerged in the early 19th century in England where it was promoted by unions opposed to the capitalist expansion driven by the Industrial Revolution. It assumed the function of improving the buying power of salary workers through consumer cooperatives.

Since then the system of cooperative property has spread throughout the world, in industry, the primary sector, trade and other branches of the service sector.

Cooperatives also have a significant presence in the media, with hundreds of outlets dedicated to spreading information about the world of cooperatives. Moreover there are thousands of media cooperatives, including the Associated Press in the U.S., Le Monde, the French newspaper, and the IPS news agency, which, since 1964, has covered the subject of cooperatives as a part of its editorial focus on development and civil society, particularly in countries of the South.

The International Co-operative Alliance (ICA), founded in 1895, is comprised of 267 organisations from 96 countries representing approximately 1 billion individuals worldwide. Around 100 million people work for a co-op globally

The Director General of the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organisation, Jose Graziano Da Silva, notes that farmers associations generate huge benefits for producers, increasing their capacity to take advantage of opportunities, gain access to services, get better prices when purchasing inputs and achieve larger margins in sales. Moreover, the benefits generated by cooperatives are an engine of local development, strengthening communities and activating economies, creating jobs, and boosting income.

Da Silva sees cooperatives as a strategic ally in promoting the sort of environmentally-sustainable socio-economic development that the world needs. The concept implies that in order for development to be sustainable, hunger and social exclusion ­which affect more than 900 million people­ must be overcome.

In Costa Rica, a third of economically active people participate in cooperatives. According to the country’s president, Laura Chinchilla, “Cooperativism is a decisive factor for modernisation and the technological development of productive systems. In Costa Rica it is responsible for more than four percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) and more than ten percent of the agricultural GDP. Thanks to cooperativism Costa Rica has become a model of social inclusion. Cooperatives play a crucial role not only in economic activities but also in education and health services. For example, 23 percent of the school system is cooperative.”

Brazilian cooperativist Roberto Rodriquez argues that “economic globalisation disturbs peace and democracy because it generates social exclusion and the concentration of wealth, while cooperatives, which work as the economic element of social organisation, counter this tendency. Cooperatives serve as a bridge between the market and collective well-being and are therefore a force for the defence of democracy and peace”.

As we can see, the importance of cooperativism as an alternative to the current crisis-stricken economic models stands in contrast to the failure of the IYC to revive and refresh the media’s interest in the cooperative world. This can be explained in part by the dispersion of the message despite the efforts of the U.N., the IYC, and numerous cooperative media of the world. There has been a failure to effectively coordinate cooperatives and the media in a way that creates real synergy.

It is clear that the cooperative movement needs a more up-to-date strategy for social communication as well as the appropriate instruments to put out its message and conduct its activities. What is needed is a real pool of media cooperatives, which should be brought together to organise and coordinate their information and efforts in a way that will strengthen the impact of their central messages. Similarly they should create common virtual tools to circulate both traditional content and new products of the social media.

But the effectiveness of these instruments will depend on the degree to which they involve journalists that are specialised in cooperativism. As in other branches of journalism, specialisation is a clear necessity.

There are no social or economic needs that cooperativism cannot address. It has an essential role to play both in the major challenges facing humanity and as a form of horizontal, participatory management that is able to generate better results. Indeed, there has never been a time in which cooperativism was more urgently needed as a mode of organisation and as an alternative to the corporate mode of production. No approach is more modern and more necessary than cooperativism. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* Mario Lubetkin is director general of the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency.