The headquarters of the Capribom agro-industrial cooperative with its roofs covered with photovoltaic panels, in Monteiro, northeastern Brazil. Credit: Courtesy of Capribom

By Carlos Müller
MONTEIRO, Brazil, Nov 1 2024 (IPS)

“Ixe! If it wasn’t for solar energy, we would have closed down, you can be sure. We had to stop due to the pandemic on 15 March 2020, but the energy costs were fixed,” said Erika Cazuza, administrative and financial manager of the Brazilian Cooperative of Rural Producers of Monteiro (Capribom).

Ixe is a word used in the Northeast region of Brazil, which means Virgin and reflects its deep-rooted religious culture.“The solar system caused a 90% reduction in energy costs, which guaranteed operations, even during the pandemic”: Fabricio de Souza Ferreira.

Monteiro, with just over 33,000 people, is a municipality in the driest part of the semi-arid ecoregion, with an area of 1.03 million square kilometres covering several states in the Northeast and a population of 27 million, where rainfall averages only about 600 millimetres per year.

The semi-arid region is also affected by severe droughts that can last for several years, as happened in 2012-2017 in most of the ecoregion. Located on a plateau, at an altitude of 600 metres, Monteiro has a pleasant climate in its 992 square kilometres.

Thanks largely to Capribom, Monteiro, where extensive livestock farming has been the main economic activity since the 18th century, has gone from ranking 126th in gross domestic product (GDP) to 14th among the municipalities of the state of Paraiba, of which it is the largest.

Erika Cazuza, administrative and financial manager of Capribom. Credit: Carlos Müller / IPS

When talking about solar energy, Cazuza was referring to the 316 panels and other photovoltaic generation equipment installed in 2018 on the roofs of the cooperative’s plant headquarters, in the district of Fazenda Morro Fechado, a transition zone between the rural area and the urban centre of Monteiro.

The investment was made with non-refundable resources from an International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) loan to the government of Paraíba, equivalent to US$62,970, with a counterpart of US$1,830 from the cooperative itself.

“The solar system caused a 90% reduction in energy costs, which guaranteed operations, even during the pandemic,” the cooperative’s president, Fabrício de Souza Ferreira, told IPS. These costs used to be as high as US$2,280 dollars a month.

Goats are better adapted to the semi-arid biome and family farmers have improved their herds by crossing rustic breeds with others that produce more meat and milk in this ecoregion of northeastern Brazil. Credit: Carlos Müller / IPS

Savings brought trucks

The savings enabled the purchase of a truck for distribution of products, which was previously carried out by hired transporters.

Now, the cooperative has six trucks for milk collection and product distribution (yoghurt, cheese, butter, dulce de leche, cottage cheese and others), which have grown from six to 20, with different flavours and presentations.

In recent years, the governments of the Northeastern states have been promoting the production and consumption of goat cheeses. Between 23 and 26 October, the Paraíba Cheese and Cachaça Salon was held in the Paraiba capital, João Pessoa. Capribom presented 12 products and all of them won medals: eight gold and four silver.

Capribom faced great difficulties when the covid-19 pandemic hit the region and the public procurement programmes for food from family farming were suspended for four months.

“Before the pandemic, we had 400 members, four of whom died. With the pandemic, the number of those still supplying milk dropped to 250 because we were still working and could not leave them stranded, although all our employees got sick,” said an emotional Ferreira.

What sustained production then was the supply of milk to the army and the emerging local private market. Deliveries to schools resumed after a few months. Despite the suspension of classes, students still picked up their processed meals.

As the pandemic passed, recovery was vigorous. Today, Capribom, founded in 2006, has 583 registered members and 80 members awaiting approval of their applications by the members’ assembly.

Solar energy enabled dramatic savings in electricity that allowed the Capribom dairy cooperative to buy its first truck. Now it has six trucks collecting milk from producers and distributing their dairy products. Credit: Carlos Müller / IPS

Increased production

In September this year, the dairy plant was processing 18,000 litres of milk per day, of which 12,000 were cow milk and 6,000 were goat milk. Some 15% was produced in three settlements (communities of farmers settled by the agrarian reform) in the region.

Before the pandemic, there were 10,000 litres in total, which in 2020 was reduced to 7,000, of which 3,000 were from goats, explained Ferreira during a tour of the plant.

Initially, the solar installation generated surplus energy, which was used in the milk coolers at the collection centres. The recent expansion required the installation of another 100 solar panels and related equipment, now with the cooperative’s own resources.

“We still have a deficit because the new machines, cooler, pasteuriser and yoghurt maker (3,000 litres) consume a lot of energy, but they have reduced losses. We will need 50 more”, said Ferreira, with satisfaction. Expanding production will require another cold room and more energy, he adds.

In fact, turnover has multiplied. Before the pandemic, Capribom sold the equivalent of two million litres a year; now it’s around seven million.

And the results directly benefit the cooperative’s members, who are guaranteed placement of their production and receive the equivalent of US$0.40 per litre delivered, while other buyers pay only US$0.32.

The president of the Capribom cooperative, Fabrício de Souza Ferreira, with milk treatment equipment. Credit: Carlos Müller / IPS

Capribom’s achievements do not only benefit its members. Although cooperatives in Brazil are exempt from some taxes, the agribusiness contributes around 25% of the revenue of the municipality of Monteiro.

In addition to tax benefits, Brazilian cooperatives have preferential treatment in public tenders.

This allows family farming cooperatives to place their products with stable prices and terms, but has bureaucratic drawbacks and relies on public policies.

Among these initiatives is the National School Feeding Programme (PNAE), which reaches 41 million students in public schools throughout the country, with resources from the federal government transferred to states and municipalities.

This is also the case of the Food Acquisition Programme, through which the government buys food produced by family farming and transfers it to public and welfare entities and so-called popular restaurants.

Public procurement used to absorb 90% of Capribom’s production, a percentage that is now down to 70%. Reducing dependence on government programmes and expanding its market are two of the cooperative’s objectives.

“With other family farming cooperatives, we created a central cooperative, called Nordestina, to jointly sell everything from dairy products to fruit pulp, tubers, free-range chickens and eggs, which allows us to reach more markets with reduced costs,” Ferreira said.

Wesley Cristyan Batista da Silva, a graduate in agroecology who has been working for two months on the evaluation of milk delivered by producers at the Capribom agroindustrial plant. Credit: Carlos Müller / IPS

Slaughterhouse recovery

The most important project for the end of 2024 is to put into operation the Goat and Sheep Slaughterhouse of Monteiro, located next to Capribom’s own slaughterhouse.

This agro-industry was built by the national government in 2000 and handed over to a consortium of municipalities. The management contract expired and the facilities were never put into operation. They were looted or became scrap metal.

“In the current government, technicians visited us and saw the potential. We negotiated with the state government and the mayor’s office. The national government passed the facilities to the state, which passed them on to the mayor’s office, and the mayor’s office gave Capribom a transfer of use,” Ferreira said.

The cooperative recovered part of the equipment. The government of Paraíba is acquiring new cold rooms and installing them on site.

With a capacity to slaughter 120 small animals daily (goats and sheep, and eventually pigs), the slaughterhouse will be the only one in Paraíba complying with the sanitary standards required by Brazilian legislation and will be able to participate in public procurement programmes.

Deboned cuts of sheep and goat meat will be sent to schools. Whole pieces will be sent to other entities, but Ferreira does not lose sight of the market for special cuts. “It’s a small market, but it’s a gourmet type market,” he explained.

Capribom has 50 employees, and another 30 will work in the slaughterhouse when it starts to operate normally.

According to administrative director Cazuza, 80% of the employees are children of the cooperative members.

This is the case of Wesley Cristyan Batista da Silva, who has a degree in agro-ecology and has been working for two months evaluating the milk delivered by the producers to the dairy and providing them with technical assistance.

Historically, young people from family farming emigrated from the semi-arid region due to a lack of study and work opportunities.

Da Silva is part of a different generation. He has a university degree and combines collaboration in the family property with employment in the cooperative. “Am I satisfied? Yes. It was what I wanted and what I intend to continue doing,” he told IPS confidently.

A camel outside a traditional Mongolian felt tent (yurt). Credit: Michelle Tolson/IPS

By Michelle Tolson
ULAANBAATAR, Mongolia, May 6 2013 (IPS)

Genghis Khan knew about hard times. The founder of the Mongol Empire, which spanned most of Eurasia until roughly 1227, Genghis and his clan had to survive on their wits and natural surroundings, often resorting to meals of “green leafy things” when food was scarce.

Today that history seems to have been lost, with most Mongolians dismissing fruits, vegetables and cultivation as “unmanly”, according to Marissa Markowitz, a food security consultant with the ministry of industry and agriculture (MoIA).

Less than one percent of the country’s land is used for crop production. Instead, following the instincts of their ancestors who were primarily nomadic herders, Mongolians rely on livestock for their food needs, guiding massive herds across the vast grasslands of the Central Asian Steppes.

The Soviet-era meat and dairy industries that flourished here between 1921 and 1990 collapsed along with the Soviet Union, robbing Mongolians not only of the centralised economic structure that had regulated production and distribution for years, but also of major markets for their products, tipping the country towards food insecurity.

One third of households in urban provincial centres and the capital, Ulaanbaatar, were found to be food insecure in 2009, according to a seminal study by Mercy Corps.

The standard diet here is comprised of wheat, meat and rice, said Markowitz, citing reports by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Research released by the ministry of health in 2008 and 2010 revealed that a full third of the country’s population of three million eat no fruits or vegetables at all.

Vegetables and fruits are expensive compared to the monthly minimum wage of about 100 dollars. Spring is a particularly difficult period, when national food stores are depleted and prices skyrocket – during this time, local sea buckthorn berries sell for about three to four dollars a kilo; carrots for roughly two dollars a kilo and tomatoes for nearly four dollars a kilo.

A severe lack of storage capacity in rural areas and informal settlements known as “ger districts” — shantytowns comprised of traditional Mongolian felt tents, or yurts — exacerbates the problem, with transportation costs adding to the price.

The poverty index is 23.4 percent in Mongolia’s capital Ulaanbaatar, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), with 60 percent of the city’s one million residents living in informal settlements or shantytowns.

A fifth of Mongolian children under the age of five are stunted, according to the MoIA’s statistics on malnutrition.

Experts on food security are also concerned about extreme desertification brought on by the introduction of a market-based food system, which saw herds increase by 20 million heads between 1999 and 2007.

Bringing back gardens

In light of these alarming trends, the country has recently embarked on the slow process of rebuilding its agricultural sector.

In the northwestern Songino Khairkhan district in Ulaanbaatar, in a neighbourhood crowded with gers surrounded by wooden fences, a two-acre farm flanked by snow-capped mountains is thriving. Warm greenhouses nurture vegetable seedlings and, outside, the hardy sea buckthorn bush saplings are preparing to explode into ripe orange fruit.

This is the headquarters of the Mongolian Women Farmers Association (MWFA), a volunteer-led NGO that works in all 21 of Mongolia’s provinces to promote vegetable and fruit cultivation among poor families.

The climate here – cold and dry with a short growing season from May until September – is ideal for potatoes, beets, cabbage, carrots, onions and radishes, which can be stored during the long winter months when temperatures drop to minus 40 degrees Celsius.

But a survey published by the Mercy Corps showed that despite 40 percent of the urban poor having access to land, only six percent grew their own vegetables – and even these families cultivated the produce for their own personal use rather than additional income.

Markowitz, coordinator of the project, says the NGO has already worked with 4,500 families on “enhanced nutrition and resource conservation”, and supported vegetable gardens as a “viable way to generate household income”. MWFA also teaches families how to cook and preserve vegetables by canning.

The organisation hopes this will reduce dependence on Russian and Chinese imports that typically flood the local market during the cold season that lasts from October through April.

A volunteer named Tuya told IPS the farm is very popular among locals, particularly for their cultivation of sea buckthorn, which thrives in Mongolia’s harsh weather and helps to stem desertification.

Over 30 grafted varieties of the plant grow in the central and northeastern parts of the country. The yellow berry, known as a “super plant,” is high in vitamin C, omega-3 fatty acids and can remove toxins in the body. Families freeze harvested berries in the winter, and often turn them into juice for a quick meal.

In 2007, the far-western Uvs province, considered the birthplace of wild buckthorn domestication in the 1940s, attained the coveted geographic indicator status, comparable to the Champagne region in France, which ensures a higher price for specialised produce. Today, Uvs supplies the nation with 60,000 saplings yearly, according to a FAO case study.

In addition to helping spread sea buckthorn plants, MWFA has published two books and 30 texts on agriculture, using their greenhouses as teaching aids. They also provide free classes to the local community in the surrounding ger districts.

One of the teachers, Bayraa, told IPS classes span twenty days and instruct individuals interested in subsistence agriculture or entrepreneurs aiming to start a business.

Some teachers travel to the countryside to impart knowledge of vegetable cultivation to populations in more remote provinces.

It remains to be seen if sea buckthorn berries or vegetables can stand alongside meat or dairy as a traditional Mongolian meal, even though agricultural production was practiced on the steppes as far back as 2,000 years ago.

Today, Ulaanbaatar boasts over 20 vegetarian restaurants, helping to fuel a demand for local greens and reduce the impact of herding on the country.

If the expansion of agriculture here is successful, Mongolia could build a different kind of empire to Genghis Khan’s – one with nutrition and food security at its core.

Nabi Ahmed, a dairy farmer in Aliabad, with his cows, a few of whom were artificially inseminated. Credit: Muhammad Hadi/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Mar 16 2013 (IPS)

Mohammad Ali’s routine has not changed in over three decades. A small dairy farmer in the village of Aliabad, in the Narowal district of Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province, he wakes at sunrise and walks to the barn to milk his three cows manually, stopping only for a breakfast of unleavened bread and tea heavily laced with milk before getting back to work.

Unfazed by the multitude of flies hovering around the stainless steel milk buckets, he carefully transfers their contents to an aluminium container and, securing it firmly on his motorbike, heads off to the nearest shop that purchases 14 litres of milk from him every day.

For many years, the forty-year-old farmer had accepted that each of his cows would produce no more than three to four litres of milk a day, hardly enough to put food on the table and clothes on his back.

Until he heard of Jassar Farms, that is. Located in a village by the same name just two kilometres away, as Ali learnt from his neighbour, cows on Jassar farm produce three times the quantity of milk as the cattle in Aliabad.

Run by Shahzad Iqbal, a 43-year-old social entrepreneur, this “miracle” farm – on which over 500 of the 600 cows produce 12 to 14 litres a day – began in 2007, based on a scientific model and backed by a sound business plan.

“I began by importing the embryos of pure exotic bulls instead of the more common practice of importing elite cows from the United States or Australia that cost thousands of dollars,” Iqbal told IPS.

He then used local cows as surrogates and once the first generation was born, started crossbreeding them with his own herd.

Iqbal sees great potential in Pakistan’s dairy and livestock industry, which engages roughly 20 percent of Pakistan’s population. About 8.5 million small and landless families in rural areas comprise the bulk of the dairy and livestock sector, with 35 to 40 million people dependent on it for a living. Most farmers own just three or four cows.

With a herd of 162 million animals, including cows, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, horses, asses and mules, Pakistan has the world’s fourth largest livestock population.

Speaking to IPS over the phone from Narowal, Iqbal admitted, “The attitudes of these poor farmers are hard to change.” But change is exactly what he is after, convinced that artificial insemination could push milk production up by a minimum of 2,000 litres per animal per year.

This “translates into 80,000 rupees (814 dollars) extra revenue for every farmer from each animal if the milk is sold at the current rate of 40 rupees (.40 dollars) per litre,” he says.

“According to the Economic Survey of Pakistan, livestock generates 40 percent of rural income and 11.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) — if we can double the yield, we can contribute significantly to Pakistan’s GDP,” he added.

If farmers could embrace scientific practices, he said, the country could produce an extra 16 billion litres of milk per year.

Given its advantageous geographic location, Pakistan would then be poised to become a leading supplier of milk and dairy-based products to import-dependent “Islamic countries, from Malaysia to Morocco”.

But based on the 2006 national livestock census, estimated milk production for 2011-12 was just 42 billion litres, scarcely enough to meet the country’s own demand: according to Iqbal, the country spends half a billion dollars annually to import milk-based products.

In an effort to fill this gap in yield, Jassar Farms now produces “high quality” bull semen at an affordable price. Utilising a network of 6,000 technicians, the enterprise distributes 75,000 doses per month from Punjab to Sindh, at a bargain price of 150 to 300 rupees (1.5 to three dollars).

Rizwan Hameed, a marketing graduate working at Iqbal’s farm, told IPS that the quality of this semen can be compared to elite imported varieties but comes at a much cheaper rate.

“Our dose is tenfold cheaper than the comparable imported variety, which is available at 2,000 rupees (20 dollars),” he said.

Keeping it local

Dr. Tanveer Ahmad,  at the Livestock Production and Management Department of the Arid Agriculture University in Rawalpindi, agrees that artificial insemination could result in a genetically superior herd, thereby “decreasing the spread of veneral diseases and increasing the yield”.

But he fears lax market regulations could compromise the health of local breeds.

“There is indiscriminate insemination going on, which could spoil our pure breeds,” he told IPS.

He favours the use of high quality semen taken from local beasts like Sahiwal cattle, which originated here in the Punjab, rather than the imported variety “because our local elite animals are more resistant to the weather and environment, can endure the heat and do not develop ticks the way cross-bred imported varieties do”.

Irfan Elahi, secretary of the Punjab Livestock Department, echoed his words. Talking to IPS over the phone from Lahore, Elahi said a bill has recently been tabled in the Punjab provincial assembly, aimed at regulating semen production units across the province.

There is already a ban on artificial insemination of Sahiwal cattle with exotic semen – these beasts can only be inseminated with better quality semen from the same breed, he added.

The Punjab government has also been actively engaged in livestock research and in 2006 began testing the progeny of Sahiwal cows and the local Nili-Ravi buffalo.

In addition, the Punjab provincial government has set up 976 artificial insemination centres to provide services to smallholders. The Punjab Livestock and Dairy Development Board is training inseminators and provides them motorbikes and insemination kits free of cost to provide services in the field, where the Livestock Department has limited reach.

Still, many farmers are reluctant to embrace the change.

Shafaqat Ali, a member of the Pakistan Dairy Farmers’ Association, believes this is because the practice is cost-prohibitive: “Each imported dose costs anywhere between 6,000 and 25,000 rupees (60 and 250 dollars) and there is no guarantee that one dose will impregnate the animal.

“An impoverished farmer cannot afford to take the risk and so relies on the natural method,” he told IPS over phone from Faisalabad, a city in the Punjab.

In developed countries, 90 to 92 percent of animals are impregnated through artificial insemination, but the rate in Pakistan is as low as seven to eight percent, according to Iqbal.

(END)