Tag Archives: agroforestry

Give Trees: The Perfect Alternative Gift for Vegetarians

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All Heifer projects strive for sustainability, and that’s why we often provide trees of different varieties to families in need. Trees enrich the air with oxygen, help maintain soils and provide fruits and nuts, as well.

Watch this video to see how Heifer’s efforts at reforestation and other agroecological methods are promoting soil conservation, erosion control and improved farming in Ecuador.

Fruits and Fodder
Planting trees ensures families have a source of fodder for livestock. Fruit- and nut-bearing trees provide nutritious and fresh foods, and surpluses can increase income.

Better Soil
In many countries where Heifer works, poor families cook on wood-burning stoves. Families must cut down trees to ensure they have enough firewood. Without trees, soil washes away. Tree roots hold together topsoil and help to sustain moisture and nutrients.

Firewood
With many families foraging for firewood in similar areas, sometimes families have to walk miles just to find enough wood to burn so they can cook a meal. When families plant trees, firewood is no lnger scarce and is available in the immediate area.

This holiday season, give the gift of trees in honor of your tree-hugging, vegetarian sister-in-law; and help a community grow food for themselves and their livestock while preventing soil erosion and water loss. And learn more about Heifer’s agroecology and agroforestry work by digging into our archives.

The Big Deal About Fair Trade Bananas

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As I mentioned yesterday, our friendly Ecuadorian banana farmer, Wilson Sanchez, is a member of the Association of Small Banana Producers El Guabo, which brings together 14 smaller groups of banana producers (accounting for around 320 active producers in total). El Guabo is a pioneer in Ecuador in associative commercialization for the export of bananas under Fair Trade conditions and with organic certification. Here’s a link to a good summary of El Guabo‘s work.

Outside a local El Guabo office.

So where does Heifer come in?

In January 2011, Heifer began implementing a project in partnership with El Guabo. The project, Strengthening the Productive Diversity of Agro-Forestry Small Holders in El Oro, Azuay and Guayas, will benefit a total of 200 families belonging to El Guabo who are considered vulnerable due to their low farm production.

While farmers earn a better price for their bananas through membership with El Guabo, their income and standard of living remain lower than they would like. They farm on steep land and lack sufficient irrigation to increase their yields. Family diets lack nutritional diversity as most of the effort is put into growing bananas for export.

Wilson Sanchez

Sanchez and his fellow Heifer participants, however, are receiving irrigation systems, livestock and training. By growing five or six different crops (bananas, cocoa, citrus, timber trees, etc.), they’re not only diversifying their sources of income, but their diets as well. Sanchez is raising hogs–a gift from Heifer–that he feeds excess bananas not fit for sale. In the coming year, Heifer Ecuador will work with participants to teach them how to grow vegetable gardens for their families’ consumption (kitchen gardens are less common in this part of the world so focused on exports), which will allow them to feed themselves and rely less on external markets.

Heifer will also provide capacity building and organizational strengthening for local partners within the El Guabo network.

So where do you come in?

Buy Fair Trade bananas!

Sure, they’re more expensive. But those extra pennies per pound support small farm families, provide medical clinics in banana-growing communities, pay teachers’ salaries to educate the children of banana farmers, provide retirement benefits for the hard-working farmers who grow the fruit we have come to rely on year-round.

Want to do even better?

Make sure the Fair Trade bananas you’re buying are certified organic, too.

Yes, it’s true: not all Fair Trade bananas are created equal. There are actually three classes of bananas sold under the Fair Trade label. Conventional Fair Trade bananas are grown on small family farms and must meet the same social requirements as organic, but they still use chemicals that are harmful to the planet, the producer and the consumer. Organic Fair Trade bananas are grown using organic standards, but still rely on the monocrop model, which is not only difficult to do, but it also means the farmers are vulnerable in their lack of diversity (income and diet). Agroforestry Fair Trade bananas are what our participants are growing, and they go beyond organic standards. Unfortunately, there is not currently a method used to distinguish agroforestry Fair Trade bananas from organic Fair Trade bananas. This is something the folks with El Guabo recognize as a weakness, but the onus is on us, the consumers, to demand more. I’m still working out the best way to do this, but one place to start is to tell your grocer you want to know: are these organic Fair Trade bananas agroforestry bananas?

Here are some interesting banana resources:
Equal Exchange
Green America
Fairtrade International
Fair Trade USA
Banana Link
The Banana Trade War (an article)

And we’re not the only ones talking about Fair Trade bananas this week. Nourishing the Planet has a guest post up today from Jessica Jones of Oke USA Fruit Company, which is the company purchasing El Guabo members’ bananas.

All in a Day’s Work: Protecting Bananas for Export

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Watch these videos. This is Wilson Sanchez, and he’s showing us some of the work he must do to every banana plant intended for export from his agroecological banana farm in rural Ecuador.

The big green bag is used to protect the bananas from birds and insects. These particular bags are called “bio bags,” and they’re made by only one company. Unlike the bags used by conventional banana plantations, these bio bags do not contain chemical pesticides. The smaller bits are called “diapers,” and they’re used to protect the growing bananas from each other. Sanchez and other farmers use each bag and each diaper twice. At the end of the season, they hire a truck to pick up the used bags to take to the recycling plant. The bio bags cost $7 for a box of 100; I didn’t catch the cost of the diapers. That’s not including the labor of doing this over and over again.

Thankfully, Sanchez belongs to El Guabo, an association to protect small banana producers. It is through El Guabo that Sanchez is a Heifer project participant. I’ll tell you more about El Guabo later, but a significant benefit of belonging to the association is health coverage. You know, in case Sanchez falls off his ladder and breaks a leg. That’s not a luxury afforded a typical commercial banana plantation worker.

Why the added cost and so much trouble? Sanchez put it plainly: “Europeans eat with their eyes.” (Don’t think we’re any better in the United States.)

This is what an Agroecological Banana Farm Looks Like

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Yesterday, I posted a couple of pictures I took of conventional banana plantations outside Machala, Ecuador. I think probably my favorite day in Ecuador was the day we visited Wilson Sanchez’s agroecological banana farm, which was about as opposite from those plantations as you could get. It was so tropical, so diverse. Visually, it was the most interesting place I’ve ever been.

Driving to the farm. It’s amazing how quickly the landscape changes in Ecuador.
A line up of the produce grown on the farms in the area
 at the processing station of the small-farmer group. It was a total feast of the senses.
The trucks took us as far as they could;
we were on our own to muck the rest of the way up to Sanchez’s farm. 
You can see, there’s a wide variety of trees and shrubs growing here.
Here is a banana plant (they’re not actually trees) with a banana heart.
I’ll show you a video of what happens at this stage tomorrow. 
Tropical paradise, no?
I couldn’t stop taking pictures to remember how beautiful it all was.
Hello, frog.
Cocoa!
Up close.
Pigs (from Heifer).
Fermenting liquid compost, to be used as fertilizer.
Wild ducks! On clear water.

Ecuador: Into the Banana Republic

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For whatever reason, my 2-year-old associates the word “errand” with bananas. I say, “I’ve got to run some errands,” and she says, “You get more bo-mannas? You come back more bo-mannas?”

Okay, so it might have something to do with our family of three eating about a banana and a half every day.

I’d never given much thought to how bananas are grown. They don’t make the Clean 15 list as being lowest in pesticides, but they’re also not on the Dirty Dozen. With such a thick skin, it seemed like paying the premium for organic bananas was an option I’d take when I won the lottery.

Until I went to Ecuador, one of the world’s top 10 banana producers for export. While I didn’t have the chance to tour a “conventional” banana plantation, we drove by mile after mile of mono-cropped banana fields, some protected by electric fences.

A huge contrast to these flat expanses of banana trees was the hilly agroecological farm of Wilson Sanchez. Sanchez is a participant in a new Heifer project called Strengthening the Productive Diversity of Agro-Forestry Small Holders in El Oro, Azuay and Guayas Project. Witnessing the hard work and dedication required to grow bananas for export, learning about the negative environmental impacts of conventional bananas and the alternative provided by agroecology, and scratching the surface of the Fair Trade banana movement, gave me a new outlook on bananas.

Over the next several days, I’ll share some photos and videos I captured of Wilson Sanchez and others involved in this small community of agroecological banana producers. Hopefully, by the end of it, you will be as convinced as I am that Fair Trade, organic bananas are worth the premium. This is definitely one of those cases where “voting with your dollar” means something real.

Saving Animals, Plants and People At the Same Time

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This week, members of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity are meeting in Japan to talk about how to protect the planet’s flora and fauna. It’s a noble and challenging goal, especially considering that they hope to do it without displacing or disenfranchising any of the world’s poor, 70 percent of whom live in rural areas and are therefore more likely to look to hunting, fishing and resource extraction for their livelihoods.

The online magazine Slate takes a look at this challenge today and considers ways that biodiversity can be preserved at the same time poverty is reduced. Agroforestry, in which trees and agriculture are integrated, is one solution that Heifer promotes in many of its projects. Protecting soil by planting trees simply makes sense for the farmers who rely on healthy soil to produce healthy crops. You can learn more about some Heifer’s work with partner Green Mountain Coffee to preserve biodiversity in Mexico in the Winter 2010 issue of World Ark magazine.

Read more about the Convention on Biological Diversity here.