Tag Archives: Ecuador

Self-Reliance: Not Just for the Rural Poor

Posted on by
2
American Food Culture

Photo by JasonTromm, used under Creative Commons.

One of the identifiable turning points in my young adult life was a course I took as a sophomore in college called “Food and American Culture,” taught by Allison Wallace. It was one of those classes where you learn things you almost immediately wish you could unlearn, but of course can’t. It was the first time the concept of self-reliance was introduced to me, though it took a long time for me to internalize exactly what that looks like.

Last month there was a major snowstorm in central Arkansas (if you don’t live here, you possibly heard about it on the news). Thundersnow and Snowpocalypse were a couple of nicknames it earned. My family and I missed it, spending the holidays in the typically-snowy, but snow-bereft on that visit, foothills of the Smoky Mountains.

Every time there’s a storm like this, where thousands of people lose power and grocery store shelves are shopped bare, I remember a particular story Professor Wallace (well, we actually called her Allison, such was the culture of the College) told. Though I don’t remember all of the details so well–Allison, if you read this, please forgive any creative license I take with your story–the overall message resonated so much it sticks with me nearly 13 years later.

Arkansas snow storm

Photo by jball359, used under Creative Commons

Allison had lived in Maine, where the winters are typically harsher than in Arkansas. A snowstorm had hit, and many in her community were without electricity and other resources. As time passed and people continued to go without power and access to things like grocery stores, one community member in particular, an older woman, became the boon of the neighborhood.

Did she have an all-terrain vehicle that could drive everyone to the store? Nope. She had skills. A variety of skills once known by many and now forgotten by most. In fact, I’ve forgotten her list of skills. The two that stuck out for me were: She knew how to grow food and, importantly, how to preserve it.

Backyard garden

Photo by Pip_Wilson, used under Creative Commons.

As a college sophomore who lived on cafeteria baked potatoes and 10-cent ramen back in the dorm room, the thought of growing my own food and “living off the land” seemed remarkable. Completely unattainable. As a somewhat older and wiser person, I now see it’s not just doable, at least to some degree, it may be the key.

Having visited Heifer project families in Uganda, Peru and Ecuador, I have seen the difference between families who cannot provide for their own needs and those who go beyond that and can enjoy true security as they build income and assets and help their neighbors. One of the linchpins to this security is diversity of resources and skills.

Self-Reliance in Ecuador's Dry Forest

Though I'll never have as much land as Flor and her husband, Don Juan, who live in the Dry Forest in Ecuador, I will remember the diversity of their small farm forever. They grew their own fruits and vegetables, raised their own protein (fish), grew insect-repellent flowers alongside their crops, and produced their own natural fertilizer. Photo by Dave Anderson, courtesy of Heifer International.

When I come home and compare these families’ security with that of my own family I see how untenable mine really is. If it came down to it, could my family provide itself, long-term, with food, water, shelter and clothing? As of now we could eat eggs with rosemary and a side of figs (season permitting), cooked over a campfire.

I don’t believe we’re headed for a real cataclysmic shift anytime soon, but as these major storms (not just snow; this is Tornado Alley we’re talking about) happen more frequently, as  food and fuel prices continue to rise, I’m more and more seeing the value of being at least a touch more self-reliant and on being part of a community with similar goals.

Food preservation

Photo by jazzijava, used under Creative Commons.

What do you think? Do you have any self-reliance skills already built? Are you learning to sew or grow a garden? Have you made any New Year’s resolutions that fall into this category? Or do you think this is purely the business of hippies and hipsters? Tell us in the comments section.

Christmas Wish List: The Secret Life of Sheep

Posted on by
0

On Heifer International’s Christmas Wish List, we want you to look at Christmas gift-giving from a different point of view. From a sheep’s-eye-view, actually.

Christmas gift sheep

These guys are marvelous – they provide wool and manure for rural families, and even meat and milk in some cases. And the sheep will tell you all about it in this Heifer Christmas video shot in Ecuador.

Christmas list sheep

The sheep — they actually look like goats to me, but I’m assured that they are recently-shorn sheep — required a translator for the “baaaa”s, but Heifer took care of that for you. See what the sheep have to say, and then consider purchasing a sheep as part of your Christmas shopping.

Beyond Hunger Event Celebrates Women’s Empowerment

Posted on by
0

I am in California where this evening I will be a part of Beyond Hunger: A Place at the Table. This event is an extraordinary opportunity to honor Mary Steenburgen and Ted Danson for their awesome dedication to Heifer International, and to raise awareness of the ongoing need to empower women.

Because I feel so strongly about the importance of providing opportunities to women, many of my blogs feature this topic. I wrote that Investment in Women Farmers IS Priority for Heifer; but at Heifer, we don’t just say it is important, our actions demonstrate our commitment.

Heifer CEO, Pierre Ferrari in Nepal

In August, Heifer CEO, Pierre Ferrari met with a women's self-help group in Nepal.

Gender and Family Focus is one of Heifer’s 12 Cornerstones and empowerment for women is  an integral component of our projects. Gender equity (the notion that women, men, girls and boys are valued equally and have the same opportunities to achieve their potential) is an important, key element of our programmatic work. Heifer has developed a two-part strategic approach: mainstreaming and understanding the cultural aspects that prevent gender equity. Mainstreaming ensures that women’s (and men’s) concerns, priorities and experiences are an integral part of the entire project cycle: the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of the project. Through training, Heifer is able to address the cultural systems, procedures, norms, beliefs, practices and attitudes that perpetuate gender inequality. These approaches allow for bridging the existing gaps between women and men.

Women in Cambodia in August 2012

Heifer CEO, Pierre Ferrari, was present in Cambodia when several women participating in Heifer projects received certificates for completing their training.

I recently returned from a visit to India, Nepal and Cambodia; and for the first time, I met women who were in the beginning stages of Heifer projects. These women were shy, and their husbands dominated the conversations. They were such a contrast to other women whose stories I have previously shared, such as Dolores Delgado from Peru or the Women’s Group Coordination Committee (WGCC) in Nepal. But I know that this contrast will not last, and these timid women will become transformed after they complete their Cornerstones and Values Based Holistic Development trainings.

It’s unbelievable that even though women make up more than half the total number of small farmers in the world, produce between 60 and 80 percent of the food in most developing countries, they still struggle for access to basic resources and services. Gender equity should be the norm; with your help Heifer will continue to work toward making that a reality.

So tonight, as we celebrate the stories of hope and inspiration and reflect on the work that is yet to be done, we recognize that together, we can change the world. And, even if you will not be able to attend this event, I ask that you join us in this pledge for the future to help empower women to achieve their dreams of life without hunger and poverty.

Purchasing Fair Trade to Support Families

Posted on by
0

May 12th is World Fair Trade Day, and like many celebrated days, I think this is something we should consider every day. Last month we shared with you how to purchase coffee with a conscience, and I wrote about coffee. I mentioned that in my previous life I assumed purchasing fair trade was “enough” to help the farmers move from poverty to a sustainable life.

Fair trade is a wonderful practice – we purchase good, quality products, and the farmers receive a fair price for their product. But another aspect we want to make sure we consider is that we are improving the lives of the farmers. We want the farmers to produce, first for themselves and then to sell the surplus, and through this build their sustainable lives.

Fair trade supports helping farmers, and at Heifer we believe this is an important component of helping more people. But we also need to have an understanding of the big picture and support the full cycle of farmers improving their lives.  We want this practice to be beneficial both ways, for us and the farmers!

Photograph by Dave Anderson, courtesy of Heifer International

This is why it is important for Heifer to support organizations such as Fair Trade USA. It’s not just about purchasing fair trade products, but it is also about ensuring that we incorporate different elements while working with the farmers. Protecting the planet, supporting farmers as they build their business, educating and empowering all families members (especially the women!) and fighting poverty are all part of the solution.

As I have mentioned before, I am on the board of Ben and Jerry’s, and one of the plans we are implementing is incorporating fair trade products into our ice cream. I’m pleased to report that by 2013, the products Ben and Jerry’s uses for their ice cream will be 100% fair trade. I’m also excited to mention that in my travels last year to Ecuador we met with a fair trade banana cooperative that is working with Heifer and (coincidentally) provides Ben and Jerry’s with fair trade bananas. What a small world!

Photograph by Dave Anderson, courtesy of Heifer International

So yes, it is important to purchase fair trade products – but it’s also important to support organizations like Heifer that are working with farmers to ensure they have the essential tools needed to rise above the struggles of poverty.

So if you’ll excuse me, I’m off now to drink my Yerba Mate (organic, shade grown, reforestation oriented, fairly traded of course!) and contemplate on what more we can do to end hunger and poverty.

 

Give Trees: The Perfect Alternative Gift for Vegetarians

Posted on by
1

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

Posted on by
1

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

Posted on by
0
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

Posted on by
0

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

Posted on by
0

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.

Growing For Market

Posted on by
2
After we visited the agroecology market in Loja, Ecuador, we went to visit the farm of one of the vendors participating in the project. Maria and Rafael Paccha had a very diverse peri-urban farm with vegetables, fruit trees and an entire greenhouse of strawberries.
Maria Paccha in her vegetable plot.
Part of Heifer’s work with the Paccha family and others has been to help local organizations, like the Agroecological Network, establish and maintain farmers markets such as the one in Loja. In the past, the practice was largely for farmers to sell their produce to an intermediary (this was a common theme throughout our entire visit in Ecuador). Doing so, however, gives the farmers a much lower profit margin than what they can earn by selling directly to consumers in the market.

Another piece of the work is connecting these agroecological producers with the fishing communities to allow for the cross-selling of goods, thereby diversifying the diets of both groups.

Using inter-cropping and drip-tape irrigation helps make the most of the small farm’s land.
Strawberry greenhouse.
There seems to be a common belief that you can’t grow
 good strawberries without chemicals.
This basket would like to argue otherwise.
Rafael Paccha


It was interesting talking with the farmers, asking them what they needed to succeed. Out of this group, the most common answer was more land. More land so they could grow, sell and earn more. The Paccha family raises their produce on about .15 acres. What they’d like is to have six acres or so, which would not only allow them to raise more produce for the market, but also to have a cow and other small livestock. Another serious need is more water for irrigation. A significant hurdle to owning more land and building a higher capacity irrigation system is access to credit through traditional banks. Currently, financial institutions in this area do not recognize a diversified family farm as an investment opportunity. Were the Paccha family raising a mono-crop of corn or wheat, for example, they would be more likely to secure a loan to purchase additional land. The irony here is that an agroecological farm is much less vulnerable to external risks than a monoculture farm (pests, disease, etc).