Organic Certification Workshop

About six months ago another volunteer and I were approached by the Peace Corps office to spearhead a workshop to educate both coffee and cacao growers on the process and benefits organic certifications. The Peace Corps approached Brigitte and I because we were both working in communities that were very active in the cultivation of coffee. The other crop this workshop was to focus on was Cacao, which is the bean they use to make chocolate and comes primarily from the hot and humid coastal communities where we have many volunteers located as well.
So Brigitte and I started the long, hectic and often times annoying process of dealing with Ecuadorian hotels/convention halls, restaurants and organic certifiers to arrange the food, lodging and presenters of our workshop. First we had to contact all of these possible places to have them send us a cost breakdown, which can be very frustrating given the level of business we were both accustomed to in the US and how extremely different they do things here. Then we wrote what is called a PL480 grant to apply for funds established by the US Dept of Agriculture specifically for Peace Corps projects. (I am also in the process of writing another grant like this for a greenhouse and nursery project in my site). About 4 months later we finally got the money and were ready to set up the workshop.
Fortunately we found a great place located in Quevedo, Ecuador which is known as a distribution hub for Ecuador’s huge banana production. We had our workshop at the Instituto Nacional Autonomo De Investigaciones Agropecuarias, aka INIAP, which is an area of about 3000 acres set up by the Ecuadorian government as a farming research and training facility. It was a great location for us because we could eat, sleep and conduct the seminars without having to leave their campus.
The training started on May 4th and lasted for three days and was conducted by a group named Conservation and Desarollo who are auditors for the Rainforest Alliance certifications. They gave a great presentation on all the different types of certifications, the process of becoming certified and we even went on a little field trip to a farm to show the growers the auditory process that is conducted in a certification. After their presentation we were also lucky enough to have a Cacao distributor come in from Guayaquil to do a brief presentation on the commercialization and exportation of cacao.
Given the amount of participation of both the Peace Corps volunteers and their counterparts I think the workshop was a great success. We had about 30 people attending with 7 of them being volunteers, thus it was a great learning experience for the Ecuadorian coffee and cacao producers and hopefully they are spreading that knowledge back in their communities.
Personally this workshop couldn’t have come at a better time for the coffee growers in Loja and in my community. I was able to bring representatives of 8 different coffee groups from my area, including Carlos Lapo from San Pedro de Vilcabamba (my site). Within these 8 groups, a number of them are starting the process of becoming certified. San Pedro’s coffee organization, named APECAEL, has only been together for about six months so they still have some more internal issues to address before they can pursue their certification, but with their formation they are fulfilling the first goal of becoming certified, coordinating the coffee growers. The goal of this workshop was to give groups like APECAEL an idea of what to expect on down the road when they do decide to pursue some type of organic certification and I am confident we achieved that. (Just to give you an idea, groups can earn about $75 more per sack of coffee if they were certified which is a substantial chunk of change here in Ecuador).
For now Carlos and I are planning on giving a small presentation to the local coffee growers on what we learned in order to pass it on to them. The entire certification process lasts about 3-5 years so unfortunately it won’t happen in my time but I hope that I have at least helped to lay the foundation for them to be certified in the future.

Landslide City

If you talk with five different people in my site you will probably get five different answers as to when the seasons change here. Oh and there are pretty much only two seasons here, summer from May until September and winter from October until April. The winter is in no way classified by a drop in temperature that is for sure; where I live it stays pretty constant at 65-80 degrees all year round. The only difference in the seasons here is the excess of rain that comes right around February and lasts until April. When I arrived to Ecuador the entire country was having many troubles with landslides and floods in various places all over the country. Fortunately my site and Loja weren’t too affected last year. But unfortunately it was all waiting for this year.
The rains started to get stronger about mid-February this year, it wasn’t as though it was raining here all the time but when it did rain, it rained really hard. So for about two months we received some really hard rains about 3-4 times a week. In the beginning things were ok and we didn’t see too many problems. Then one by one I started to notice how in the neighboring mountain there were about 9 landslides, then 13, then 18. After one hard nights rain I heard the roadway was blocked to get back to the city and that travelers had to walk through the mud to meet the bus on the other side. These types of adaptations seemed somewhat minimal to me. Then after a very hard night of rain it seemed like the entire town was going to slide into the river. There were houses who were swept off their foundations, the main road was again closed due to the HUGE landslide that took about 3 days to clear, the road to another smaller town was completely blocked, and lastly one of my good friends’ pig farms was just about wiped out by a landslide. I went to visit him to see if I could lend a hand and his pig pens were full up to the top board with mud. Thank goodness not a single one of his 40 pigs was lost. But he did have two crops wiped out and rented a third bit of land to a poor farmer who lost about 3 months of work in the landslide…very sad. The main highway that runs right alongside my site also had a HUGE cave in, thus causing the road to be unusable and diverting all the daily traffic to Vilcabamba through my quiet, sleepy little town of San Pedro.
Not to mention all the damage done to the peoples houses and farms but our new potable water system, which had tubes running down from high in the mountains down the river banks, was very damaged in the rains. The workers were going up everyday to fix the system where every time they fixed one part, they discovered another area broken. With these damages to the water system we were basically without water for about six weeks, yes that’s right SIX WEEKS! In order to get by the local firefighters would come by and fill all of our plastic water tanks up that would last for about 3 days. I have to say it was mighty annoying but after about the second week of not having water I became accustomed to life without it.
In a conversation with my counterpart a couple of weeks back we were talking about the issues we were facing and it was then that I made a very interesting realization about Ecuadorians and their culture. I asked him, “If you have this problem pretty much every two years or so, then why don’t you do anything to proactively fix it.” Basically his response was “We just don’t.” With that response I came to the conclusion that the Ecuadorians function pretty much only in the here and now. What are they going to earn today(money wise), where are they going to get today’s meals, ….if it rains all night and my house is filled with mud I will just shovel it out and continue on until it happens again and will shovel it out then too. In my brief experience here I have found it hard to find someone that thinks ahead into the future (not to say they don’t exist). Their tradition is solely to address problems or challenges when they are faced with them and not to have any type of forethought about what might happen to them or their families in the future.
Henceforth in hopes of possibly lessening the impact of future landslides I am looking into possibly doing a small project of finding certain types of native plants here that we can plant in critical areas where their roots will strengthen and hold the land from falling. I am hoping to do it with one of the local schools to introduce them to certain strategies to combat these landslides which have pretty much ransacked my small town this year.