IPS-English AGRICULTURE-ARGENTINA: Using Internet and Bicycles to Search Out Markets
 
Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2007 16:35:26 -0800

 
Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Nov 4   (IPS)  - Just 45 kilometres outside of Buenos
Aires, a group of 20 families have set up a farming operation where
they work in harmony with nature and without bosses, selling their
products through a small network of consumers who appreciate the benefits
of organic food and cooperative labour.  



The families belong to the San Vicente Rural Workers Cooperative,
one of the 12 campesino, indigenous, unemployed and student organisations
that make up the Tacurú network. In addition to providing a means
of marketing the goods produced by these organisations, the Tacurú
network seeks to raise social awareness among consumers. 

This network of producers and consumers has opened up an alternative
market in the country's capital made possible by its creative organisational
style. 

”There are around 100 of us who make a living from our work in the
cooperative,” Carolina Maritorena told IPS. Maritorena is one of the
cooperative members who rides around on a bicycle to search out new
customers in the area of San Vicente, a municipality south of Buenos
Aires in the province of the same name, where the cooperative has
two hectares of land. 

With financial assistance from the Ministry of Social Development,
the cooperative members turned a plot of wasteland with nothing but
an old shack and wire fence into a fully functioning farm complete
with a vegetable garden, a greenhouse, a chicken coop with 140 laying
hens, irrigation pumps, clay ovens and canning equipment, where they
produce eggs, milk, cheese, preserves, baked goods and a range of
organic vegetables. 

”We sell door to door, explaining to people that we're a cooperative
that promotes decent work, that we don't use chemicals and that we
respect the environment. And even if they're not always happy with
the prices, a lot of people are inclined to support this project,”
she reported.

For some time now, the food produced by the cooperative has reached
Buenos Aires through the Tacurú network, which has established 15
”consumption units” in different neighbourhoods around the city. ”We
come every two weeks, meet with the other organisations and prepare
the boxes of the orders to be distributed,” Maritorena explained.
 

The deliveries are made with a truck paid for by the network. This
distribution system generates around 500 dollars every two weeks,
which is shared among the network members in accordance with the amount
sold by each. The name of the network, Tacurú, is a word in the Guaraní
indigenous language for a large, extremely sturdy anthill built with
community labour. 

The various organisations involved also sell a large part of their
production through other channels, often through stores. But almost
all of them have only managed to break into the Buenos Aires market
thanks to their membership in the network. 

For Ana González, who is in charge of ”finances” for this big anthill,
the idea is ”to create a space for marketing the products of social
organisations in Buenos Aires.” She recognises, however, that the
volume of this production is beyond the capabilities of the Tacurú
network, which for the moment is made up of volunteers. 

”It's a pilot project, an alternative marketing model that has its
limits, but also has potential,” she told IPS. ”We know that organising
customers this way is more complicated than crossing the street to
the supermarket, but the idea is to create awareness of a new mode
of consumption.”

The producers in the network do not have a market of their own, but
they advertise their goods on-line and sell them in small stands at
markets in the city. Here they sell their products alongside those
of campesino and indigenous cooperatives from the provinces of Córdoba,
Misiones and Santiago del Estero, along with groups of unemployed
workers from Buenos Aires itself.  

Students from the School of Agriculture at the University of Buenos
Aires (UBA) who have chosen to undertake part of their studies in
campesino communities in the country's interior serve as the ”business
representatives” in Buenos Aires for the goods produced by the Campesino
Movement of Santiago del Estero (MOCASE).

José Bourbotte, a student who spent time in this northern Argentine
province, told IPS that the campesinos who make up the majority of
the population live in precarious conditions because large agribusiness
operations make it extremely difficult for them to own their own land.
Nevertheless, they have traditional knowledge that they are now attempting
to revive. 

”They make pickled goat meat, watermelon and squash preserves, and
collect wild honey. The women spin sheep's wool by hand and dye it
with natural fibres,” commented Bourbotte, who runs the MOCASE stand
at a weekly fair held in the UBA School of Social Sciences.

One of the Tacurú network's ”star” products is the yerba mate sold
under the brand name Titrayjú (short for ”Tierra, Trabajo y Justicia”,
which means ”Land, Work and Justice in Spanish). 

Yerba mate is made from the dried, ground leaves of the Ilex paraguariensis
plant, and is used to make the traditional hot drink known as mate.
The yerba is placed in a gourd which is then filled with hot water,
and the infusion is drunk through a sort of straw with a strainer
known as a bombilla. 

Titrayjú yerba is produced in the northeastern Argentine province
of Misiones by a group of around 50 small farmers. Some of them own
their own land, while others do not have legal title to the lands
that their families have worked for generations. Their product is
directly distributed to the alternative market in Buenos Aires. 

”The yerba is a symbol of the campesino movement in Misiones that
promotes a new form of rural work for different products, and a new,
more responsible form of consumption,” said Miguel Rodríguez, the
Buenos Aires sales coordinator for 36 rural cooperatives in the Argentine
interior. 

”Our goal is to make consumers see that when you buy something on
the conventional market, you don't know what's behind the product:
whether production pollutes the environment, if the workers are exploited,
if there are problems with land ownership,” he told IPS. ”With this
yerba, people learn to consume in a different way.” 

In a telephone interview with IPS, Eugenio Casalaba, a yerba grower
in Misiones and member of the cooperative that produces Titrayjú,
explained that each member has a maximum of five hectares of land
where, in addition to yerba, they also grow food for their families'
own consumption. 

To avoid the exploitation of their labour, the farmers decided to
join together, to dry and crush the leaves they grow themselves, to
directly seek out responsible consumers in their own province or in
Buenos Aires, and to sell their product at a fair price, even if it
leaves them little or no profit margin.  

”We try to reach Buenos Aires with a product that proves that producers
can receive a fair price and consumers can get good quality yerba,”
he said. In the province of Misiones, a government agency sets a minimum
price for the unprocessed leaves of the plant used to make yerba mate,
but the big companies that produce it do not comply with the rules.


”If the price for the green leaves is set at 48 cents of a peso (15
cents of a dollar), they pay 30 cents of a peso (less than 10 cents
of a peso) to small farmers, said Casalaba. To expand the movement's
production, they have incorporated more cooperatives that will produce
another brand of yerba along with other products from the region,
such as tobacco and tea. 

For them, the Tacurú network is just one way of reaching consumers,
because they have access to the market through a number of channels.


”We support all the diverse ways of building alternative markets
in the different community organisations for fair trade in Buenos
Aires. The idea is not just to sell, but to create a different kind
of social project,” concluded Rodríguez.


*****
+ Tacurú Network - in Spanish  (http://www.redtacuru.com.ar/)
+ Yerba Tritrayjú - in Spanish (http://www.titrayju.com.ar)
+ LABOUR-ARGENTINA: Working Without Bosses- 2005 (http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=30266)
+ ARGENTINA: Building a Solidarity Economy - 2005 (http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=27361)


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