Supporting Small Farmers in their Efforts to Build a Better Future for their Families & Communities
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Equal Exchange currently works with small farmer organizations in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the United States. Our trading partners are small farmer co-operatives - businesses owned and governed democratically by the farmers themselves. Decisions are made within the co-op, on their terms.
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Training programs for women in Guatemala, an ecotourism project in Nicaragua, new classrooms in El Salvador
- these are all examples of the initiatives that co-ops have taken in their own communities with the income and support of Equal Exchange and other Fair Trade organizations. These farmer co-ops help keep rural communities healthy and strong, and keep local cultures vibrant.
Why do we think it's important to partner with farmer co-operatives?
After over 25 years of working with small-scale growers in rural areas around the world we believe more strongly than ever that farmer co-ops are one of the best tools yet devised to address the long-standing economic, commercial, environmental, even political problems commonly found in the country-side of developing countries. This is because farmer co-ops can:
- Provide the strength of numbers. For example, whereas one farmer, earning maybe $500/year, could never buy a truck or build a warehouse or processing mill, a thousand farmers working together can do all that and more. By combining their resources and energies, previously isolated farmers can become the owners of a substantial enterprise that enables them to take more control over their economic lives, strengthen their position in the marketplace, and increase their options.
- Enable farmers to gain organic certification and access to the global organic market. A single small-farmer cannot afford to pay $2,000+ or more annually for organic certification, but when that cost is shared it becomes quite viable. In fact, most of the world's organic coffee and cocoa today is grown and exported by small farmer co-operatives.
- Help farmers improve their quality. A co-op can have the resources to train members of the community in quality control and to build the testing labs required to ensure consistently high quality. This, too, would be out of the reach of one small farmer.
- Level the local political landscape. Traditionally, in rural areas in developing countries a few powerful land-holding families, merchants or foreign corporations dominate local politics and it is hard for farmers or farm workers to get the attention and assistance of their own governments. We've seen this change considerably when the farmers organize themselves and - over time - build their co-operatives into significant enterprises. Governors and other officials who previously ignored the farmers begin to visit the communities, listen to the farmers requests, and even compete for their votes. The public services provided to the community begin to improve, and so on.
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Farmer Partners
