Written by: Emile Nsengumuremyi, Senior Program Officer - Agronomist, EMIRGE / Rwanda Post-harvest losses are food losses. Each step of the way from the farm to the market there are more and more losses. In a country such as Rwanda, food security relies on producing and storing major staple crops, such as grain. However, post-harvest commodity losses are particularly high. More than 25% of the grain produced can be lost through the entire post-harvest chain before reaching the consumer. These losses occur at every stage - harvest, transport, drying, shelling, winnowing, sorting/packaging, storage, and even during transport to market and in-market storage. Like many nations, grains represent the basis for food and job security for the Rwandan population and, consequently, more than 80% of Rwandans are involved in agriculture. Despite the national post-harvest strategic policy to reduce the losses of food grain crops from nearly 30% in 2010 to 15% in 2015, the Ministry of Agricultural and Animal Resources reports that losses are still hovering around 25%! I led the USAID/EMIRGE Rwanda program’s Post–Harvest Handling and Storage (PHHS) investigation in March and April of 2016. The causes are numerous but the key threats are known. In Rwanda, the root causes of food loss are linked. Among the cooperatives that we worked with, the key issues were: 1) lack of adequate extension services to build farmers’ skills in PHHS; 2) lack of proper packaging and storage; 3) insufficient or absence of appropriate on-farm drying and storage facilities; and 4) poor market access leading to the need for storage. For cooperatives and other groups, another key factor is their limited access to financing that would allow them to invest in small to medium processing services. However, post-harvest loss is a solvable problem. What if we could reduce these nearly 25% of food grain losses to an admissible 10% and turn lost grains into marketable food for Rwandans? Attacking the root causes of post-harvest loss can contribute significantly to improve millions of Rwandan farmers’ lives. If small-scale farmers could use hermetic bags, hermetic plastic, and/or small metallic silos, they could reduce losses of up to 40% on farm crop loss. Farmers’ cooperatives, cooperative unions, and private firms could collaboratively invest in larger storage capacities to accommodate famers’ harvests in their respective regions. Additionally, traders could build large-scale warehouses in regional locations for their businesses. Cooperative unions could seriously play a more active role by investing in an improved storage facility in each district and lead the crop collection activities for member cooperatives. While this strategy would require interlinked support from the government and other stakeholders, it would also increase the investment in having successful cooperatives in Rwanda – a long-time priority of the Government of Rwanda. Another key strategy would entail crop collection points in different districts in order to ease the enormous Rwandan shortage of post-harvest drying and storage facilities. Modern lending products that are designed to facilitate the building of processing facilities for value addition would keep valuable funds inside Rwanda – because, currently, much of the processing occurs outside of our borders. The USAID/EMIRGE program has taken the initiative to conduct an investigative study to determine the percentage loss and formulate recommendations to reduce the current crop loss. The findings will be shared with other stakeholders engaged in poverty reduction, ensuring food security of small households in the cooperative development movement development in Rwanda.
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Written by: Richard Mujuni, Program Officer, DESIGN team, Uganda For a greater part of March 2016, the USAID/DESIGN team was in central Uganda’s District of Mubende working on a survey among farmers. As we kicked off the exercise, I quickly came to appreciate just how pervasive cooperatives were in all parts of the area we visited. It has been part of our strategy to hold lively discussions with the communities we visit to grasp the bigger picture of issues affecting the livelihoods of people in the district. We found that some of the issues that affected incomes and livelihoods ranged from negative events such as marriage breakups and unbalanced gender perceptions to enabling factors such as access to education, land, assets, and markets. We also discussed the nature of income generating activities in the area, including agricultural activities and their perceived challenges, opportunities, and potential solutions. As a participant, I picked two important lessons from which I asked myself, “Why aren’t cooperatives flourishing in Mubende?” My first lesson was on resources. In all five of the communities we visited, farmer after farmer reported surprisingly high yields in the past seasons. Farmers indicated they had harvested between 10 to 50 metric ton bags of either maize or beans! This is really high volume compared to where I live in the South. We understood this to be due to the availability, accessibility, and fertility of land/soils present in the district. This was also because personal land holdings ranged from 3 acres to more than 10 acres per household! This is much higher that we have experienced in Southwestern Uganda. My second lesson was about the market advantage among the people of Mubende. Mubende is located just under 200 kilometers from Kampala, the capital of Uganda (and a population of over 4.5 million people), which is the center for the Great Lakes region trade. While I was completing the survey, long lines of lorries from Rwanda, Burundi, and South Sudan could be seen loading tons of both beans and maize for export. The geographic advantage for the people of Mubende was huge! While all of this presented a good picture of the potential for farming operations in Mubende, all is not well in the agricultural sector, according to farmers. Some of the challenges they expressed included the exploitation by middle men – these are large, capital sole proprietors who deal in buying agricultural produce from farmers in rural areas, usually at the dawn of harvesting. In reality, these ‘would be’ friends of farmers were found to be proving otherwise. They use manipulated weighing scales and they unilaterally breach contracts made with farming groups, entirely shifting the marketing costs to farmers, exaggerating post-harvest quality losses, and then use it as a basis of offering low prices for the produce. There were a few collection centers spread over the five areas visited that served as bulking centers, not for farmers but for shrewd middle men and their agents, which, by all measures, do not represent a standard post-harvesting and handling facility. For the architects of this plan, it is a strategy to block competition from other ‘more fair’ buyers, and to suffocate the organic birth of the cooperative spirit and practices. The agents monitor farming operations from a close range and sign pre-harvesting contracts with farmers characterized by monetary advances and terms of which are determined according to the financial needs of the farmer at the time, including school fees, medical crises, and food needs at home. In summary, one can only be optimistic that the scenarios in Mubende can motivate the growth of cooperative behavior amongst farmers and lead to debates and research into better ways of fast-tracking sustainable production – marketing linkage models that guarantee the safety of farming operations in a surrounding of opportunities and threats as observed in Mubende district. Written by: Richard Mujuni, Program Officer, DESIGN team, Uganda One of the major impediments to growing cooperative structures in Uganda is born from the multipurpose nature of our umbrella organizations. For example, in Mubende (just west of Kampala), there is the Mubende Growers Union, but this union contains diverse enterprises like coffee, beans, maize, and other produce grown in Mubende. A close assessment of this arrangement exposes the weaknesses and deficiencies of cooperative unions. In their current and complex settings, these unions find it difficult to adequately address individual value chain challenges and, hence, remain only unions in name and ineffective in addressing most cooperative challenges. I recently had the opportunity to understand these challenges when I was working in Mubende on a program survey. In speaking with community members about unions, it made me think about our program, DESIGN, and its challenge of how to work with stakeholders to strategically affect the cooperative movement in Uganda and to help move from multipurpose to value chain specific unions. I believe this specialization will strengthen farming operations of these cooperatives from access to quality inputs to value addition and stronger marketing terms. Earlier in the year, while on a learning trip in Kigali, note was made of the differences in the structures of cooperatives in Rwanda and Uganda in terms of how the cooperative movement is organized. In Rwanda, the cooperatives are structured /organized according to specific value chains from the grassroots where they have primary producer cooperatives, then on to district-based marketing unions and, lastly, national federations. The national federations forum was referred to as the national confederation of cooperatives. In Uganda, the structure is quite different with the primary producer cooperative societies at the grassroots level and the marketing unions at the district level; they both may engage in more than one value chain. In specific value chains like coffee and milk, the primary societies and unions are specialized, but do not have the national federation level. In some cases in Uganda, instead of unions at the district level, there is another tier of marketing cooperatives known as the Area Cooperative Enterprise (ACE), which is based at sub-county levels and handles more than one value chain. At the national level, all of these cooperatives are free to federate to the Uganda Cooperative Alliance (UCA). On the other hand, the Rwanda cooperative structure provides for better specialization and segregation of roles and responsibilities at each level, enabling cooperators and the government to concentrate on value chain specific challenges and solutions leading to increased access to quality seed, fertilizer, improving post harvesting and handling services, formal marketing practices manifested by contract signing, and partnership agreements across a wide range of cooperatives. The Ugandan case is still less specialized and organized, so the UCA remains a good apex cooperative umbrella, albeit with unclear members and roles. Looking at the areas visited so far, including the post-Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) conflict Lira district, the revision of the cooperative structure in Uganda will accelerate the revival of cooperatives in the greater part of the country and will help diversify areas of cooperation, facilitate complimentary actions between government programs and the cooperative agenda, ease research and monitoring for cooperatives, and guide policy formulation and support. Written by: Johnson Kithendu, Co-operatives Specialist & Country Lead, Global Communities, Kenya In 2010, Kenya changed its entire constitution after many years of advocacy, activism, and frustrations. The Constitution of 2010 is hailed by many as being both progressive and people-centered. It is also praised for its clear principles supporting human rights and the separation of powers. The most dramatic innovation of this constitution, however, is the devolution of the governance structure in Kenya. The Constitution created one unitary state and forty-seven county governments. These county governments operate as independent entities, and the constitution has clearly assigned specific roles to be performed by each level of the government. As a result, many functions were devolved to the counties. Among them, the function of ensuring the growth of cooperatives, as well as their management and regulation. This devolution has had an enormous impact on the entire cooperative sector. The national law that had been governing cooperatives (Cap 490) must now be retired and the Constitution expects each county government to enact laws that would govern the cooperative sector in each respective county. Effectively, this means the cooperatives are now in a T-junction. They cannot continue using the old laws because they are not in tandem with the Constitution, while at the same time they do not yet have their own laws to guide the sector. Some counties have rushed and enacted laws only to find out they cannot fully operationalize all provisions of these acts. This is why the cooperative movement in Kenya, more than any other time in history, needs partners to help it to navigate this junction as soon and as smoothly as possible. Key questions arise.
EMIRGE, a cooperative development program funded by USAID under the E3 Bureau in Washington, D.C., is participating in advocacy efforts to bring cooperative industry players together to create a common, progressive, and more inclusive cooperative legislation, which can be adopted by any county. EMIRGE is working in partnership with the Cooperative Alliance of Kenya to bring the Council of Governors, the county executives in charge of cooperatives, the Kenya Law Review Commission, and a consortium of international non-governmental organizations, among others, to support an initiative of the Cooperative Alliance of Kenya in adopting a draft of the model bill, County Cooperatives Bill. Thus far, these efforts are going well and we have successfully raised the profile of cooperatives and their potential for contribution to county economic strategies as well as their ability to create stable incomes in both the urban and rural areas. Continue to watch this space for updates on how these efforts are yielding fruit in the service of the cooperative movement in Kenya. Written by Ms. Tuul Tuvshinbayar, Program Manager, EMIRGE Mongolia Far from the capital Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia, Khatgal Khuvsgul is located 900 kilometers north of the capital city. Khatgal has a population of approximately 3,000 people but have anywhere from 40,000-60,000 tourists who visit the famed great lake every summer. This year in February, I had chance to travel to Khatgal for meeting a group of herders who are interested in cooperating together and working with the EMIRGE cooperative mentorship and capacity building program. I am so excited about working with new herders in new rural area. It was very interesting to find out why those herders in Taiga were willing to cooperate. It allowed us, as EMIRGE, to find out what is the real motivation of herders. In the past, I heard that some herders in Taiga (Hatgal) stopped herding yaks, because they began to run boat and guide tourists. Such kind of businesses are growing as a mushroom after the rain. It is affecting local market and local families. Due to it, fresh dairy products such as fresh yak milk, yogurt production is reduced. When I met these people, I felt they are hungry for information. Demand for information was high, particularly demand for information on starting up and running a joint cooperative business. I met the herders who want to work together and produce for the market that demands dairy products. I was impressed how they would come to classes on time, although some of them are living far away, around 60 km. Initially, shy people at the beginning of each session would get active and enthusiastically participate in discussions and team work. A new area for the EMIRGE Mongolia team, these herders live in Taiga, and local residents herd yak and also run dairy businesses out of their homes. After working with cooperatives in the Ger region of Mongolia, I am excited to see how these herders in Khatgal are different from the farmers in the rest of the program. I’m interested in understanding about how they learn, adopt new technology, understand local knowledge our life in their unique part of Mongolia and finally, learning about their local approach to business and cooperation with each other. I love this part of my job. After our first meeting, I was so impressed with how willing the yak and cattle herders were to cooperate with each other. Secondly, I was interested to see that they were immediately interested in understanding how they could grow and expand their business. The locals knew the value of the summer tourist months and were interested in understanding how they could use their own resources to tap into the lucrative tourist value chains of the summer months. With that in mind, we put our heads together to see how the cooperative model could work for them. We'll see where it goes--more to come in the future! Written by: Ms. Urana Dashtseren, EMIRGE project, Global Communities, Mongolia Written by: Johnson Kithendu, Co-operatives Specialist, Global Communities, Kenya Written by: Kristin Wilcox, Program Manager for Cooperative Development, Global Communities |
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