Increase family income of 50 Mexican farmers

The Educampo program seeks to improve farmer income through increased production, organization, and farmer education.  Through this program, farmers are provided access to financing to purchase quality inputs, technical and social training, and are encouraged to form farmer cooperatives to increase their purchasing and marketing power.  Farmers are introduced to sustainable farming practices that help them significantly increase their yields and linked to reliable customers to sell their surplus grain.

Educampo is a program that focuses on economic development and competitiveness, human development and social development.  The success of the project lays on these three aspects which make it different from any governmental program or any other social program.

• Economic Development: This area focuses on the development of capacity to improve income.  It involves technical assistance and a technological package (financed from inputs to harvest), and guaranteed marketing of the product. The other important part of this area is the necessary support of the producers for a pre-established period of time (5 years), until they can handle the projects and their own development.

• Human Development:  This area focuses on improving self-reliance and empowering farmers.  Through Basic Social Education (our unique methodology), the farmers are taught to acknowledge their reality, to analyze it in a critical manner, to ponder their individual and collective options in a rational way, and to strengthen links of solidarity, cooperation and participation, aiming at having the producers identify themselves as the authors and subjects of their own development.

• Social Development: This area focuses on the development of farmer organizations.  This part of the program helps organize the producers in groups, as a major means to solve scale limitations, with the objective of having a professional administrative structure that would provide services to their members, generate market oriented added value transferable to the members of the organization.

The program started in the state of Chiapas in 2007 and to date, we have worked with more than 2,000 farmers.

Our activities this past trimester:

-          We have provided full time capacity building and technical assistance to 460 farmers in Chiapas.

-          We have been negotiating with local grain buyers to get a fair price.

-          Farmers will start harvesting corn in the next couple of weeks and will sell their produce directly to a local buyer at market prices.

-          We have accompanied farmers throughout the process and methodology of establishing 10 organizations.

Some expected results for cycle 2010:

-          460 farmers

-          2,500 hectares

-          2,300 people benefited with this project

-          Expected productivity: increased from 2.5 ton/ha to 6 ton/ha

-          Family income: increased from 1.5 minimum wages / year to 4 minimum wages (aprox. $5,900 USD/year).

-          Input financing from suppliers: 1.25 MUSD

Our 2011 goals:

-          Expand the project to 7,000 hectares.

-          Create 15 more organizations and strengthen the existing ones.

Your contribution to our project will allow us keep working in Chiapas.  Our goal is to have farmers remain in Mexico, working in the fields and earning an income that will allow them to increase their quality of life.

We know there are a lot of other ways you could spend your money, but you believe in our cause and we invite you to keep investing in our project. Please consider telling your friends and family about our Educampo Chiapas project - share the link on your blogs or social networks, use the tell-a-friend feature on the project page to email your network, or just bring us up in conversation.

Si necesita información en español, favor de contactarme.

Links:

• Educampo Chiapas and its benefits to local farmers (in Spanish)