Açaí Berry Brazil’s Boon

A formerly obscure berry from the Amazon rainforest in Brazil has become a global marketing success. The açaí berry – a dark, small fruit similar in appearance to blueberries – has surged in popularity around the world and brought newfound prosperity to poor communities.

The açaí berry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Açaí_Palm) has seen its popularity take off because of its purported antioxidant properties (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antioxidants). It is marketed as a way to reduce cancer and heart disease, although hype has sometimes portrayed the benefits to be higher than scientific studies have found. But whatever the truth of the berry’s overall health-giving properties, it has become an economic success story in Brazil.

A rapid success story – açaí was first exported from Brazil after 2000 – the berry is now sought by health-conscious consumers and the diet industry for its antioxidant properties and slimming effects.

Harvesting the berries is providing poor communities with an alternative source of income in the Amazon rainforest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Rainforest). And the successful marketing and selling of the berries offers a good example to others trying to improve profits for agricultural products from the South.

Prior to its global popularity, a bowl of açaí berries was a staple for poor families in some parts of Brazil. The pulp is traditionally eaten as a side dish. It is a common sight in Brazil to see street vendors or shops selling crushed açaí pulp. Trendier places in Rio de Janerio sell sweetened açaí berry smoothies. In Belem, the capital of Para State, two ice cream chains sell açaí flavoured ice cream. A white and purple swirl of açaí and tapioca is a common favourite. Other treats include açaí candy and açaí tarts in bakeries.

Some claim the taste of the berry when sweetened is earthy, while left in a natural state it is more grassy. The berry grows wild on palm trees lining rivers or on farms.

Orisvaldo Ferreira de Souza is an açaí farmer on the island of Itanduba, an hour by boat from the town of Cametá, population 117,000. Açaí harvesting has become the main livelihood for many families in the area. Orisvaldo harvests açaí from 8,000 palm trees on a 14 hectare farm.

“Two or three years ago, we had a lot of trouble selling the product,” he told the New York Times. “We had to bring it to town, and sometimes we came back without selling it.”

But times have changed and the buyers now come to the farmers.
“Just yesterday, six buyers came by,” he said. “We sold 10 baskets each to two of them.”

At the CAMTA cooperative (http://www.camta.com.br/companyE.htm) in Tomé-Açu, a town with a population of 40,000, the berry is a significant source of income. The co-op’s director, Ivan Saiki, notes the boost to local incomes: “Before the boom, the harvest came and the açaí was worth practically nothing. Before, nobody had television, nobody had a motorized canoe. Now many have their own electricity at home. It’s greatly improved the life of the river communities.”

The co-op has a fruit pulp processing factory to improve the profits for the farmers and, by controlling quality, raise the reputation for their products. In order to avoid over-dependence on one commodity, the co-op members grow many other fruits as well, including papaya, mango, lemons, and local favourites abrico, uxi and bacuri.

Another initiative is Sambazon (Sustainable Management of the Brazilian Amazon) (www.sambazon.com). This small company, founded in 2000, combines business with a partnership to ensure local communities benefit from the berry’s success story. Sambazon buys the berries from over 10,000 people in the Amazon and is certified organic (http://www.organicfarmers.org.uk). Through its SAP (Sustainable Amazon Partnership), over 1,100 local family farmers are able to harvest açaí berries as an alternative income source to logging, cattle ranching and monoculture plantations – all of which are threats to the Amazon rainforest. The company sells a range of products, from sorbet to supplements to juices and energy drinks. It also uses athletes to promote the products and encourage a healthy lifestyle.

Other companies like Açaí Roots (www.acairoots.com) – founded by three Brazilians in Rio de Janerio – also associate the product with an overall healthy lifestyle. It sells drinks, smoothies, energy shots and liquid concentrate. Founded in 2005, it is selling the concept of the healthy Brazilian lifestyle and proudly claims its founders “were born and raised on açaí.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: May 2010

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Afghanistan’s Juicy Solution to Drug Trade

Afghanistan is the world’s largest source of the illegal drugs opium and heroin (International Narcotics Control Board), both of which are derived from the bright-red flower, the poppy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppy).

The country produced 8,200 tons of heroin in 2007, up 34 percent from the previous year.

The negative consequences of the flourishing drug trade are numerous: it is destabilizing Afghanistan’s neighbours and undermining political and legal institutions, addiction rates are soaring, and addicts are spreading HIV/AIDS.

All of this gives Afghanistan’s farmers a bad image. But that could change with the launch of a new brand for Afghanistan: “Anar, Afghan Pomegranate.” It is hoped this sweet fruit will lure farmers away from the illegal trade and boost the country’s image at the same time. The red fruit that contains hundreds of seeds (http://tinyurl.com/dhrzfq), is a local delicacy and has a regional reputation for excellence. It is hoped the pomegranate fruit trees will draw farmers away from the market for the red poppy flower.

By launching the product with its own logo and brand, producers hope the Afghani pomegranate will be able to benefit from a wave of interest in Western markets in the antioxidant qualities of the fruit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antioxidant). Boxes of the fruit come clearly stamped with the logo, a sliced fruit with seeds spilling out, and the brand name.

A sophisticated branding and marketing campaign can make all the difference when a Southern country is exporting its products to wealthier nations.

Rather than having the product disappear amongst the plethora of products on a market stall or in the supermarket, clear and sophisticated branding quickly fixes a reputation with customers and significantly increases return purchases.

As consultants KPMG make clear, “For many businesses, the strength of their brands is a key driver of profitability and cash flow.”

Yet many small businesses fail to think about their brand values or how design will improve their product or service.

The Afghani pomegranate had been enjoying export success since 2007, when it became a big a hit with supermarket shoppers in Dubai. The French supermarket chain Carrefour expanded its order to all its Middle Eastern stores. It is hoped the branding will grow and secure these export markets.

There are more than 48 kinds of Afghani pomegranates. The highly prized Kandari pomegranate – named after its home province in the south of the country – is so popular in India, it will be branded “Kandari Pomegranate.”

Afghan Agriculture Minister Mohammad Asif Rahimi told a Kabul launch ceremony last November that Afghan pomegranates are the best in the world. “It’s sweet; it’s juicy,” he said.

The launch was an apt reflection of the risks of doing business in Afghanistan: it had extensive security and bomb-sniffing dogs.

For Afghani farmers, the pomegranate offers the attraction of more profit than growing poppies: farmers can make US$2,000 per acre, compared to US$1,320 for poppies.

While the financial incentive is there, there are many obstacles to making this alternative market a success. The country is a war zone in many places, and exporting through the road network can be perilous, with frequent attacks. Things became so bad last year, a shipment of the pomegranates had to be sent by US military aircraft.

Taking on the lucrative drug trade and its highly sophisticated global networks is not easy. Drug traffickers provide farmers with credit, advance payments, long-term contracts, technical advice and many other benefits farmers do not receive for growing legal crops.

It is hoped the fruit will be more than just a success on its own, and that it will boost the brand of Afghanistan as a nation as well.

“Afghanistan has a mixed-brand heritage,” said Loren Stoddard, USAID’s head of alternative development and agriculture.

Stoddard said the country is hoping to break with its image of war and extremism, and play to its exotic image in the Western mind. The Afghani pomegranate industry is receiving US$12 million from donors to modernize and expand.

Using design to profit from overseas markets has many advantages. But according to Monique Thoonen, managing director of Dutch Design in Development – an NGO experienced in helping Southern entrepreneurs break overseas markets – getting the steps right is critical.

“If you want to focus on a wider market you have to convince buyers that you understand what is wanted in all fields: design, product development, good presentation at a (trade) fair,” she said. “And if you have convinced the buyer, then you must make sure that your organization is organized in such way that you can make promises come true.

“Designing good products is one thing, but during product development also a good and effective production process has to be taken in account. Making the process too complex will result in high price setting, long lead times and maybe even poor quality. Besides, also the transportation of goods must be taken in consideration, bulky goods are very expensive, goods should be easy to pack and not easily break during transport. Goods must be able to resist high humidity and temperatures during transport.”

The Netherlands is well known as a global centre for high-quality product design. Dutch Design in Development works with importers, retailers, NGOs and foundations, matching them with a Dutch designer to develop their product and then provide them with advice on the Dutch and European markets.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: February 2009

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Farmers Weather Fertilizer Crisis by Going Organic

Around the world, large-scale agriculture relies on the use of chemical fertilizers. But increasing expense and decreasing supply of fertilizer is driving up the cost of food, and in turn contributing to the overall food crisis.

According to a soon-to-be-released UN report, prices have shot up and will stay high for at least three years. Prices have almost doubled and in some cases risen by 500 percent over 15 months.

The fertilizer crisis is caused by several factors. Anhydrous ammonia, which is the source of nearly all nitrogen fertilizer, needs natural gas, and the price of gas has risen sharply. Other fertilizer ingredients like phosphorous, potassium and potash are also increasingly expensive. Fertilizer needs to be transported long distances to get to farmers, so costs have risen with the soaring price of oil. And finally, the rise in demand for food has put the price of fertilizer up, as countries hoard supplies for themselves.

The 1960s ‘Green Revolution’ in agriculture made developing-world farmers dependent on supplies of fertilizers, pesticides and artificial irrigation. Monoculture cash crops became the norm. Yields were doubled, but at the expense of using three times as much water by accessing groundwater using electric pumps. This and fertilizer pollution has caused widespread damage to soil and water. In India, for example, 57 per cent of the land is degraded, according to Tata Energy Research.

In Cambodia, farmers are reaching back to past practices for answers to the fertilizer crisis. One is to go organic. Taking this approach has many health and environmental advantages – and, best of all for farmers, it keeps costs down.

Khim Siphay, a Cambodian farmer, has found he gets bigger crops of rice and vegetables while paying a lot less for fertilizers.

“Using pesticide or fertilizers kills important insects, and causes the soil to become polluted,” he told Reuters. “I use compost and it helps keep the soil good from one year to another. All of my family members help make the compost.”

The push to organic methods for Cambodia’s 13 million people relying on agriculture for a living comes from a non-governmental organization, the Cambodian Center for Study and Development in Agriculture (CEDAC). It has successfully moved to organic methods, starting from just a handful of 28 farmers in 2000, to the current 60,000 – and received an endorsement from the Cambodian Ministry of Agriculture.

CEDAC says farms using the organic methods have been able to increase rice yields per hectare, while the seeds needed have fallen by 70 to 80 percent. By using a “System of Rice Intensification”, the mostly small-scale farmers are able to get more out of the land, with less labour. Add to that the fact that organic rice gets a premium price on world markets, and the result for the farmers has been a rise in income from US $58 to US $172 per hectare.

“The important point of organic farming is that farmers don’t need to spend money on fertilizers and pesticide so they spend less money on farming,” said CEDAC official Yang Saing Koma.

“They can sell the produce for a higher price. Also they can avoid being infected by pesticides and they will be healthier. It is also good for the environment,” he said.

Rice and other produce can be used to feed chickens to produce organic poultry and eggs – another bonus for farmers looking to raise the value of their produce.

“I started doing organic farming outside my rice paddy, but then I noticed production was double, so in the next season, I decided to grow organically on all of my land,” said farmer Ros Meo. “I spend less money now and I can grow more and I am not sick as I was before, my health is now good.”

Going organic in Cambodia is something that is becoming more attractive to the country’s growing middle class, and the government hopes the country will gain a reputation as an organic producer.

Another approach to cheap fertilizer comes from Caracas, Venezuala. Marjetica Potrc, an artist and architect who works closely with impoverished communities, has come up with a “dry toilet” which collects human waste and converts it to fertilizer.

Developed after spending six months in the barrios of Caracas, the dry, ecologically safe toilet was built on the upper part of La Vega barrio, a district in the city without access to the municipal water grid. It is a place where about half the population receives water from municipal authorities no more than two days a week.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: September 2008

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Urban Farmers Gain from Waste Water

The global food crisis continues to fuel food price inflation and send many into hunger and despair. Around the world, solutions are being sought to the urgent need for more food and cheaper food. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called for food production to increase 50 percent by 2030 just to meet rising demand – and right now there are 862 million people undernourished (FAO).

One fast-growing solution is bringing farming to urban and semi-urban spaces, where the majority of the world’s population now lives.

Urban farmers can take advantage of their close proximity to consumers, keeping costs down and profits up. They can also solve one of agriculture’s enduring problems – where to find water for irrigation by using existing waste water. Waste water is plentiful in urban environments, where factories usually pump out waste water into streams, rivers and lakes.

The amount of urban farmed agriculture is still small, about 10 percent of the world’s agricultural production, but is a potential growth area if handled well. In 53 cities surveyed by the International Water Management Institute, 1.1 million farmers – some 200 million worldwide – are now using recycled or waste water to irrigate their crops.

In Accra, Ghana, more than 200,000 people depend on food grown with wastewater. In Pakistan, a full quarter of the grown vegetables use wastewater.

The use of waste water comes with its ups and downs. While the World Health Organization rightfully points out that waste water can be a source of disease and pollution, cities also face a dilemma: diverting fresh water to irrigate crops means less for people to drink. Out of the 53 cities surveyed by the International Water Management Institute, 85 percent dumped their raw sewage and wastewater into streams and lakes. With this in mind, the WHO has altered its stance on wastewater, and now supports its use for irrigating farmland as long as all efforts are made to treat wastewater and that people are warned to thoroughly wash food before eating it.

Pay Drechsel, who heads the IWMI’s research division based in Accra, Ghana, studying safe and productive use of low-quality water, says sophisticated systems to use waste water have developed in Vietnam, China and India, “where this practice has been going on for centuries.”

“People know how to avoid health risks, like thorough cooking of vegetables,” he said. “In Vietnam and China, waste from households (fecal waste, solid waste and wastewater from household use) have always been effectively recycled in ‘closed systems’ at a household level where the waste/nutrients are recycled into the food chain and so return for human consumption.”

Drechsel cites examples like Calcutta, where a large wetland is being used for treating and recycling wastewater for beneficial uses such as fish farming. In Northern Ghana, fecal sludge from septic tanks is spread on fields that are later used to grow cereals.

“The risk for the consumer is extremely low, a waste product is productively recycled, the farmer has a good harvest and the city gets rid of their waste,” Drechsel said. “A multiple win-win situation.

“Depending on the local situations such models can be widely used, provided they are documented and the risk factors are controlled,” he added.

Farmers use various methods to reduce the risk of contamination, including drip irrigation where the water does not touch the crop.

The risks for both farmers and consumer can be managed with the right protocols. For farmers, Drechsel recommends wearing of rubber boots and careful hand washing to avoid skin diseases. He points out that these farmers usually make more money than those who do not use waste water, and thus can afford the extra cost of precautionary measures, like de-worming tablets. They can quickly get out of poverty by using this water.

For consumers, the risk is from diarrhoea, typhus or cholera if raw food is eaten unwashed or poorly washed. The best solution is to turn to the WHO’s guidelines and proven local practices and tested techniques developed by researchers.

“Here more awareness creation on invisible risks through pathogens is needed. Perception studies in West Africa showed that nearly all households wash vegetables but they target visible dirt. Thus, the methods used are not effective. Best would be therefore a combination of risk reducing interventions from farm to fork, as none alone is 100 percent efficient. This is also what the new WHO guidelines promote: a flexible approach, reducing in each country the health risks as far as it is possible and feasible.”

Drechsel sees an opportunity for water treatment plants to seize: “What is missing so far is a ‘design for reuse.’ If treatment plants would be designed to serve farmers they could be less sophisticated and easier to maintain. Farmers could be involved in this, maybe a win-win situation.

“The environment benefits too. Spreading wastewater over fields, and allowing it to leach back through the soil into local waterways, turns out to be a reasonable way to purify it. The process filters out all the organic contaminants, and much of the nitrogen and phosphates that would otherwise contribute to algal blooms and dead zones further downstream. It is certainly preferable to dumping wastewater straight into the nearest big river or lake.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: September 2008

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Small-scale Farmers Can Fight Malaria Battle

Malaria is one of Africa’s biggest killers. Each year globally 300 to 500 million people are infected, and around 1 million die from the disease (theglobalfund). Ninety percent of malaria deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa – mostly to children under the age of five. The disease costs African countries US$12 billion a year in lost gross domestic product.

Malaria is a parasitic disease – the parasite plasmodium – transmitted by mosquito bites. Symptoms include fever, headache and vomiting. Internal bleeding, kidney and liver failure may follow and can result in coma and death.

The most common and effective treatment, recommended by the World Health Organization, is artemisinin-based combination therapies, known as ACTs. ACTs have low toxicity, few side effects and act rapidly against the parasite. Research shows that artemisinin remedies cure 90 percent of patients within three days.

But there are far fewer doses available than people who need them. WHO has claimed the quantity made available by pharmaceutical companies falls far short of the more than 130 million doses required to combat malaria throughout the world.

And ACTs are very expensive to deliver: in just one country, Tanzania, providing such therapy for three years would cost US $48.3 million. Every year, this would account for 9.5 percent of Tanzania’s health budget, and 28.7 percent of yearly spending on medical supplies: a six-fold increase in budget for malaria treatment (Malaria Journal 2008, 7:4).

But a cheap alternative to the expensive pill form of the treatment is being piloted across Africa. It involves the drinking of a tea made from the bushes of the artemisia plant. Artemisia annua is an annual shrub and the active ingredient in the pills (artemisinin). It is native to China and Vietnam and has been used for 2,000 years to treat fevers.

Bushes cultivated by farmers in Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique under the supervision of the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, Kenya, are helping to bring down malaria rates without the long wait for the pills to arrive.

The leaves are boiled and made into a tea. Drinking the tea gives a high enough dose of artemisinin in the blood to cure malaria. Helen Meyer, a nurse operating nine mobile health clinics in rural Mozambique, is using the bitter tea made from the dried leaves. Even in treating drug resistant malaria, she has found the artemisia tea effective: “If you drink the tea, you feel better after the first day. Other medicines take a few days.”

A special hybrid of artemisia, A-3, is used because it is adapted for warmer climates. The wild variety grows to only five centimetres in the tropics, but A-3 grows to three metres and packs 20 times more artemisinin. It is also highly economical: thousands of plants can come from a single stem.

The daily adult dose of anti-malaria tea just needs five grams of dried A-3 leaves in one litre of water. The tea is drunk every six hours for seven days. Each plant produces 200 grams of dried leaves, and a thousand shrubs can cure 5,700 people. Since it is a cheap cure, money can be spent instead on other things. Farmers are also able to supplement their income by growing the bushes. And the dried leaves have long-lasting power: even after three years the leaves retain close to a 100 percent of their artemisinin.

Access to authentic artemisinin is critical: it is estimated 16 percent of malaria medicines in Kenya are counterfeit. Elsewhere, the proliferation of counterfeit anti-malarials substantially raises the risk of the emergence of resistance to artemesinin combination therapy, the last truly effective treatment against malaria. Past misuse of other malaria drugs, such as chloroquine in the 1980s and sulphadoxine/pyrimethamine in the 1990s, resulted in the malaria parasite becoming resistant. Hundreds of thousands of people in malaria-prone areas may have died as a result.

The World Agroforestry Centre, recognizing potential problems with artemesinin monotherapies, is working to combine it with indigenous herbal remedies made from other anti-malarial trees, producing a herbal combination therapy (HCT).

“I used to grow fruits and beans here,” said Charles Kiruthi, a Kenyan farmer, to the IRIN news service. “but I will get a better return from this plant. No pests attack it, and until harvesting time it requires very little labour.”

“I expect to get a good return, and I am also very happy to be helping fight malaria,” continued Kiruthi. “I recently lost two friends to the disease, and my child gets sick with malaria sometimes.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: July 2008

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Southern Innovator Issue 2: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Ty0N969dcssC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 3: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AQNt4YmhZagC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 4: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9T_n2tA7l4EC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 5: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6ILdAgAAQBAJ&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

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