This article is taken from Bread for the World Institute's 2005 annual report on the state of world hunger, Strengthening Rural Communities. Download the section below in pdf 
or order the entire report from our online store.
What could be so hard about getting a group of rural farmers together and then helping them to sell their products in the market? They make more money and you achieve your goal. Well, in rural development initiatives, few things are as easy as they seem.
Rural farmers are often considered the most challenging group to work with in an international development setting. They are usually conservative in their approaches to innovation because they have the least amount of resources to invest in new, unfamiliar production techniques. Add to this a general suspiciousness of outsiders and generations of local inter-familial politics and you have formidable hurdles to overcome.
Working with Save the Children, I participated in a pilot project with apricot farmers in the rural valleys of the Bolivian Altiplano (High Plain). Let me give you some examples of how complicated this process really was by highlighting just a few of the steps my project took to get from point A (getting the farmers together) to point B (selling their products in the marketplace).
We began the process by selecting a farmer association that enjoyed a sizeable membership (approximately 140), a history (albeit short) of association-level activity, motivated leadership, and a location with the infrastructure to support such an activity. We met with the leaders of this association, along with any interested members, and the concepts, activities and goals of the pilot project were discussed and debated at great length.
The next few weeks were spent determining the following items:
Classification – no nationally established standards existed in the classification of apricots in Bolivia. As with all agricultural products, apricots come in varying shapes and sizes. We decided to concentrate on four categories of apricots and determined specific size parameters for each category.
Selection – what about quality standards? We agreed the product should be clean and free of dirt (which is traditionally used to ward off birds), at a certain stage of maturity, and without blemishes or evidence of pests.
Prices – as there were no established standards for the sale of apricots, we needed to determine acceptable prices. We conducted market research, discussed past sale prices and consumer spending practices, and set preliminary price levels.
Markets – four marketplaces were identified in the city of La Paz, marketplaces frequented by a demographic that were thought to value quality over price.
Presentation – we could hardly sell the apricots stacked on the ground or heaped in large wooden trunks as is traditionally done. We decided upon wooden crates with slats and lids, apricots placed stem side up, and pieces of tissue paper separating the neat rows. The apricots would be picked from the crates by rubber-gloved hands, and placed carefully in clear plastic bags at the time of sale.
Product Identification – we needed labels for the crates, business cards and a marketing pitch in the form of a slogan. Agreeing on a contact telephone number for the association to put on their labels and business cards was problematic in that there were only three phones in the village.
At this point, the excitement level was high. Now came the operational phase, when our planning and assumptions were challenged by the practical realities of association-level initiatives and the marketplace.
What’s mine is mine. The participants were proud of their professionalism and were empowered by the thought that they, one day, might be a market force to be reckoned with—unfortunately the level of solidarity and common purpose did not go much deeper than this. Very few were in favor of consolidating their apricots because of the varying quality levels, and each was distrustful that they would be given the money that they had earned through the sale of their product.
All farmers are not created equally. Usually, those that had the bigger fruit with the least amount of blemishes were those with more resources to invest in cultivation and harvesting. The poorest farmers with the most inferior product are the ones that need support in commercialization the most; but they brought the overall quality of the product down and compromised the high standards that were being promoted by the association.
As it worked out, the best apricots (i.e. the biggest) were sold in the market where the customers were willing to pay more for a better product, and the inferior apricots (small) were sold in the less profitable markets. Needless to say, this situation created a certain level of animosity among the participating farmers.
Politics, politics, politics. Getting permission from the city government was as bureaucratic as one would expect, but achievable nonetheless. Getting permission from the other vendors in the market was an entirely different story. Markets in La Paz, at least, are ruled informally by the vendors themselves, and they did not appreciate this new competition.
If we were not relegated to the least advantageous position in (or outside) the marketplace, we were threatened with physical violence, destruction of property and regular harassment. In more than one case, our products and property were outright stolen and never returned.
A woman’s place is in the…market? Despite our efforts to include women in the planning and conceptualization phase of the project, it was not until it came to the physical classification and selection of the fruit that they began to get involved. Their interest in the project was no less than that of their husbands or fathers, but it was an unspoken truth (or so presented to us) that men are better at making decisions and determining what is worthwhile.
Women had the children to care for and household chores to do, so they couldn’t attend the meetings earlier on. It did make sense that the women participate in the critical step of picking and choosing which fruit to sell, as women are traditionally the market vendors, but that did not save us from having to repeat the discussions and review and amend the decisions that had been made by the men weeks before. In short, women should have been there from the beginning.
My cousin’s brother’s sister’s husband. A bitter pill to swallow was when my colleague and I realized that the farmers we had been working with, debating with and cheering on were all relatives of the president of the association. Apparently, participation in the project was never even presented as an option to those association members that did not share this privileged bloodline. This is not to say that the farmers who participated in the project were any less worthy of inclusion, but it did remind us, once again, that we probably missed working with farmers that were most needy in terms of this sort of opportunity.
The customer is always right. The need for training in customer service and marketing became strikingly apparent after the first day of sales. The traditional way of selling your wares in the marketplace is to confront a potential customer aggressively and persistently. A customer with a question is a pest and is answered begrudgingly, if at all. If the customer does not have exact change, the vendor either forsakes the sale entirely or, once again begrudgingly, goes scouting for change, leaving the customer hostage for her change for several minutes.
Allowing the customer to pick the apricots themselves, to exchange those that were bruised or in some way inferior, and to actually taste the product before purchasing took some cajoling of the vendors on our part, but in the end the customer (and the association) won out.
In the end…
The apricot pilot project lasted three months, but we could have used a couple of growing seasons. The underlying point to be made here is that rural development takes time. Working with people takes time, and it requires a willingness to face up to the realities of human behavior. It is not a question of just promoting new standards or buying wooden crates—development is about people.
In our quest to produce quantifiable results, we, the development community, often lose sight of the complexities of the overall goals that we are trying to accomplish in the first place. This article hopefully communicates an underlying theme that nothing is as straightforward as it seems.
Until we accept that a modest initiative, like the commercialization of apricots, is not merely a process of going from Point A to Point B, but rather a lengthy and involved Point A to Point Z undertaking, then we will continue to achieve limited results and questionable levels of sustainability. This is not a new opinion, but one that we need to be reminded of regularly.
Mette Karlsen is a Mickey Leland International Hunger Fellow who worked on this rural development project in the Bolivian High Plain with Save the Children during the summer of 2004.
