APALH President Raul Contreras at the Third P4P Annual Review in Rome (Copyright: WFP/ Tobias Bauer)
In October 2011, we profiled Gilda Zepada, a member of the Guatemalan cooperative APALH and the benefits P4P trainings had on her life. The cooperative’s president, Raul Contreras, who attended the Third P4P Annual Review in Rome in November 2011, now tells us how the cooperative itself also progressed over the last few years.
ROME-- The cooperative “Asociación de Productores Agrícolas de la Laguna El Hoyo” (APALH) is based in Monjas in Eastern Guatemala, a region known as the dry corridor. To improve agricultural productivity in the area, the Government had launched an irrigation system in 1961, enabling the local farmers to have three harvests instead of only one per year, and also allowing the cultivation of higher value crops such as broccoli and other vegetables.
Two channels lead water from close-by rivers to a volcanic reservoir called Laguana El Hoyo, which can hold up to three million m3, enough to irrigate 350 manzanas (about 240 hectares) during the dry period. In 1997, the Government handed over the administration and ownership of the system to the local community. But in 2009, the neighbourhood committee in charge of the administration wanted to return the ownership to the Government: pumps, dams and canals were almost collapsing, and outstanding electricity bills of GTQ 600,000 (about US$ 77,000) could not be paid.
This led to the birth of APALH: All the irrigation system users decided to join together, form an association and take over the responsibility for the irrigation system. APALH was set up as a non-profit organisation to collect fees from the users and repair and then also maintain the infrastructure.
See the story on APALH member Gilda Zepada here:
As APALH president Raul Contreras says, this soon proved not to be enough: “As we were a non-profit organisation, we were freed from taxes, but we were also limited to irrigation. But we saw that with the irrigation system in place again, we were very productive, and we needed to find a way for our members to commercialize, to find a market.”
With the full support of all members, APALH is currently setting up a new legal structure as a profit-oriented entity. With support from WFP in organisational building and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in legal issues, Raul and his fellow farmers plan to set up this corporation for the communal marketing of their crops parallel to APALH, based on shares distributed to all community members.
At the moment, we are preparing to sell 14 tons of black beans and 14 tons of maize to WFP” says Raul, “and also to sell 1,000 hundred-pound bags of maize seeds to our members, commercial members and FAO. This last year with P4P has been a bed of roses – and we all hope that we continue this way.
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