The AgriBusiness Initiative

Saturday morning at 3:00 I took a bus from David across the mountains to Chiriqui Grande and met with three members from my community. By 6:30 we got onto a bus for Changuinola for the AgiBusiness Seminar, which started at 9:00. The guys from my community got up at 4:00 and paddled for an hour to Chiriqui Grande to meet me at the bus stop. That’s dedication.

The Agro Negocios (AgBiz) Seminar takes place in the IPACOOP office in Changuinola and is organized by Peace Corps Volunteers. The funding comes from a Peace Corps Partnership Grant and is used to pay for the transportation, food, and supplies for the seminars. That means that the farmers that I bring do not have to pay for the $11.00 round trip cost, which is a big deal, especially five times. The initiative focuses on helping the farmers in our communities better organize, communicate and market their products. While these people have an extremely in-depth knowledge of their crops they often lack the business savvy to profit from them.

Each of the 8 or so volunteers participating bring 3 to 4 members from their communities to participate. Because almost every volunteer in the region is working with indigenous communities, the seminar is all indigenous (mostly Ngabe but also some Naso, the group from further north). We encouraged our counterparts to bring snacks to the seminar to share and eat during breaks to have fresh, cheap, tasty snacks, but also to show the participants an example of the variety of products from around the region. Many thought the chocolate milk we were drinking was choco-listo or storebrand powder. The sweet yucca pie and johnnycakes also came from our sites. This helped demonstrate the idea of local demand and importance of supporting neighboring products.

Later in the day we split the participants up to share experiences with their harvests and network with each other. Sharing the stories helped them realize some of their common success and struggles, as well as come up with solutions or new ideas. For people who rarely get the chance to spend much time outside the small (and isolated) communities, this was a rare opportunity to learn about what is happing with similar situations. After lunch we worked on creating a vision and mission statements as well as setting goals and objectives.

The other volunteers who are participating in the seminar do an incredible job. Their energy and attitudes are infectious. It is great seeing the participants getting inspired and concentrating during the activities. Because many of the volunteers have been in country for two and three years their language (both Spanish and Indigenous) abilities make it easier to explain the more complicated subjects. We did an example of an activity together and asked for the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT Analysis) of PC Volunteers. Some of the weaknesses listed were sickness, language and misunderstandings. As we were listing these my counterpart blurted out machete accidents!