SHARE- Donations

What do you do as a farmer when the product you have been putting all your energy in can no longer support you or your family? How do you respond when you see no other option but possibly having to leave the land that you have worked on for generations? What do you do when you see symptoms of malnutrition appearing in your community?

We want to invite you to support the work the SHARE Foundation is doing to accompany our Salvadoran partners as they grapple with these questions, search for solutions to combat hunger and create an alternative model of development.

El Salvador is traditionally an agricultural country. This has been the basis for many of the conflicts over the years, including the civil war of the 80’s. One of the means that people gained land is through the formation of cooperatives (co-ops). Larger farms tend to be more productive; so, by pooling resources many communities can benefit. Many co-ops started with the desire of families to buy their own land. Other cooperatives came through government land reform. In both cases, people often took out high-interest loans to get the land.

The struggle continues today for people to stay on their land and prosper. The Salvadoran government has not taken any steps to create a cohesive and comprehensive rural development policy. Instead, it has turned to maquila industries (factory assembly plants) and free-trade polices as their development agenda. These policies have ignored poor communities, especially in the rural areas. Farmers, especially small farmers, have not been able to keep up and have received no support from the national government. Rural dwellers lack basic tools to succeed such as farm to market roads, access to credit for small and medium-size farmers, potable water, schools and health clinics.

Many are forced to move to large cities to find work or are immigrate to the United States for employment and send money home to their families. Others are becoming buried in debt without a way to feed their family.

The situation is even worse in some areas, such as in the new SHARE target regions of Chalchuapa, Santa Ana and Atiquizaya, Ahuchuapan, where the main agricultural product is traditionally coffee. This region has been devastated by an international coffee crisis where prices have fallen more than 70% over the last five years. Over 80,000 coffee producers have lost their jobs in El Salvador. Many farmers are not breaking even on their investment and cannot support their families. People are at risk of losing their land because they can’t pay their loans and poverty is rising to record proportions. Child hunger has particularly become a problem. According to Reuters’ News Agency, since 2002, 52 children under the age of five have died of hunger in El Salvador and over 4,000 are malnourished in coffee producing regions.

Just last month, when I visited Chalchuapa I had the honor of meeting Ana Ruth Hererra who is a mother of three and works with her partner as a farmer, coffee picker and cooperative member. For families like Ana Ruth’s there are few options. Her family lives in the cooperative of Paso Carrera with about 20 other families. It is one of the longest running co-ops in the Chalchuapa area and was formed in 1986 by a group of determined families who saw the land they lived on not being used by the landowner and organized to buy it.

Ana Ruth Herrera (center, facing picture), President of the women’s committee at Paso Carrera Cooperative, with Lidia Orellena, President, (to the right) and Beatriz de Paul (to the left) of FEDECOOPADES and Guadalupe Cortes Vega, (ceneter back to picture) Advocacy Program Officer in SHARE’s El Salvador office, meet and talk about the project in front of the bakery.

Since its formation, the co-op’s main product has been coffee. The families had been doing well until the coffee crisis hit. Things deteriorated to the point that the co-op wasn’t sure if it would survive and the people were beginning to think they would have to leave.

As she stated to me, “Before we were able to make a comfortable living for all our families. Now we are lucky if we are able to sell our coffee at cost. This is the hardest time that we have seen since the co-op started.”

In 1999, they approached FEDECOOPADES (The Federation of Cooperative Associations for Agricultural Production in El Salvador) for technical assistance. One of the first things that FEDECOOPADES did was to look at the amount of women’s involvement and suggest they form a women’s committee to support the increased leadership of women in the affairs of the co-op. Ana Ruth was one of the first to join the women’s committee.

The women’s committee decided that they needed to create economic opportunities for the women in the cooperative as a way to increase the standard of living for women and their families. In addition, the women’s committee and FEDECOOPADES realized the need to diversify the products of Paso Carrera in order to survive. One of the first projects that FEDECOOPADES supported was the creation of a bakery.

At the time, there was no bakery in the community and if people wanted bread, they had to journey to the town of Chalchuapa to buy it. Through this bakery, women in the cooperative were given the chance to be involved in economic activities where they could sell the bread in the surrounding communities to make some money for themselves and their families. Although the bread they make was very simple bread it provided a means for them to have other products to sell beyond coffee.

From my first meeting with Ana Ruth, I noticed that she was a woman with a great amount of pride and ambition. Ana Ruth is the president of the women’s committee and the lead director of the co-op’s bakery. She has earned every bit of this success through hard work, strong will and with the help of our partner FEDECOOPADES. She took the time to walk us around the co-op and explained in great detail the bakery project. As we paused in front of the oven, her eyes lit up as she explained the possibilities that existed in the bakery project. Through her, I was able to see the hope that exists for her and all the members of the co-op. Ana Ruth explained in great detail about all that she had learned through being involved in the gender trainings and how that prepared her in being a leader of the co-op.

Within the women’s committee, Ana Ruth and the other women of Paso Carrera gained leadership skills. They learned about gender issues and women’s oppression, domestic violence, and skills that they needed to play an active role in the cooperative. Most importantly, they learned that they could have a voice in their future.

The coffee crisis has not ended but through this first process, people were able to eat and also sell products in the community.

This year, the committee approached FEDECOOPADES again. The new idea was to expand their bakery to increase production and to diversify the products they sell. The committee hopes that the new plan will increase the amount of money they can earn for their families.

In 2003, the SHARE Foundation started working in the new target area of Chalchuapa and Atiquizaya supporting local development projects. One of the first organizations that we approached to support was FEDECOOPADES, which is committed to the SHARE Foundation integrating principles of promoting women’s empowerment, leadership development, and citizen’s participation.

SHARE is supporting the FEDECOOPADES project from Paso Carrera, along with three similar projects in surrounding cooperatives. The other projects include the inauguration of a bakery in the El Jicaro cooperative in Atiquizaya and the construction of a corn mill and the expansion of a grocery store for the cooperative in La Reforma cooperative in Chalchuapa. The projects were all designed in consultation with the women’s committee of each cooperative and technical advisor from FEDECOOPADES, who conducted a needs assessment and helped develop a business plan with the community.

Now, even though the coffee crisis continues to worsen in many parts of El Salvador, some cooperatives are starting to stabilize themselves and seek out alternative products to support themselves and their families. Through this diversification, not only are people investing in products that will feed their families, but also products which they can sell at higher prices and which are subject to less fluctuation in the market than coffee.

People are beginning to see the hope, confident that they will be able to stay on their land and feed their families.

SHARE is proud to support the work of FEDECOOPADES and the women’s committee of Paso Carrera. These projects would not be possible without your help and that is why we are asking for your support. Please consider making a donation to the SHARE Foundation today. We believe that these initiatives are making the difference in people’s lives not only personally but in the community as well.

Your donation will help SHARE go the extra mile to support Ana Ruth
and so many families like hers to achieve self-sufficiency
and a hope-filled future. Please contribute today.

Thank you for your support over the years, and I hope you will join SHARE in walking with Ana Ruth Herrera and other community leaders who are transforming and reinvigorating the life of their community.

Sincerely,

Erik Schnabel
Development Director

P.S. The coffee crisis is an international one and the solution is not an easy one, but SHARE is helping communities like Ana Ruth’s and little by little they are finding alternative, sustainable solutions. I invite you to support these courageous women to rebuild a new El Salvador.