NEW GRAMEEN PROGRAM TO BOOST PH COCONUT FARMERS’ LIVELIHOODS

Grameen Foundation—in partnership with Barry Callebaut, the world’s leading manufacturer of high-quality chocolate and cocoa products—has launched a fiveyear program in the Davao region of the Philippines that is designed to improve 25,000 smallholder farmers’ copra production and incomes and connect them to markets, while ensuring positive social and environmental impacts.

The Sustainable Coconut Project is funded by Barry Callebaut, in support of its Sustainable Coconut Oil Strategy and the Sustainable Coconut Oil Charter.

Coconut oil, produced from copra, is found in most confectionery products. Currently, coconut production is unable to keep up with global demand.

In the Philippines, aging trees, fragmented and untraceable supply chains, pests, diseases and climate change contribute to low production. Further, Filipino coconut farmers’ yields and incomes suffer from poor extension support, low adoption of good agricultural practices (GAPs), lack of access to technology and financial services, and low resilience to natural disasters. While farm cooperatives work to support coconut farmers, their effectiveness is compromised by low adoption of digital tools, lack of financial and operational resources, and failure to include female farmers.

Sustainable value chain

“The Sustainable Coconut program will leverage Grameen’s extensive experience improving the productivity, income, and resilience of Filipino coconut farmers, as well as our wide range of digital solutions and training content, to comprehensively address the barriers cooperatives and farmers face,” said Brent Chism, interim president and CEO of Grameen Foundation.

Oliver von Hagen, global director for sustainable ingredients at Barry Callebaut, said: “As part of our commitment to 100 percent sustainable ingredients by 2025, we strive to achieve a sustainable coconut and coconut oil value chain. Thanks to this project and the partnership with Grameen Foundation, we get closer to this goal and create concrete impact on the ground, improving the livelihoods of thousands of farmers.”

Grameen began the program earlier this year with a baseline and market assessment in the Davao region, where they will be working with eight cooperatives, 35 field agents and 25,000 farmers. The assessment, which surveyed 1,007 coconut farmers, found that coconut productivity in the region is considered low at 32 nuts per tree per year while the ideal productivity is 75 nuts per tree per year (Moreno et al., 2020).

About 90 percent of the farmers heavily rely on cooperatives or local traders for their working capital through cash advances or loans.

The average age of the survey participants is 60 years old, and the average age of a coconut tree in this region is 43

years old, while the annual average income from copra activity is $1,400 annually.

Harnessing women’s potential

Meanwhile, agri-cooperatives play a crucial role as aggregators of smallholder farmers, especially in scaling and achieving business-to-business dealings with institutional markets.

The study also found that women have untapped potential, which can be utilized in the agriculture sector, particularly in farm management, financial management and product quality control. Leveling the agricultural playing field and empowering women to actively participate in business decisions can result in long-term

benefits for the farm and their families.

Grameen also held a solutions workshop in September in Davao City with key stakeholders, ranging from farmers and cooperative members to government agents and copra buyers.

There, they held discussions on interventions to increase farm productivity and improve copra production, as well as increase access to finance, copra markets and resiliency of farming households.

As the program moves toward the training and deployment of extension workers to provide digital advisory services to farmers, Sustainable Coconut will use Grameen Foundation’s innovative FarmerLink solution.

The platform provides farm data collected by field agents to help smallholder farmers increase productivity, deal with crop pests and diseases, improve quality, and increase the sustainability of their farms.

Through this digital solution set, field agents are mobile-equipped to educate GAPs to farmers. FarmerLink includes a collection of farmer profiles and farm-level data to measure progress of farmers in the program.