Starfish Community

Critical potential for agricultural interventions is in fruit and orcharding. Let's add category of organizational and professional focus to reflect this.

Tami,

We are looking at working with a lady named Marion Fromm from Cambodia that is building a company that packages and sells dried fruit. Have you met her? Would it be beneficial for the two of you to connect? Hope you are doing well! MIke

Here in Mauritania, we're piloting a small orcharding project - with Neem trees, mango trees and Jatropha. We'd welcome the chance to learn from others, and also will share lessons from our experience as our projects develop.

I believe there are some women's cooperatives in our neighboring country of Senegal who are making good profits selling dried Mango. It's such a great source of Vitamin A, and the trees are such prolific producers. I'd love to hear of any SF Community members' first-hand experiences with similar projects.

Our Neem project has been a great success so far. Neem leaves and seeds from Mauritania are bought by a U.S. organization JustNeem.com which then uses them in soaps, loations, mosquito repellent, etc. We're finding there's a great market for these products in the U.S. A few Whole Foods stores are selling some of the Just Neem soaps.

We had been interfacing with Whole Foods for a time when we were helping to launch the Global Innovations for Fair Trade (GiFFT) organization. Whole Foods is always interested in new items that they can import from around the world into the US market.

All these small beginnings in the agricultural arena are very important and need to continue, as so much of our world is tied to an agricultural lifestyle. The needs among those who are still so impoverished is crucial in establishing dignity for so many, and to give them hope for a continued future in development.

We must work clearly toward helping to decrease anyone's dependency on outside supports-as this is not a healthy lifestyle; and continue to direct individuals and communities suffering under poverty toward designing their own sustainable transformation of their entire economic systems.

I am using JustNeem products myself and they are an amazing healing balm for those with Eczema and other skin ailments.

And I am interested as to how I might access the dried fruit grown in the Central Asia area, any ideas where the market is for this?

My family was in the fruit orchards business for 40+ years and I certainly learned that it is a highly technical and multi-variable (can you say "big challenges and issues") endeavor.

I was wondering, Karen B., if you all had a subject matter expert (SME) or consultant to assist you on the launch of your orchard project or did the locals have this expertise within the community?

Hi Mark, Before our Neem project launched, we had experts from the States here to evaluate Mauritania's potential for the project. Neem trees already grow throughout many parts of Mauritania so not so much expertise was needed in how to grow them. But we did need help in testing the quality of the leaves and seeds/oils to verify that the chemical properties would be suitable for soap, insect repellant, etc., and the experts from the States provided some training about the possible uses of Neem.

We also had help from the national agricultural service before launching the mango tree orchard, and have been talking to experts here in Mauritania, as well as in our neighbor to the south, Senegal, about Jatropha. This past summer we sent one of our national employees who works on the Neem project to an agriculture training course run by the ministry of rural development here.

So, yes, we've relied a lot on subject matter experts, some expat, some nationals. We don't have a trained agronomist on our team. We're quite impressed with the quality of some of the training offered by the government here. Mauritania doesn't have much agricultural development due to its severe climate and inconsistent rainfall, but there is some good local expertise to build on, and we're trying to take advantage of it.

(I guess you'd call that asset-based development?!)

Excellent Karen-- that IS asset-based development for sure!!

You guys are to be commended and sounds like you are taking all the right pre-steps to see great success on these initiatives. Sounds like you all have done the heavy lifting in sorting out many of the issues. It will be good to keep you in mind on connecting folks to Neem specialists, as we continue to hear about organizations that are considering getting involved with Neem products and Neem agriculture.

Karen,

You mentioned that you are looking into jatropha as a cash crop, I suppose for biofuel, is that correct?. It is quite a controversial crop. Make sure you thoroughly investigate both sides of the discussion.

Tom L.

Tom, Our work with Jatropha is very small, experimental, and just started within the past few months. We are just testing to see how it grows here. I'm not so involved with the Agricultural projects of our team, but I will pass on your comments to my colleague here who heads up our rural development projects. I personally am not too familiar with any of the arguments pro or con for Jatropha specifically.

Per biofuels in general, we certainly are well aware of the concerns regarding crops for biofuels displacing food crops, since Mauritania was very hard hit by the global price rise in cereals in 2007 - 2008. Since Mauritania must import nearly 75 - 80% of its cereal, we would never want to promote planting anything that would displace food crops. What we've heard about Jatropha, however, if I'm remembering correctly, is that it can grow on very marginal land with little rainfall where food crops could not grow here. So that's what it was of interest to us.