An Impromptu Movie Production Brings Certification to Life for Farmers in Madagascar

The road to Rainforest Alliance certification is different for every farming community, but training is often an important component. Our team of experts support farmers and producer groups as they implement the Sustainable Agriculture Network Standard on their farms—organizing training workshops and diagnostic visits and providing training materials such as posters, manuals, videos and an online training platform. Here, the Rainforest Alliance’s technical capacity manager Reiko Enomoto shares her experience working with lead farmers in Madagascar to develop training materials for other farmers within their community.

I never imagined that the cocoa farmers we work with in Madagascar lived deep within the forest. To get to them, we drove two days by car on a very bad road. (The road didn’t really look like a road at all. It was more like a huge puddle.) Eventually, there was no more road, so we carried our luggage on our shoulders and walked for one whole day–crossing through several rivers–until we got to the farming community. Upon arrival, I discovered that there was absolutely no electricity. I knew I’d need to forget about internet (and communicating with my colleagues outside of Madagascar) until I came out of the village. I stayed in a hut made of bamboo and leaves, bathed in the river and called the forest my bathroom.

The road to the Malagasy farming community.

The lead farmers welcomed us with all of their hearts and were so excited about our arrival. I showed them different types of training materials that they could use to train other farmers in sustainable practices and learned that most of the local farmers cannot read or write (even in their local language). That’s when we realized that a training movie might be the best way to introduce these farmers to standards for socially, environmentally and economically viable farming. Each village has a few people with a generator and those who have a generator always have a TV. Every two weeks, these villages organize a movie night for their entire community–a training movie about Rainforest Alliance certification could fit perfectly within this system.

The hut where Reiko slept during her time in Madagascar.

Together with the lead farmers, we began an incredibly amusing amateur movie production. The farmers were so excited to become movie actors and we invented a lot of interesting scenarios together. The whole village was excited about the process and we had ‘paparazzi’  throughout the movie production.

The community gathered to watch the production of the training films.

Since the cocoa movie idea was a great hit, we made short movies about vanilla and clove production, as well. By the end of the trip, we had produced 16 training videos on various themes like pest management and waste disposal. The DVDs are now with the producer groups and the crop exporters. I also produced training posters for vanilla and cloves, and a farmer booklet about cocoa. I left copies with the exporters who are willing to finance the printing and are committed to distributing them to farmers.

Learn more about the Rainforest Alliance’s training work.

Community Education: A Key Ingredient for the Cultivation of Climate-Friendly Cocoa

Back from a trip to Ghana, the Rainforest Alliance’s climate program assistant Kassy Holmes shares how education and training is helping smallholder cocoa farmers understand and adapt to climate change.

In tropical countries like Ghana, smallholder farmers are on the frontlines of climate change. They are seeing firsthand the effects of changing weather patterns, including a heightened dry season and a shortened harmattan–a West African trade wind that brings dry, dusty air and cool temperatures to an otherwise sweltering region.

However, many communities lack access to climate change education—a vital tool to help them understand, mitigate and adapt to climate change. The Rainforest Alliance is working to change this with a comprehensive  project to educate and train cocoa farmers in Ghana’s Bia-Juabeso region.

Farmers from Asempanaye, Nkra, Breman, Eteso and Dominebo gather to learn about climate change during an education workshop facilitated by the Rainforest Alliance.

Since 2009, we have worked with 36 communities across 60,000 acres (24,000 hectares) of farmland in the Bia-Juabeso region, implementing sustainable agroforestry techniques that generate benefits for the community and the local and global climate.  To date, 1,259 farms have been Rainforest Alliance Certified against the Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN) Standards. These farms are also pursuing verification against the SAN Climate Module, which promotes practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, increase on-farm carbon sequestration and help farmers identify and adapt to a changing climate.

This work marks a huge milestone in the global cocoa market. Ghana’s cocoa farmers will be the first to undertake certified, climate-smart agricultural practices–bringing to market the world’s first climate-friendly cocoa. The cocoa will be distributed by Olam, an internationally recognized leader in processing and sourcing agricultural commodities.

Education and training that allows farmers to understand how climate change is meaningful and relevant to their everyday lives is a critical element of the Rainforest Alliance’s efforts in Ghana.  Building off of our previously developed climate change curriculum for students and teachers, we’ve sought to build the adaptive capacity of farmers through community training that takes into account local conditions and farmer perspectives.  This approach includes:

• Focusing on local climate change impacts
• Assessing the impacts of climate change on cocoa farming
• Discussing specific climate-smart practices that farmers can implement on their own, such as composting and protecting shade trees
• Using visuals, posters and local examples to reinforce scientific concepts
• Hosting workshops that accommodate farmers’ busy schedules
• Allowing ample time for discussion, debate and knowledge-sharing

By focusing on local conditions and the direct impact of climate change on farmers’ lives, these workshops help farmers to grasp the personal and global implications of climate change. This provides a foundation upon which to explain the science behind climate change and the contribution of local activities (like deforestation) to the problem.

Materials that focus on local climate impacts and local drivers of deforestation help farmers understand how climate change personally affects their communities and farms.

We’re already seeing some great examples of the ways that education can be used as a tool to empower farmers. I had the opportunity to attend a community workshop and witnessed farmers making commitments to educate their friends and families about climate change, and to do their part to help mitigate climate change by protecting shade trees and composting on their farms. These education efforts also serve as a way to reinforce the practices and concepts farmers implement by becoming Rainforest Alliance Certified, helping them better adapt to shifting climatic conditions.

In the coming months, the Rainforest Alliance will facilitate education workshops for dozens of lead farmers in Ghana who recently achieved certification. These farmers will then go on to hold workshops for hundreds of other farmers within their communities. Collectively, through increased education about climate change, community agroforestry and Rainforest Alliance certification, cocoa farmers in Bia-Juabeso will be equipped with the technical skills and knowledge needed to understand climate change, adapt to its impacts and cultivate continued, sustainable livelihoods.

Learn more about the Rainforest Alliance’s climate work with cocoa farmers in Ghana.

The benefits of cooperative cocoa farming in the Cote d’Or

Edward Millard, manager of the Rainforest Alliance’s sustainable cocoa program, looks at the way cooperatives are benefiting cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire.

Cooperative organizations feature strongly in the list of small holder groups that achieve Rainforest Alliance certification. By coming together in an organization, small holder farmers can aggregate their production and achieve a better price for their product. The cooperative gives them a better alternative to the local trader because it is a service organization managed by the farmers. Whereas traders usually aim to keep the farmers ignorant of market prices so that they can pay them the minimum, the purpose of a cooperative is to keep its members informed and pay the most that the market allows. An effective cooperative offers a range of other services to its members- not just buying and selling their production, but also providing credit at reasonable interest rates, making advance payments, providing inputs such as fertilizers and facilitating training and technical assistance. An agency providing technical assistance cannot visit hundreds of farmers individually; the cooperative provides the organizing unit for helping farmers improve their skills and practices.

A vital service that cooperatives provide for certification is establishing a traceability system. Each farmer member whose farm is certified for compliance with the practices of the Sustainable Agriculture Standard receives a number and every time the farmer sells to the cooperative, the sale is recorded. The production from certified farms is stored separately from that of non-certified farms so that if it is sold on preferable terms, as it usually is, then the benefit may go back to the farmer. Companies buying the cocoa, for example, derive a great benefit from this traceability because they have the assurance that the farm practices in their supply chain are sustainable.

Rainforest Alliance has certified nearly 50 cocoa cooperatives in Côte d’Ivoire. One of the first to achieve certification in 2007 is the Cooperative Agricole La Paix d’Issia (COPAPAIX), situated in one of the major production zones in the west-central region of the country. Formed in 2003, it brings together 700 farmers from the surrounding villages. Mr Désire Kouassi is President of the management Committee of COPAPAIX. He says:

“In my village certain people were not on speaking terms for a long time because of arguments. But since we started working together and learning together and realizing that we can benefit from the experience of others, people have started talking together again and fraternity and solidarity have been re-established, in a situation where the traditional elders had not been able to bring us together.”