CDP PROJECT #3: GUATEMALA Similar to the ways in which Sri Lanka’s spice growing operations and access to the market have been impacted by FSMA, Guatemala’s comparative advantage with high-value export spice crops, as well as its ability to add value through material processing, have been impacted. FEDECOVERA, a cooper- ative federation in Guatemala and Frontier Co-op supply partner since 2007, aggregates organic cardamom, allspice, and turmeric from its member cooperatives, and performs primary processing and export services. However, FEDECOVERA lacked the capacity to perform secondary processing, such as pasteurization, grinding, and sterile handling, so it would sell the product to customers in the U.S. and Europe to perform these value-adding processes. To increase value at the source, Frontier Co-op, USAID, and FEDECOVERA have been working together to improve infrastructure, support Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) certification, build capacity to implement pasteurization, grinding, and sterile handling processes, and provide training, in Spanish, on high-level food safety principles, good manufacturing practices, contamination control, and pest management.
A long-term partnership: Beyond USAID CDP, Frontier Co-op has invested in supportive services in partnership with FEDECOVERA for over a decade, including most recently a mobile clinic that visits their rural cooperative member villages.
LONG-TERM FEDECOVERA PARTNERSHIP Beyond the USAID CDP project, Frontier Co-op has contrib- uted more than $376,000 in its more than 15-year partnership with FEDECOVERA to business and community building projects. The small cooperatives that comprise FEDECOVERA are made up of 120 organized small-scale growers’ groups representing nearly 100,000 indigenous Mayans of Q’eqchi’ and Poqomchi ethnicity. The support services FEDECOVERA provides to their cooperative members are free of charge and include health, education, financial, legal, agricultural, and other social and technical services. The work Frontier Co-op and FEDECOVERA have accomplished through the partnership includes the introduction of organic turmeric as an additional high-demand premium crop, infrastructure and process im- provements, and community needs support – including the establishment of a dental clinic and medical resources for the rural farming communities.
Photo (left above): FEDECOVERA provides a variety of supportive business and social services for their cooperative members, including agricultural inputs, trainings, and starts. Photo (right above): A production worker ties a bag of product closed in FEDE- COVERA’s processing facility in Coban, Guatemala.
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