Raisin Producer Cooperative Center No. 2 stands astride the highway in Parwan Province, an hour north of Kabul. Inside the clay-colored building with a cheery yellow gate, Afghan raisin farmers sit cross-legged on the tan carpet, talking about the past and the future.
“Before the wars, we were exporting our raisins to the UK, to the Soviet Union, to India,” said Haji Hamidullah, who was chosen to be president of the Parwan cooperative.
“It’s our hope that we will again find good markets for our products on the international market,” he said.
Illustration: Yusha
Next month, raisins grown in Parwan will be found on the shelves of health food stores and fine food retailers in Britain, selling under the Tropical Wholefoods brand, thanks to an alliance between Afghan farmers; Mercy Corps, an international aid organization based in Portland, Oregon, and Fullwell Mill, a British food producer.
The venture is part of an effort to bring the so-called fair-trade movement to Afghanistan, a country known more for conflicts than cooperatives. Along the way, participants hope to build more stable and prosperous communities by improving on an indigenous business that was once a source of local pride.
In the decades before war decimated Afghanistan’s infrastructure and its land, the country produced 10 percent of the world’s raisins. According to the Afghan Department of Agriculture, Afghanistan’s raisin -production peaked at 86,000 tonnes in 1981 before plunging to less than a quarter of that by the end of the 1980s.
Since 2001, Afghanistan has slowly climbed back, with production hovering at 25,000 to 30,000 tonnes annually for several years.
Official figures show the country exporting more than 80 percent of its dried grapes, but the sweet, seedless raisins can also be found in local markets and are a staple of Afghan rice dishes. The country now produces 3 percent of the world’s raisins, with the biggest producers — the US, Turkey, China and Iran — controlling about three-quarters of the market.
Because of the fighting, farmers like Hamidullah have struggled to sell their goods any farther away than Pakistan. Mercy Corps, together with Fullwell Mill, set out to change that.
“We went to the farmers and we asked them: ‘Do you want to export your raisins? If so, and if you try your best, we can find a good market for you,’” said Aman Taheri, program coordinator at the Kabul office of Mercy Corps. “We told them our strategy was to increase their knowledge and their sales and to help give them linkages: the farmer to the trader to the buyer to the processor.”
The effort is part of a three-year, US$2 million Mercy Corps program, started in June 2008 with financing from the US Agency for International Development. Along with Parwan, the Mercy Corps program operates in Kandahar Province, which is far less secure.
The goal of the program, the Global Development Alliance, is to increase training, jobs and sales along the grape and pomegranate production chains (pomegranates have been harder to export, given security constraints in the south, where they grow in abundance).
The grape growing season lasts about six months, from spring through early autumn, with raisin-drying in the Parwan region requiring four to five additional weeks.
Last year, the Parwan cooperative had a bumper crop of more than 1,000 tonnes. This year, because of heavy rains, that figure could drop below 400 tonnes.
Although billions of US dollars have been spent on development programs in Afghanistan since 2002, few have had such a direct link to international markets. Judging from the challenges Mercy Corps and Fullwell Mill have faced since starting the program in Parwan, it is not difficult to see why the program is such a rarity.
Mercy Corps first reached out to Fullwell Mill in 2006 to study the possibility of producing organic raisins in Kandahar. The two organizations decided to collaborate several years later after agreeing that together they could better overcome the many obstacles.
The first issue for Fullwell Mill was persuading the Fairtrade Labeling Organizations International (FLO) and its certifying body, Flo-Cert, to consider allowing raisins grown in Parwan to carry the Fairtrade label, which indicates that growers have received a fair price and that a portion of their profits will be used to further economic development.
As part of the process, auditors visit producers to verify that they meet the stringent environmental, labor and organizational standards. In the case of the Parwan raisin cooperative, however, FLO did not have the ability to verify facts on the ground and did not want to risk the danger of sending its staff to Afghanistan.
After months of talks, Flo-Cert agreed to let Mercy Corps provide proof of the cooperative’s ability to meet Fairtrade requirements. For now, Parwan raisins will be available only in the Britain, the largest global Fairtrade market.
From the view of the fair-trade representatives, the decision to allow the Parwan raisins project to proceed under their label presented formidable business risks.
“The debate was around whether, by coming up with a new way of working with this group, could that, if anything goes wrong, potentially bring the fair-trade movement into disrepute,” said Chris Davis, who manages producer partnerships at the Fairtrade Foundation.
In the end, the foundation decided that by being open with consumers about the unusual certification process, it could indeed give the raisins the Fairtrade seal.
Organizers faced the challenge of getting farmers to embrace new farming techniques and standards so that their products could be competitive overseas. They also had to convince them that if they did so, they could trust the foreigners who promised to come back at harvest time to buy their products.
“The farmers are guaranteed a whole series of things like reasonable quotas of what we are willing to buy from them,” cofounder of Fullwell Mill Richard Friend said. “And they know in advance there are guaranteed prices and a guaranteed premium on Fairtrade certified product. Concomitantly, there are a series of things they have to give.”
Those include being trained in and adopting certain modern techniques, like mat-based drying of the grapes. Traditionally, farmers had let their grapes dry on the ground, but Taheri, the Mercy Corps program coordinator, and his colleagues told farmers that they simply had to dry their grapes on the new mats, made of river reeds, because they produced cleaner and plumper raisins.
Fullwell Mill’s pledge to pay 350 afghanis (about US$8) for 7kg of raisins, rather than the going market rate of 200 afghanis, added a financial incentive.
For their part, the farmers say that the education has been a boon to their production and to their families. Now that they know they can trust the Fullwell Mill team to deliver on its promises, the farmers hope that this is just the beginning of the collaboration. From the 35 farmers who initially agreed to try the new mats, more than 200 have signed on this year.
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