FINANCING OF AGRICULTURE
INPUT PROVISIONING AND COMMERCIALISATION
OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCE
ORGANISATION OF BUSINESS LINES
PROFESSIONAL REPRESENTATION OF
PRODUCERS AND SERVICES TO FARMERS

FINANCING OF AGRICULTURE:
Creation and development of systems of Agricultural Savings & Credit Unions

Half of the world population has no access to banking services. As they do not benefit from any loan, nor from any facilities related to saving or insurance, the most dispossessed ones are left into the hands of usurers, in a state of dependency and severe weakness.
Microfinance refers to the offer of services to low-income populations that do not have access to financial banking services, in order to meet the needs of families or the needs of their economical and professional activities. Microfinance is still globally limited, it represents an important fighting tool against poverty and a major lever for development, as the access to financial services constitutes a basis from which other needs can be satisfied: health, education...
Today, the commonly admitted approach of development of microfinance consists in simultaneously allowing:
- the access for low-income households to durable financial services,
- the creation of viable and perennial microfinance institutions
- the insertion of these MFI into the global financial system.

FERT contributes to this approach as much from the point of view of mobilisation of experience and professional skill as from the one of the chosen method for action.

FERT started its microfinance-centred activities in rural areas in 1986 in Madagascar, implementing an intervention plan that allows to provide accompaniment to farmers involved in the management of such services. FERT has brought its support in several fields: associative animation, organisation counselling, mobilisation of specific technical skills, and more generally the training of the professionals, as well as of the technicians, in charge of running the organisations.

When it appeared necessary to confirm with banking skills the microcredit initiatives that FERT supported in Madagascar, the association approached the support of the Credit Agricole bank, which has the competencies.
This partnership has been institutionalized in 1999 by the creation of ICAR. It results from the association between FERT and the North-eastern Regional Savings Bank of Credit Agricole, or Caisse Régionale du Crédit Agricole Mutuel (CRCAM), which has been enlarged to the CRCAM of the Reunion Island, the CRCAM of Centre Loire, the CRCAM of Aquitaine, the four CRCAM of Brittany through their Regional Union, and by the association “Crédit Agricole – Solidarity and Development”.

ICAR has so accompanied the CECAM network (Madagascar’s Agricultural Savings & Credit Unions) until its autonomy in 2005.
Since 2004 in Madagascar, ICAR concentrates its activities:
- in the Anosy region: creation and development of the CECAM of Fivoy, of the Mutual Financial Institution of Madrare and of the Regional Financial Institution of Anosy (IFRA)
- in support to the Tiavo network to help it to reinforce its agricultural and rural orientation and to accompany the structuring of the network.

Relying on the experience aquired in Madagascar, FERT initiated in Tanzania in 2001, actions aiming to the creation and the development of agricultural savings and credit systems.
First supporting the development of SACCOS (Savings and Credit Cooperative Societies) in three regions, FERT has been concentrating its efforts since 2006 in the support of USAWA, a financial institution which federates the SACCOS in ths Kilimanjaro region.

 

Examples of ongoing actions

Tanzania: USAWA, a network of credit and savings cooperative banks in Kilimanjaro region

 
INPUTS PROVISIONING AND COMMERCIALISATION OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCE:
Creation and development of agricultural groups and cooperatives
In France, agricultural cooperatives have been a very efficient tool for agricultural development and have contributed to re-establish alimentary self-sufficiency in the country even though the latter, recovering from the war, had to face a continually increasing population and an agriculture that did not allow to meet all the needs.
Fifty years later, the challenge for these professional organisations is to meet new requirements, maintaining a balance between on one side the economical imperatives to which they are subjected within the global market and on another side their professional mutualist essence that more than ever entrusts them with the task of ensuring a personalised and nearby service to their members.

Relying on their own experience, many French agricultural professionals have involved themselves in cooperation with emerging countries. Among them, cereal producers, through FERT, provide accompaniment in about fifteen countries to the modernisation of family farming so that it asserts its commercial vocation and turns towards the market.
Agricultural cooperatives, particularly through functions of input provisioning and commercialisation of agricultural produce, allow the farmers of these countries to acquire the ambition to get out of self-subsistence, to increase their productivity and to sell a growing portion of their production in order to obtain monetary incomes that will allow them to invest and improve their living standards.

Support actions for the structuring of such organisations are conducted by FERT in most of the countries where the association intervenes. Within the frame of those actions, FERT mobilises French professional agricultural organisations, in order to help local partners to find the answers to technical, organisational and economical issues they face.

Examples of ongoing actions

Burkina Faso: reinforcement of the role of Sanmatenga producers in the niebe sector

Madagascar: development of the dairy line with the support to ROVA (Union of dairy cooperatives of Vakinankaratra)

Morocco: cooperative and valorisation of quality wheat

 

ORGANISATION OF BUSINESS LINES:
Creation of markets, regulation and policy of quality
Convinced that the structuring of lines by the professional agricultural organisations themselves is perfectly adapted to the development of family farming in emerging countries, FERT provides accompaniment to projects that aim to the development of an agricultural line at the scale of a small region.
This accompaniment translates into :
the strengthening of professional organisations at local, regional and national level and their support, within the ambit of partnerships, so as to allow them to contribute to the development of a given business line ;
the improvement of produce quality at all the levels of the line (production, commercialisation, processing and distribution) through the definition of policies of quality;
the elaboration and the enforcement of regulating texts and the setting up of incentive measures.
To that end, FERT mobilises French professionals specialised in coordinating actions of development (Chamber of Agriculture, Cooperation Agencies) or the counsel and the technical support for diverse agricultural lines (Technical Institutes, Groupings of producers).

 

Examples of ongoing actions

Brazil / Minas Gerais: support to agricultural organisations in the quality process

Tanzania: rural markets, an innovating initiative to improve the marketing conditions of agricultural produces

Albania: support for the development of agricultural economy in mountainous areas

PROFESSIONAL REPRESENTATION OF PRODUCERS AND SERVICES FOR THE FARMERS
The structure of agricultural economies in Europe and in emerging countries, based on family farming, makes the fundamental interests of farmers, wherever they are, often closer one to another than what appears from the positions of governments in international negotiations.
FERT is convinced that the emergence and the strengthening of responsible producers organisations, representative of a wide grassroots base in emerging countries, would allow to establish a genuine professional dialogue that would result in a shared vision of the political and commercial conditions for the emergence of agricultural economies in emerging countries.
The lessons from many actions of cooperation focused on the accompaniment of farmer organisations show, first, a great ability on behalf of the farmers to mobilise themselves in order to assume their responsibilities as soon as they have at their disposal a space where they can express themselves and take actions, and second, that the necessary progression for the evolution of mindsets and to reach a satisfactory level of representativeness is a long walk. That is why, over and above these organisations’ accompaniment in the development of structures of economical vocation (agricultural produce collection and commercialisation, input provisioning, credits for agriculture), FERT supports the steps they have taken on professional representation for producers and on services to farmers:
representation and negotiation to the public authorities and to other players of the economical and social environment,
training and counsel to the farmers in technical and legal fields,
technical, commercial and general information for farmers, through the organisation of meetings, the issuance of newspapers and the use of various media.

Examples of ongoing actions

Mediterranean Basin: animation of Mediterranean Large Scale Cultivation Network and reinforcement of capacities of base groups for the promotion of conservation agriculture

Madagascar: basic training in agriculture

Madagascar: the CEFFEL (Center for Experimentation and Education in Fruits and Vegetables) to accompany the organisation of the fruits and vegetables line

Madagascar: support to a expanding federative movement (FIFATA)

Brazil / Parana: support to UNILEITE for the professionalisation of dairy family farms

Belarus: rehabilitation and economical development of rural areas contaminated by the Chernobyl accident.

Albania: setting up of strategic plan for the sustainable development of Voskopoje town

Democratic republic of the Congo: local development and professional training in the North of Kivu