Download the the Sustainable Food Lab Antigua, Guatemala meeting invitation and logistics document
Now is the time to make specific plans to join us for the week of 14 October, 2007 in Guatemala.
The week will begin with four learning journeys—held concurrently—followed by two days of large group meetings, and end with optional team meetings on Friday, 19 October. We will be gathering at a beautiful renovated monastery, Casa Santa Domingo, in the historic colonial city of Antigua.
Almost all of the companies in the Food Lab are implementing sustainability through their supply chains. Value chains are another way to refer to supply chains, one that takes into account the ways that value gets created all along the path from producer to retailer.
This meeting will be an opportunity to focus on work stemming from the words of Andre van Heemstra, co-founder of the Food Lab and former Unilever management board member; “Creating sustainable agricultural models will require bringing parties together that normally do not cooperate.” Today within the Food Lab network are supply chain projects that involve multinational companies, global and local NGOs, national and regional government agencies,
local buyers, and farmer cooperatives.
The focus of the Food Lab meeting in Guatemala is on Healthy Value Chains: Cases, Methods and Leadership. The meeting will include case stories and mini workshops around approaches to assess and improve value chains. Many of the cases involve business/NGO partnerships. Since we are in Guatemala, the site of some exemplar Food Lab projects that focus on improving producer livelihoods, we will be exploring the contribution of agriculture to development and poverty reduction. The learning journeys will provide a shared context and a starting point for these conversations.
Using some of these projects as cases, our meeting will focus on assessing and improving supply chains—in particular, looking at how to leverage business/NGO partnerships to that end. The learning journeys will provide a shared context and a starting point for our conversations, furthering our understanding of the impact we have on producer livelihoods and the contribution of agriculture to economic development and poverty reduction.
We will be joined by leadership expert Peter Senge,* who will help us focus on the methods and practices that enable learning so that our value chain projects have the potential to scale up and infuse sustainability into the core missions of our organizations. Guatemalan public sector leaders will help ground us in the challenges and opportunities for sustainable agriculture in Guatemala, and they will also share in our learning about partnerships.
To advance our collective capability in building partnerships for healthy value chains, the meeting in Guatemala will focus on two plenary cases in depth: fresh vegetables and coffee, which will illustrate the opportunities and challenges from the different perspectives along the value chain.
We will have additional, concurrent value chain case sessions that focus on improving existing supply chains and developing new approaches to bringing family-scale farms to the market. This will be a chance for detailed conversation around common challenges such as transparency and trust, financing, information and knowledge sharing, access to technical assistance, and the accessibility of rapidly changing standards for small producers.
We will also have workshop sessions to facilitate progress toward individual organizational goals and common projects. Tentative topics include: Regional Sourcing Strategies, Public Agency and Donor Engagement, New Approaches to “Pro-Poor” Procurement, and Policies that Create
Incentives for Sustainable Production and Consumption.
Beyond any particular tools, our progress in creating healthy supply chains will require the ability to nurture common intent and genuine partnership. We hope you will join us for this journey of discovery, conversation, and action.
Learning journeys, described below, will be important to our learning together, not only because we will visit inspiring innovations but also because we will share with one another our different points of view as we go on these visits.
The Learning Journeys
Dinner and Briefing Session for all Guatemala Learning Journeys: 14 October, 2007, 18.30- 22.30
Leave for Learning Journeys: 15 October, 2007, time as scheduled per individual journey
Return to Antigua: 16 October 2007, time as scheduled per individual journey
Dinner and Food Lab Meeting Opening Session for everyone: 16 October, 2007, 19.00
To give us a chance to immerse ourselves in the problem situation, we are offering three concurrent Learning Journeys just prior to the start of the Food Lab meeting in Guatemala. You may choose one to participate in.
All three of the Learning Journeys will provide the chance to explore the following themes:
- Understanding challenges and opportunities for improving lives in farming communities;
- The role of standards and innovative business models in improving economic and environmental outcomes of value chains;
- The larger policy, trade, and country context that influence value chains;
- Ongoing challenges and opportunities for each of our organizations, and how our learning together can help us meet those challenges and opportunities.
The goal of the Learning Journeys is to see the seeds of the future embodied in specific projects and communities in Guatemala. Since we will be in diverse groups, we will see much more than we could individually. Each trip has been designed carefully to minimize presentations and maximize conversations and will provide experiences with both crops and certification systems. Each trip will be two days in length, with one overnight in the field. We begin with dinner and a joint briefing on Sunday evening, 14 October, which will include the Learning Journey methodology, trip details, and an introduction to Guatemala.
Learning Journey 1, co-hosted by Guatemala’s Presidential Commission for Local Development includes visits to:
- Lake Atitlan to meet with ECOAPOCS in the community of San Lucas Tolimán, whose
principal activity is the sowing and harvesting of organic coffee. - CDRO, an organization dedicated to sowing and harvesting medicinal plants. They now sell their plants in 27 Wal-Mart stores all over Guatemala.
- A community in Totonicapan transitioning from maize to new value added opportunities sold to the formal retail market, supported by The Presidential Commission of Local Development through their new systems approach to development. Includes a forest visit of the growing areas.
- Cuatro Pinos, one of the most important vegetable exporting cooperatives in Guatemala
Learning Journey 2, co-hosted by Rainforest Alliance includes visits to:
- A cooperative of coffee growers near Antigua that are both Utz Certified and C.A.F.E. Practices certified, and will include conversation with representatives from Fedecocagua
(Guatemala’s largest umbrella cooperative of small holder cooperatives) and from Starbuck’s agronomist. - A mayor of a Mayan community to discuss community scale poverty reduction strategy;
- An overnight in a hotel certified by Green Deal, the Guatemalan sustainable tourism certification, supported by the Rainforest Alliance
- Meet with carpenters successfully opening niches in the Guatemalan market
- Have conversations with owners at a Rainforest Certified estate farm. The farm exploration includes housing areas for seasonal workers, wet and dry mill, biodiversity at the farm, school and clinic, and an open discussion with some of the farm workers.
Learning Journey 3, co-hosted by Utz Certified includes
- A sugar plantation and exporting facility on the pacific coast—Guatemala is one of the most significant producers of sugarcane in the region
- An overnight at a diversified medium scale coffee and cocoa farm that is Utz certified
- A Rainforest Alliance Certified banana farm that sells its produce to Chiquita, including an introduction by Chiquita staff in Chiquita’s training center, a conversation with the owners of the independent farm about the certification process, tour of the farm and discussions with workers at the farm.
Logistics
Meeting Start Dates and Times
Oxfam Leaerning Journey Participants in San Pedro Sula, Honduras - Thursday, 11 October 2007 in time for dinner.
Guatemala Learning journey PArticipants - Sunday, 14 Octber 2007, by 18.30
Food Lab Meeting Only - Tuesday, 16 October 2007, by 17.30
Meeting End Date and Time
The Food Lab meeting formally ends at 16.30 on Thursday, 18 October. Team meetings and interest group meeting swill be held on Friday, 19 October from 8.30-12.30. Please check with your colleagues to see if your team/group is meeting.
If you are interesting, please contact: LeAnne Grillo at grillo_at_generonconsulting.com.
* Peter M. Senge was named a 'Strategist of the Century' by the Journal of Business Strategy, one of 24 men and women who have 'had the greatest impact on the way we conduct business today' (September/October 1999). While he has studied how firms and organizations develop adaptive capabilities for many years at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), it was Peter Senge's 1990 book The Fifth Discipline that brought him firmly into the limelight and popularized the concept of the 'learning organization'. Since its publication, more than a million copies have been sold and in 1997, Harvard Business Review identified it as one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years. More recently he co-authored the book Presence, which describes the development of the U-Process.
