the world of organic agriculture - Organic Eprints

16 Organic Farming in Latin America
16.2.4 Popular Fairs
Probably the most popular form of organic trade in Latin America is the neighborhood fair or
small informal market. In most towns there is a place, usually a park or sports arena, where the
producers can sell their goods directly to the public on a weekly basis. This is a good opportunity
for farmers to get the full price, without having to give intervention to middlemen. Many local
governments favor this kind of transaction, helping the farmers by providing them the stalls
and some advertising. Although these local fairs have a small economic significance, they are
very important for modest peasants and in total they represent an important percentage of the
organic market of the continent. And some of them are quite big, as the Porto Alegre bi-weekly
fair in Coolmeia, which gathers some 300 producers and thousands of consumers.
The Peruvian NGO Red Agroecologica (RAE) has developed many of these small weekly fairs all
over the villages of Peru, taking advantage of a millenarian tradition of local trade that comes
from the indigenous communities. Something similar takes place in many areas of South and
Central America.
In Uruguay, the Parque Rodó fair exists since the beginning of the nineties, and there is also a
fair in Tacuarembó. In the Dominican Republic, there is the FAMA ecological market in Santo
Domingo. Mexico City has recently started an organic weekly fair. In Lima, the Bio Feria has
been going with a very efficient organization for years, and they even made a video and a book
on “how to build up an organic fair”, published by IFOAM
Many groups of vegetable producers in Brazil, Argentina and Perú are reaching the public with
the same prices as conventional vegetables, and make it a political point: “Let all the consumers
choose freely, not only the rich.” Some of these schemes have developed a quite sophisticated
system of “participatory certification”, basing their guarantee in the direct relation between the
consumer and the producer. Participatory Guarantee Systems are being researched by a special
IFOAM Working Group 1 .
16.2.5 Box Schemes and Home Delivery
An important organic trade system is the box scheme. In big cities, many producers organize a
planned home delivery circuit with fixed boxes containing assorted vegetables and fruits, and
sometimes milk products and eggs brought by other farmers. This has been, in many cases,
the starting point of organic producer associations and specialized shops, which grew out of
a successful home delivery system. In Argentina it took ten years of box schemes to develop a
consumers’ base that could allow producers to step into the more massive sale of supermarkets.
Uruguay is following the same pattern, and Brazil has regional groups that have been reaching
the public with organic produce through home delivery for almost twenty years. There are some
examples of sophisticated systems in the continent, like the Bio Canasta in Lima; El Rincon
Organico in Buenos Aires and Sitio do Moinho in Rio de Janeiro, who reach hundreds of families
weekly.
1 IFOAM working group on Participatory Guarantee Systems for Organic Agriculture, Internet
http://www.ifoam.org/about_ifoam/standards/pgs.html
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