Panamas Farm Cooperatives attracting global attention

Alongside Panama’s official tools of tourism promotion, trade fairs and costly advertising campaigns, a hidden and unsung program is helping thousands of farm workers and their families, and bringing tourists.

In Panama’s poorest rural communities over 320 “farm cooperatives” are providing sustenance, and employment for thousands of “campesinos, and, as the word spreads, attracting increasing numbers of foreign tourists ready to literally put their shoulders to the wheel.{jathumbnail off}

The activity has led to a major international health and sustainable development organization making a substantial anonymous donation to help send volunteers to work with the farm residents. Alongside the expanding numbers of foreign visitors more and more expat residents are asking to visit the “Patronato de Nutricion” farm associations.
The program began in the early 1990’s when a successful Panamanian 

businessman and some associates felt that impoverished  cjildren could not be expected to learn if they had to walk miles to school and then try to learn on empty stomachs.

Patronato de Nutricion’s 320-plus farm cooperatives are currently benefiting more than 40,000 of Panamas poorest.. “Patrons” purchase 5-to-20 hectare farms structured to support 5-to-15-families who “learn” to grow enough nutritional food to feed themselves, then produce surplus crops, meat, and fish, which is first sold to their local communities at affordable prices, then to commercial markets… at competitive prices.

The result, important to all societies, is that impoverished people develop sustainable farms, learn to market their products, and become entrepreneurs, “land owners” – when they buy the farm, the mature cooperative, from the founding “patron(s)” – for only the original cost of the land itself. This is not charity… they have earned it.

Prophets are not recognized in their own land, and Patronato de Nutricion is no exception, but the word is spreading to other countries and organizations who are asking “How?”

The photographs illustrating the article were taken during a recent tour of  the Las Gaita’s Cooperative in the Capira District, where the residents now own ther farm,  by visitors and leaders of 47 other cooperatives in Capira.

 Visitors included U.S. expats  Ife (red blouse) and  bearded Damani Keene (former Dean of Residence at  Howard University,Washington DC) and British expat  Jack Gordon-Smith who once operated and then owned  a large  produce cooperative  In Cambridge, England.

All the visitors were not only impressed by what they saw, but left committed  to promote awareness of the program. The Las Gaita's Cooperative celebrates its 11th anniversary today, April 14