South African farmer Graham Ford has teamed-up with US NGO TechnoServe, with the consent of the Inhambane provincial government – as all land in Mozambique is owned by the state – to revive an abandoned coconut plantation, about 10km from Maixie. A small processing factory in the community extract the meat and oil from coconuts collected by local people and is then transported to the highway by 4WD vehicles where it is loaded onto truck bound for South Africa. The factory accepts two sacks of husk coconut s from one person a week, which translates into a monthly income of about 1,000 meticais (US$33,50).
Until now the local people have not really availed (themselves of) the natural resources around them on a commercial level because they had to take them all the way to the highway (about 10km away). Here they were only given small sums of money by men who took the coconuts to Maputo,”Said TechnoServe Agricultural Consultant Rizwan Khan, adding that the key to replicating such an initiative, so the poor derived greater commercial benefit, was to situate factories in or near communities. Khan said the long term was to support the establishment of similar factories across Inhambane Province that would mirror the Maxixe pilot program. (UCAP Bulletin)
Source: Cocommunity, Vol.XLI No.7, 1 July 2011
Partly Cloudy 27 oC