The Inter-American Development Bank’s Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF) approved a $3 million grant for a project in partnership with The Coca Cola Company to boost the incomes and crop output of 25,000 mango farmers in Haiti.
Coca Cola, the world’s largest non-alcoholic beverage company, will provide $3.5 million for the project, including all the profits from sales of Odwalla Haiti Hope Mango Lime-Aid. The project will be carried out by TechnoServe, a U.S. non-profit organization with extensive experience in promoting agribusinesses in developing countries.
Haiti produces high-quality mangoes but only a small fraction of its crop is exported. Due to a combination of poor post-harvest handling methods and bad rural roads, most of the harvested fruit is too damaged by the time it reaches packing plants around Port-au-Prince.
The project backed by the MIF and The Coca-Cola Company will work with growers who farm small plots of land and own just a few mango trees. Many of these farmers make less than $1,000 a year.
Farmers participating in the project will be trained to improve their tree yields and diversify their production, lessening their dependence on a single crop and bolstering their families’ food security. They will also receive training in handling mangoes after the harvest to reduce fruit damage and rejection ratios.
The project will provide mango farmers assistance in establishing or strengthening grower associations, aiming to help increase their bargaining power and business skills. This will enable farmers to deal directly with fruit exporters and processors rather than selling their crop through middlemen.
In addition, the project will support efforts by local investors to establish processing plants to transform non-export grade mangoes into byproducts such as dried fruit or fruit juice. Despite its considerable crop, Haiti imports mango juice. With its expertise in juice production and market development, Coca Cola will provide guidance throughout this process.
Based on a monitoring and evaluation system, the project will generate a body of knowledge on improving the mango value chain that may be shared with other agricultural producers and transferred to the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture and its School of Agronomy. All project activities will be carried out in close cooperation with Haitian authorities.
The mango project will build on lessons learned from other rural value chain projects backed by the MIF, an autonomous fund administered by the IDB that promotes private sector development in Latin America and the Caribbean, focusing on microenterprises and small businesses.