From poverty to power - Oxfam-Québec

3 POVERTY AND WEALTH LIVING OFF THE LANDformally register. As a consequence, many POs remain as unregistered,informal organisations, which limits their legal safeguards and theirability to raise loans. 60As a new generation of bottom-up POs takes root, that legacy ofsuspicion is being overcome. In the northern Albanian village of Kiri,where villagers gather wild mountain herbs to sell for cash, the legacyof forced collectivisation under communism made people initiallyreluctant to form a co-operative. So they set up a Herb Associationwhich helped them improve the quality of their product, find newbuyers, and increase household incomes by 40 per cent. Oxfam hasseen farmers, governments, and aid donors embrace such initiatives incountries as diverse as Mali, Honduras, and India. A significant proportionof new POs are commercially oriented and concentrated inhigh-value product markets, often for export. Relatively few operatesuccessfully in domestic staple food markets, where prices are too lowand transactions too small to cover the costs of organisation, both infinance and time. 61 BOX 3.3THE SWEET TASTE OF SUCCESS IN COLOMBIAIn 2002, a group of private sugar mills applied for a licence tobuild a large panela mill in the impoverished Patía region ofnorthern Colombia. Panela is a brown sugarloaf made fromsugarcane, which is used as a low-cost, nutritious sweetener.The step up from small, family-run units to industrial productionpromised to create jobs and improve cost and quality for consumers.Just the sort of investment to pull people out of poverty,economists said, as the urban market was largely untapped.The impoverished farmers who made their meagre living frompanela did not see it that way, fearing they would be pushed outof even an expanded market. Some Rural Development Ministryofficials concurred, adding that a single factory could manipulateprices to both farmers and consumers. Moreover, when the initialtax breaks ran out, the factory might close down, leaving everyoneworse off.The small producers formed an informal association andlaunched a campaign to persuade the government to reject the135