Supporting smallholders and women in Madagascar

Supporting smallholders and women in Madagascar

17 April 2020

Empowering women and ensuring sustainable production for smallholder farmers is key to the UN's Global Goals for Sustainable Development. We've taken action to address the barriers to decent work that women and farmers face in our cashew nut supply chain in Madagascar.

Working Together

Together with our cashew nut supplier, we devised and co-funded a collaborative project to generate secure incomes, long-term deals and successful businesses for smallholder cashew farmers and to ensure better working conditions, income and employment security for factory workers.

 

 

 

Smallholder farmers

Training

We set up three training centres to provide farmers across four villages with training to teach them how to plant cashew trees so they can produce better yields. This includes pruning trees, removing weeds, making organic fertiliser, planting trees and selecting the best nuts from the healthiest trees. Cashew trees produce their best yields after 10-25 years but can start producing nuts after three years. 45,000 trees have been planted since the project began.

Creating greater access to market and securing land rights

We recognise the importance to small-scale farmers of a fair system of value distribution and commit to supporting small-scale farmers to organise collectively. Through providing the training in communities, farmer cooperative groups were created. Farmers used to have to go through a collector to sell their crop, but can now deal directly with our supplier through farmer cooperatives, which creates better access to market. Although the prices of cashew nuts fluctuates on the world market, farmers are guaranteed the equivalent of the Fairtrade price at a minimum, which covers the cost of sustainable production, and sometimes receive even more. In 2019, the price was 11% above the Fairtrade price. This has provided an uplift of around 122% in income for farmers from the 2014 base price, before we started the project. We will monitor and track this to ensure the financial gains are sustained.

Part of the project was for farmers to get the rights to their land deeds, as the land originally belonged to the government. Our supplier worked with a surveyor and now 288 farmers have their land deeds, of which 99 are women.

Our programme started in 2014, and as of 2019, 357 cashew farms are now members of the different cooperatives, 99 of these farmers are women and nearly 600 farmers have benefitted from the training.

 

Factory workers

Improving working environments

Cashews are harvested by hand. Processing is traditionally done by women sitting on the floor. This can cause skin complaints and back problems. Working with a local women's health expert, we introduced a number of initiatives to improve small-scale producer and worker livelihoods. This includes upgrading workstations with chairs, using coconut oil and gloves when shelling nuts to reduce problems, introducing ventilation in the processing factory to maintain a temperature three degrees cooler than before, creating a new rest area and canteen that is shaded and improving hygiene through hand-washing stations with dryers.

Introducing stable income

Our supplier used to buy cashews for workers in the processing facility to have work for three to four months of the year. Due to increased benefits for smallholder farmers described above, our supplier is now able to buy more cashews and provide enough work for the factory to last all year round as a result of our investment.

After speaking with the women, it became clear that they preferred the flexibility of being paid on a daily basis as on other days they help with the rice or vanilla harvesting. So, they now have job descriptions and contracts to work all year round, should they wish to. The aim was to reach 150 workers, of which 145 are women with the opportunity for year-round work. In fact, this has been superseded, and now 207 workers benefit from this, of which 201 are women.

Workers are paid per kilo of nuts processed meaning they always earn above the minimum wage. The monthly minimum wage in Madagascar for 2020 is 200,000 MGA and in 2020 the workers who cut, grade and peel the cashew nuts earn between 18-21% above this minimum. In lieu of a living wage calculation developed according to the Anker methodology for Madagascar, we used the living wage calculation from Wage Indicator which demonstrates that the lowest wage of 236,750 MGA per month fits into its living wage range. Wages for the lowest paid workers have increased by 50% since the start of the project. The contracts that have been put in place ensure workers receive the living wage. We will monitor and track this to ensure the financial gains are sustained at living income levels.

This programme has been so successful that our supplier continues with it and has found alternate funding streams in order to expand into five additional villages. We will report progress on wages and new workers impacted on an annual basis.

Listening and learning

So we can continue to listen and learn we asked an independent expert on gender, recommended by the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), to review the project. They said that a key strength is that all parties have an economic interest in its success, and next steps should be to work with women to form a workers' committee and to continue to integrate them into the project planning process.

We’ve taken this on board and the following have been implemented:
•    One of the technicians running the training centre is a woman
•    Women are on the elected boards of the farmer cooperatives, including representation at Vice President level
•    Six of nine supervisors in the factory are women and report directly to the factory manager
•    The health expert used is a woman

We’re committed to ensuring fair, transparent, stable and long-term sourcing from small-scale food producers and making a positive difference to their lives. You can read more about this commitment for our banana supply chain here.