Seed farming: The sesame solution

Greg Amos | Image: Greg Amos | Published: August 01, 2008

Santos Machado takes off his baseball cap and wipes the sweat off his brow. It’s early August and Machado is lying on his back on the dirt driveway of his 3½-hectare farm in León, Nicaragua, halfway underneath his sembrador – a large seed and fertilizer dispenser meant to be hitched behind a pair of oxen. He takes a breather before torquing a wrench to make adjustments to the machine. Fruit trees shade the yard from the hot midday sun while a half dozen pigs loiter nearby in a swale of cool mud. The sound of Machado’s two young children, helping their mother grind coffee beans, can be heard from inside the family’s partially walled home. Machado is getting ready to plant a new sesame crop. In a few days, he’ll use the sembrador – bought with help from a Canadian-funded aid project called Produmer – to plant seeds for their future.

Machado is one of more than 800 Nicaraguan farmers being helped by this unglamorous but progressive initiative – one that’s showing measurable results and attracting investors and philanthropists from across North America. Produmer is managed by the Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA), a not-for-profit organization, and gets funding from private investors and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). Its focus is small – the tiny sesame seed – but its ambitions are large: to bring financial independence to farming families who have been frequent victims of indiscriminate natural disasters and unforgiving world markets. Produmer takes a different approach than that of a typical development project, where money and technology are dumped into countries without collaborating with the people meant to benefit. Instead, it hinges on the idea that poor farmers are perfectly capable of taking responsibility for improving their own lives – so long as they can access the necessary cash, equipment and training.

As far as needy locales go, Nicaragua is near the top of the list. While the World Bank reports that the country’s economy is slowly growing and stabilizing, it remains one of the poorest countries in Central America, with the third-lowest per-capita income in the Western Hemisphere. Almost 70 per cent of rural Nicaraguans still live in poverty. Farmers have worked at organizing themselves here, bartering collectively in co-ops to gain some leverage when they sell their goods, but many still distrust the handful of exporting companies that dominate their commodity markets. Bank loans that

could allow them to grow out of their dependent positions are extremely hard to come by.
“It was eye-opening how these people are denied funds,” says John Toews, owner of Oakhill Enterprises, an Abbotsford home-building company, and an investor in MEDA’s work. He took part in a MEDA-sponsored tour of Nicaragua in early April, visiting rural communities north of León. “These are hard-working, family-oriented people, and sesame seeds are their main income.” Toews invested $25,000 into MEDA’s microfinance program, which enables farmers to access small loans for equipment and training, and he expects to net a seven per cent return in five years. (Ninety-seven per cent of MEDA’s microfinance loans have been repaid.) MEDA holds that a business-like approach is better than straight charity – a key reason why the organization has attracted the support of private investors such as Toews.

MEDA has been doing development work in Nicaragua since 1990 and started the Produmer project specifically to assist farmers in 2001. After four years of working with various crops, MEDA determined that sesame was the best fit for the people, the land and the economy. Produmer program director Keith Poe, an American raised in Nicaragua, knows first-hand that sesame is a hardy crop that can tolerate fierce rains and poor soil and has a strong natural resistance to pests. “Sesame is something that will last forever here because it’s easy to grow and it doesn’t take much money to start,” he says. It takes a lot of manual labour, he adds, but requires neither irrigation nor vast tracts of land and can be grown where coffee can’t. It bucks the trend of industrialized agriculture by suiting the land it grows on, and small growers benefit the most from it.
The grain arrived in Latin America from Asia via Spanish conquistadors and is now found wherever hamburger buns, sushi or tahini exist. The worldwide sesame market is sizeable and growing rapidly, driven by the expanding middle class in India and China and a growing international appetite for hamburgers. Worldwide trade was valued at $850 million last year, up 70 per cent since 1993. In 2006 Nicaragua’s sesame industry exported 3,000 tonnes within Central America and to Japan and Europe.

Since 2001 MEDA has managed to convert $2.8 million in CIDA money into training and development for Nicaraguan sesame farmers, with the goal of keeping them prosperous in perpetuity. But to get the benefit out of sesame, funding and expertise had to get into the hands of farmers. According to CIDA’s head of aid in Nicaragua, the agency turned to the Mennonite organization because “there was no local agency that could provide sesame farmers with comprehensive support.” (Another reason for the hands-on approach is that corruption is endemic in Nicaragua: the country ranks 123rd out of 179 nations in Transparency International’s 2007 Corruption Perceptions Index.)

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