Acceso is revolutionizing food systems in Latin America and the Caribbean to put smallholders and workers first.
We believe in a world where smallholder farmers are empowered with long-term opportunities and market access that enable them to live healthy, dignified, and prosperous lives. A world where local food systems are equitable and work in favor of small producers, not against them. A world where all workers in food systems are paid fairly. We believe in building long lasting local solutions to solve local problems.
The Problem
Food systems in Latin America and the Caribbean are broken. 22 million smallholder farmers in the region live on less than $5 per day, produce below their potential, and are unable to directly access formal, high value, markets. Many are forced to stop farming altogether and leave their communities. Meanwhile, high growth urban centers, local feeding programs, and international markets need fresh produce. Yet most large buyers find it burdensome to deal with small farmers directly, and instead rely on large commercial farms, imports, or in some cases, informal intermediaries that exploit small farmers and do not pay workers fairly.
The Acceso Solution
Adopting a pioneering model developed over a decade, Acceso (Spanish for “access”) builds and scales local agribusinesses that are designed to enable smallholder farmers in developing countries to fairly participate in high value domestic and international markets.
Acceso agribusinesses provide smallholder farmers a ‘one-stop-shop’ to remove all the barriers they face in trading with formal markets. They improve and reduce producers’ cost of production, create the operational infrastructure needed to get their produce to market, provide value-added processing and commercialize their crops for them. Unlike traditional development programs, Acceso’s agribusinesses partner with farmers for the long term, supporting their whole journey, as they grow to their full potential and prosper. Acceso agribusinesses’ holistic ‘seed to market’ approach is proven to increases farmers’ incomes on average by 250%, which not only lifts them out of poverty but to income levels at which they choose to stay in their communities.
Acceso agribusinesses also create long term jobs for women and vulnerable youth through community processing centers next to farmer production and guarantees all workers across local food systems are paid fairly.
Acceso local agribusinesses provides large buyers with a single, transparent system and reliable way to source high quality produce from smallholders at scale. Acceso agribusinesses are highly market driven and align farmers’ supply very closely to the demand, and are constantly innovating to develop new products and services to meet ever changing markets needs.
Acceso’s agribusinesses are designed to support multiple crop types and sell these through multiple sales channels (domestic, export and humanitarian) – creating both, more equitable local food systems as well as growing new international markets for small producers.
Acceso’s agribusinesses offer philanthropists a highly cost efficient, fully locally managed, solution to support rural economic development with guaranteed market linkages and to build more equitable local food systems, including supporting locally sourced humanitarian feeding & market-linked reforestation.
Acceso’s agribusinesses provide leading impact investors with a proven, high social return on investment, opportunity to support local rural development, supported by best-in-class local teams.
To organizations working in local agriculture, Acceso’s agribusinesses are able to consult on best practices to build smallholder supply and on how to create robust long term market linkages.
As the leading local agribusiness builder in Latin America and the Caribbean with support from philanthropist Frank Giustra, the agribusinesses Acceso has created include:
Acceso Colombia, a pioneering Colombian agribusinesses that sources fresh fruits and vegetables from smallholder farmers in the Andean and Caribbean regions and sells these to large local retailers and food service companies, export markets, as well as humanitarian feeding programs at the Colombian-Venezuelan border, providing food to date for over 10m meals.
Acceso El Salvador, the leading smallholder sourcing business in El Salvador that sources more than 60 types of fruits and vegetables, and fish and seafood from smallholder farmers and fishers and sells to the country’s largest national supermarket, restaurant chains, and soon internationally.
Acceso Haiti, one of few successful social agribusinesses in Haiti that has staying power and works with the largest formalized network of farmers in the country, sourcing peanuts, mango, lime, and moringa for sale to local and international buyers as well as producing Haiti’s famous Lavi Spicy Peanut Butter. Acceso Haiti also is the countries’ leading Haitian supplier of locally sourced smallholder food for local feeding programs and is a main player in Haiti’s market linked reforestation efforts.
Extensio is Acceso’s innovative proprietary digital field agent platform that brings cost efficient, best-in-sector actional information – weather, good agricultural practices and more – to tens of thousands of smallholders across the region.
Acceso’s agribusinesses in Colombia, El Salvador, and Haiti have:
- Generated $60m in income for 15,000 farmers, workers and their families
- Brought 45k MT of sustainably produced smallholder produce to market
- Provided 11 million meals to vulnerable populations including Venezuelan migrants, earthquake victims and children facing food insecurity in Haiti, and those impacted by COVID
- Planted nearly two million fruit trees as part of market-linked reforestation efforts
Acceso is growing rapidly and will be replicating its pioneering local agribusiness model in other countries across the region.
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For more information, to partner with us, or to donate to Acceso, learn more in this brief or please email us at info@acceso.org.