Acceso Commercialization System
Acceso offers fair and reliable prices for smallholders’ crops, and aggregates with other farmers to trade with the most attractive markets, meaning farmers can avoid exploitative middlemen or “coyotes.”
In Latin America and the Caribbean, as much as 90 percent of produce is imported despite the under-utilized agricultural capacity of millions of smallholders. For many farmers, their only option is to sell their crops directly to limited local and informal markets while others are exploited by middlemen, who often underpay for the value of their products, knowing smallholders have few alternatives.
Meanwhile, formal markets are often completely out of reach for smallholder farmers who produce food in modest quantities so that when taken alone, cannot meet the needs of major buyers.
Meanwhile, formal markets are often completely out of reach for smallholder farmers who produce food in modest quantities so that when taken alone, cannot meet the needs of major buyers.
Acceso offers a benevolent alternative through its ‘multi-crop, multi buyer’ system, which levels the playing field and allows smallholder producers to participate equitably in formal local and international markets. Acceso has developed the infrastructure with the capacity to buy, process, and sell more than 80 crops to hundreds of buyers, lifting the limits of smallholder agriculture.
By buying the produce of thousands of smallholders, Acceso can guarantee a fair price while negotiating the best possible contract with major buyers.
Acceso makes it easy for farmers to offload their product by creating collection hubs near farmers’ fields. These centers also provide jobs where they are most needed in rural areas, close to farmers, providing rural communities with a viable and profitable route to market, while also meeting market demand.
Often, agricultural development efforts involve facilitating market linkages to large singular buyers. A multi-crop commercialization system goes beyond this, enabling a broader range of farmers to participate. Farmers benefit if one buyer takes all crops and grades. It de-risks reliance on singular boom and bust crop cycles and creates synergies for better aggregation economics.
Acceso’s Community Processing Centers take commodities like peanuts from smallholders and turn them into high-value products like peanut butter, generating even greater returns for farmers.
Acceso’s Community Processing Centers are located within rural communities and create both local jobs where they are most needed and ‘value added’ profitable agri-food products that generate sustainable incomes for marginalized communities. Around 90 per cent of skilled processing jobs through Acceso’s network are filled by previously unemployed women.
By aggregating produce directly from smallholder farmers, Acceso’s Processing Centers can supply major buyers.
In El Salvador, Acceso built the country’s leading processing plant for lettuce and potato that sells processed produce previously unavailable in El Salvador to the country’s leading supermarket, Super Selectos, and buyers such as Subway.
In Haiti, Community Processing Centers provide the rigorous quality control needed to ensure peanuts are not contaminated with aflatoxin, which allows peanut products to meet strict international food safety standards. As a result, Haiti’s Lavi (“life” in Haitian Creole) Spicy Peanut Butter is now sold to markets in the US and Canada.
A new Community Processing Center for moringa oil and powder in Haiti will enable smallholder farmers to grow a new high-income crop line that previously has never been a cash crop.
Acceso handles the sale, transportation, and distribution of crops across its network of farmers, allowing smallholders to concentrate on growing and improving their farm.
Acceso’s global logistics experts have designed world-class systems to remove the complexity and risk of managing multiple crops, while putting the needs of farmers first. Acceso has invested in industry-leading IT financial systems, and infrastructure that support “just-in-time” delivery processes needed by formal markets. This enables Acceso to trade with local, domestic, and global markets, securing profitable contracts on behalf of farmers and locking in fair prices.
Knowing that Acceso handles the sales process provides the reassurance that smallholder farmers need to invest in and develop their operations.
THE ACCESO SOLUTION
Acceso builds the entire
food system from seed to market.
To learn more, partner with us, or to support our work reach out at info@acceso.org
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