People's Recovery, Empowerment and
Development Assistance Foundation, Inc.

The first of a new series of articles written by people work in producer organisations about issues that concern them. Father Shay Cullen from the PREDA Foundation in the Philippines writes ...

My mother had many wise sayings that were passed on from generation to generation. One of her favourites was "Never put all your eggs into one basket." It seems an obvious piece of advice but you would be surprised how many people just cannot accept common sense.

In our world today the food security of nations is endangered by the voracious and aggressive pests that attack and destroy crops causing billions of pounds worth of damage every year.

Brazil, according to a recent Newsweek report, produces 70% of the world's orange juice. It earns more than 1 billion a year and gives employment to as many as 400,000 people. Now their livelihood is in danger as the orange variety is under threat.

After a devastating virus attack that destroyed every orange tree in Brazil in 1940 one variety survived. This was the salvation of the industry, and today 85% of the nation's 200 million orange trees come from this one survivor. But this is mono-cropping at its most vulnerable. A virus has evolved that is devastating that brave lone survivor. The industry is now in dire straits as catastrophe looms.

Mangoes
The two most favourite fruits in the Philippines and most tropical countries are the mango and the banana. The Philippine Carabao is the sweetest of all mangoes and different from those exported from Mexico, India and Africa. Growers are advised to avoid mono-cropping, but the demand for the Philippine Carabao is growing.

Especially when it is processed into soft chewy dried fruit without chemicals as we do at the PREDA development centre with the help of a professional processor.

The project helps thousands of farmers by paying fair prices and keeping the price fixing cartel at bay. The proceeds of selling dried mangoes in Europe helps to finance our development work for the poor.

Presently our products are distributed by an ethical importer that brings the PREDA dried mangoes into fair trade shops across Europe. Credit financing is vital to keep fair trade afloat. Shared Interest makes it possible for thousands of producers and importers to get their products to market without being exploited by the unjust banking system that has brought more poverty into this world than famines and natural disasters.

The PREDA products have brought together the people from across the religious divide of Northern Ireland. For many years Kestrel Foods, a successful business based in the North of Ireland, has had a thriving fair trade business relationship with PREDA. Kestrel Foods imports PREDA products and packages them with the 'Forest Feast' label for sale to the public in ever increasing quantities in Sainsburys and Waitrose in the UK and Dunnes and Superquinn in Ireland. These are unique chemical-free dried mangoes and soon we hope the fair trade shops in the UK will distribute them also.

Bananas
One product that is arriving in the fair trade and world shops these days is organically grown bananas. This is really great news and if you can get them eat them. There are over 500 varieties of banana in the world but what you see in Western supermarkets is only one pale looking dry Cavendish variety. This is the plantation banana of the multinationals and it is so inbred that it is defenceless against an array of pests that descend on the plantations for their daily foraging and feasting. The diversity of the gene pool has long been lost. The banana trees have to be sprayed with deadly fungicide up to 50 times a year according to the Newsweek report. This is startling and scary. I will never eat a Cavendish again. Not only because of the huge amount of toxic pesticide used but because I am so used to the Philippine wild banana. It is so good that a banana ketchup we make from them is selling like hot cakes.

Pests
Many would believe that transgeneric crops would solve the problem of pest and virus attacks. This scientific process does not just mix the different genes of the same variety of crop, it takes genes from one crop and puts them into another. These are banned in many countries. In Europe customers just don't want them.

Genetically manipulated crops have their own weaknesses. They can resist some pests but not all. The genes are exactly the same in the whole variety with no chance of diversity. When a new virus comes along into the single-crop plantation they all perish. The one variety of orange that survived in Brazil and saved the nation is now doomed because the fundamental lesson was never learned - "Don't put all your crops into one variety." My mother would approve and she loved the Philippine dried mango.

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