CNFA:The Farmer-to-Farmer Program

CNFA:The Farmer-to-Farmer Program

• 19.02.2010

More than 15 agribusinesses from Moldova will benefit from free consulting services in the year 2010 – including technology, skills and knowledge transfer – from the expert volunteers of the American Program “Farmer-to-Farmer”, implemented by the USAID-funded nongovernmental organization CNFA.

The Farmer-to-Farmer Program operates almost in twenty countries of Africa, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe (including Ukraine and Byelorussia). The program was launched in the year 1999 and prolonged in the years 2003 and 2008. The current program will last until the year 2013, having a total budget of $2.5 million. Approximately 125 American experts will visit Moldova until then. 30 experts have already visited our country, based on beneficiaries’ requests. The standard length of a work assignment is of up to three weeks.

Most of the FTF budget is spent on organizing the U.S. experts’ visits. According to the common practice of the volunteer movement, these people are working without being paid in our country, but their flight, lodging and transportation, as well as the medical insurance, are quite expensive. However, if the hosts are willing to share the expenses, e. g., for the volunteers’ meals, this initiative is welcomed. The reason for that is the Farmer-to-Farmer transfer can be bidirectional.
However, if the FTF team (two employees in Washington, four – in Chisinau) was more or less paying attention to the statutory proportion at the earlier stage – not less than 50% of the program customers had to be farmers, the beneficiaries’ selection principles are more liberal now. The major requirement is for them to realize the necessity to develop their business and be willing to accept innovative approaches.

There are several potential beneficiaries on the preliminary list of the FTF program for the year 2010: farms, limited liability companies, «Vita-Lact», «DoPrimLact», «OlgutaProd», «Premium Fruct» and «Agrostoc» business cooperatives, higher education institutions, the Agricultural Park INAGRO of the Academy of Sciences of Moldova, and a corporate nonprofit association – the Table Grapes Producers and Exporters Association.
Besides the “direct sales” practice, used by the Program team for its services, there are also several potential customer providers for FTF. These are bodies with different objectives – such as Peace Corps, the nongovernmental Federation of Farmers of Moldova, «Agroinform», the Republican Union of Agricultural Producers’ Associations «UniAgroProtect», the consulting network ACSA (a subcontractor of several projects carried out by the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Industry). In several cases, some of the FTF partners are able to provide the beneficiaries with grant support («Agroinform») or technical assistance («ACSA»).
According to Nadejda Mocanu, FTF program coordinator, the two strategic directions of the program are actually two strategic sub-sectors of agriculture (production of fruit and vegetables and dairy products). Until recently, the program clients representing these two sectors (particularly «Alfa-Nistru», «Coval&Co», and «Lapmol») were mostly interested in technological and marketing experience; therefore, experts with this particular background visited Moldova within the FTF Program. However, lately both large and medium-sized agribusinesses (such as milk processing business cooperatives) have become more concerned with management and quality control issues both for raw materials and finished product. This is perceived as a major competitive advantage.

However, the FTF expert volunteers are not only concerned with growing or marketing issues. Nadejda Mocanu states there are frequent cases when during an assignment the volunteers identify more serious difficulties the company is facing in different areas than the ones the company itself has assumed to be the most problematic ones. E.g., the business development might be hindered not by the weak sales system, but by the wrong financial planning principles. The volunteers are including these findings in their mandatory trip reports submitted to the program organizers, as well as in their recommendations to the host organizations. Thus, the beneficiaries can continue benefiting from the assistance, this time in the corrected direction.

As a matter of fact, currently a major direction of the FTF program in Moldova is the financial consultancy. Thus, in cooperation with the IFAD program, the FTF experts have developed a quick and simplified loan risk evaluation system for the agricultural businesses, especially for the small and medium-sized ones. The system has already been presented to six banks (of a total number of 11), which are currently cooperating with IFAD in the Republic of Moldova. Moreover, the CNFA/FTF team recommends the same system to be used when cooperating with the Moldovan banks involved in another donor program - RISP.
The FTF management is also planning to renew its cooperation with the Rural Financial Corporation of Moldova (CFR) on matters of financing the Farmers’ Savings and Loans Associations (the program has already contacted the corporation in the year 2002).

Recently FTF is considering another kind of associations – the water users’ association. The establishment of these associations is an objective of the irrigation-related course of the Compact/«Millennium Challenge» Program. FTF has had previous work history with an association of this kind in the village of Gura Bicului. This could become necessary within a large U.S. government-funded donor project implemented in the rural areas of Moldova.

Both the Moldovan insurance companies focusing on agricultural risk insurance have also been FTF customers. The «Moldcargo» experts were mostly interested in the American practices of insurance for the agricultural sector, as well as in several insurance products for the growers, while «Moldasig» experts paid particular attention to the subsidized insurance practice, as well as to the interaction between the insurance companies and the state bodies on matters of improving the existing legal framework.

FTF was initially conceived as a global movement for the cultural exchange. Given this, the program welcomed a variety of specialists: women, retired people, and representatives of ethnic minorities from the U.S., which could show the world the cultural diversity of America. From the one hand, that is. From the other hand, the program deliberately invited as consultants-volunteers people who have never left their village, state, or continent – in order to show them the cultural diversity of the world. These people were coming to Moldova in order to see an interesting, distinctive, and yet one of the poorest countries of the South-Eastern Europe; as well as to help its people.

People who proved to be very hospitable and inquisitive, and who made the older American farmers to become nostalgic and remember “the good old America of the last mid-century” - as they later shared it with the FTF staff. Moreover, as it turned out, not all of the Moldovan villagers were very poor and uneducated, some of them had already moved on to producing agricultural products with a high added value. Thus, in time, not only volunteers with significant life experience would come to Moldova; professional experts and consultants would do it as well. Also as volunteers.

This fact was initially included in the Moldovan replica of the program – its name used to be Agribusiness Volunteer Program (AVP). However, this later changed, and now in Moldova, just like in the rest of the world, the transfer comes from “Farmer to Farmer”.

And finally, a late addition of major importance - from an ideological point of view. The full name of the program is John Ogonowski Farmer-to-Farmer. John Ogonowski was an activist of the farmers’ movement from the state of Massachusetts, and also a pilot of one of the airplanes that crashed during the terrorist attacks of 09/11/2001.
V.K.