Progress report from El Salvador

I would like to share the latest report from Joshua Bogart, staff member of Trees for the Future. He traveled last month to El Salvador to provide technical guidance as well as general support to the coffee co-op regarding our reforestation project.

The Coffee co-op is called Ucraprobex and is located in El Salvador.  I would like to revisit some facts about this organization.  This coffee cooperative was founded in 1988 with 10 smaller associates' co-ops. Its membership has now grown to 56 sub co-ops. The sub-groups are composed of 2800 associates with more than 14,000 family members involved. The production volume of this co-op represents around 8% of the total coffee production in all of El Salvador. We chose to work with them because we share their commitment to conservation and their vision for producing sustainable coffees.


Staff member: Joshua Bogart wrote his diary of the trip as follow:
 
Tuesday the 26th I traveled to El Salvador.

Wednesday the 27th I met with Maria Gutierrez, and Maria de Serrano who are our contacts at UCRAPROBEX. I spoke to them about the documentation, of the germination, and finally about documentation of trees planted in the field. We also spoke at length about continuing this project for next year. We talked at length about involving species out side of timber species, and the coffee plantations.

I spoke with members of 7 cooperatives giving each the seed which had been requested and giving specific planting and care instructions for each species. I also took the chance to speak introduce the Agroforestry Manual. Maria had three printed out, two were sent out with cooperatives and one will be kept in the UCRAPROBEX office. I also promised to send Maria an electronic version so people could access it at the office.

The Conversation continued with topics of organic pest control and use of green manure, several of the participants showed interest in incorporating leguminous tree species into basic grain or vegetable production systems.Handing out seeds and giving planting instructions to cooperative members.

     
Thursday the 27th I traveled to Comasagua to visit cooperativa Santa Adeliada. I met with the president of the cooperative Manual Correas. The Cooperativa Santa Adeliada has 900 hectares of terrain of which about 200 are in basic grain production, the rest is in coffee or forest preserve.  Besides coffee the cooperativa also produces some oranges, and avocadoes which are planted in the coffee. There are some other fruit trees, and native vegetables (pacaya) planted with the coffee but not commercially.

I visited the area they are looking to plant to trees. The idea they have is to plant areas which are upslope from organic coffee with trees because they can no longer use them for corn production because the fertilizers wash down slope.

An area destined to reforestation in the left photo is high priority, it is about 4 hectares.

Further along in the property I was shown where the cooperative has been planting Acrocarpus fraxinifolus (Indian Cedar, or Mundani) they are very pleased with this species. The tree in the photo at right is 2 years old.

Thursday afternoon Maria Gutierrez and I visited Ricardo Vaquero who is in charge of CITES office in El Salvador, We talked about the restrictions of CITES both in working with Regulated species such as Sweitinia, and species that have been listed such as Leuceana (which is native but they haven´t bothered to change listings from other countries).

Friday 29th in the morning I met with Tomas Rodriguez, director of Agricultural quarantine, he was very interested in our projects and said he would recommend us to some groups working in degraded sugar land in the eastern par of the country. When we talked about the problems that we had importing seed, we came to an agreement that I will send a list of seeds that are being requested a the same time I am sending it to SETROS he will review the list and clear it rapidly.

[I (Andres) would like to add that we experienced several problems with El Salvador customs office regarding licenses and permits. We learned after few tries that good intentions from our side would not ease the process of clearance through customs. Fortunately, after a long process the seeds are in the grower’s hand.]

On Saturday, I returned to Siguatepeque Honduras, leaving San Salvador at 5:00 AM and arriving home at 6:00 PM.