Noticias

It was 2011 when, along with a team from the REDDOM Foundation and USAID, we were visiting the communities of Miches to understand the agricultural dynamics and how we could contribute to their evolution and growth. Pascual, as they called the farmer we were interviewing in La Gina de Miches, told us that for several years now his income hadn’t allowed him to cover his loan payments, either because the harvest was insufficient or because prices were becoming less and less competitive. Faced with this situation, I thought to ask: “So why do you continue to produce rice?” Pascual responded with a stern look, somewhere between discontent and despair, and after what seemed like a very long pause, he said: “What else are we going to do?”

Until the late 1980s, the Dominican Republic’s economy was based on agriculture. Since then, the agricultural sector has generally adapted, shaping its offerings around products that represent less risk, generate expectations of higher income, or are simply in vogue.

And despite the development of the service sector since the 1990s, a predominantly agricultural culture still prevails among a large part of the Dominican population, whether due to direct involvement in agriculture or family tradition. Furthermore, a significant percentage of our rural population has dedicated their entire lives solely to farming; in other words, that is all they know how to do.

In Miches, we had our first major attempt to integrate local production into the tourism market: the Agricultural Inclusion in the Sustainable Tourism Value Chain project in Miches. This project, implemented by the Tropicalia Foundation from 2013 to 2018, was financed by the IDB/FOMIN (now IDB Lab) and involved institutions such as the Dominican Agribusiness Board, Banfondesa, and Banco ADOPEM. It was a commendable and impactful effort, undertaken at a time when tourism demand was nonexistent, making it a truly forward-thinking initiative.

Most of our local producers are engaged in family or subsistence farming. They produce to sell to intermediaries who offer prices based on whether or not they can find the product before it reaches Miches. Sometimes they use unethical marketing practices. I remember that at the beginning of the Tropicalia Foundation project, passion fruit producers complained because the intermediary refused to give them a price until after they had already harvested the fruit. They were selling it for 60 cents per unit, when their production cost was 1.20 pesos. Double.

Tourism is one of the world’s leading industries, and a third of the sector’s spending is on food purchases. The link between agriculture and tourism could be the key strategy for expanding the tourism sector’s contribution to local economic development.

In the Dominican Republic, the most significant consumer goods in the tourism industry are fruits, followed by vegetables, meat, groceries, and, to a lesser extent, processed meats. These markets typically command better prices, hence the term “high-value markets,” as they prioritize quality and freshness, but above all, timely delivery and contract fulfillment. And it is precisely these specific conditions that pose a challenge for small producers.

Among the main barriers for the local agricultural sector in connecting with the tourism market, we have:

1. Weak culture of association and business.
2. Difficulty in accessing soft, timely and sufficient financing, accompanied by the necessary accounting and financial support.
3. Limited access to technology, both hard and soft, for production.

When we secured a contract with a vendor at the Santo Domingo wholesale market to solve the passion fruit growers’ problem, offering 2.50 pesos per unit, the growers were overjoyed. They showered us with praise and blessings. But then the middleman who had been paying them below cost decided to compete and offered 2.80 pesos per unit. The growers sold to him, and the contract with the wholesale market fell through, causing the price to drop back to less than 1.00 peso per unit.

To successfully link local production with the tourism market, political will is needed from both the public and private sectors. The public sector must implement policies that genuinely develop the productive and managerial capacities of small and medium-sized producers, moving away from mere aid and sponsorship, and fostering a business-oriented mindset among producers to offset the risk companies assume when venturing into the local market. The private sector, on the other hand, must demonstrate an openness to innovation and creativity in supply chain processes, but viewed through the lens of strategic core business design, rather than solely through the lens of social responsibility, communications, and public relations.

The company must be seen as a socially impactful entity that transcends capital growth and the financial management of future risk. It has an obligation to be profitable, as well as to leave a positive mark on the environment in which it operates. And with this sense of purpose, it should gradually establish a commercial relationship that, while initially risky, can become equally beneficial. This can be done in small steps, considering the volumes and varieties that the producer, with their capabilities, can handle.

We are now on the cusp of a second major undertaking, spearheaded by the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources through its Resilient Seibo project. This project is being implemented with the participation of the German Cooperation Agency (GIZ), experts in community interventions that require citizen organization and participatory decision-making. It finds the Miches community much more aware of the significance of participating in tourism, eager to be part of the development process, and in need of the tools to achieve it. Furthermore, it finds a strengthened and better-organized hotel sector. All of this represents an opportunity that cannot help but fill us with optimism about what we could achieve in Miches, and allows us to dream of linking, perhaps as if in an embrace, Miches’s deep-rooted agricultural past with its (ever-closer), impressive, and definitive tourism development.