by Jaim Klein

The scent of flowering citrus trees around the campus of the International Institute - Histadrut, in the middle of carefully tended lawns of the Sharon Valley, formed the background of the conversation between our Shalom Magazine reporter and participants in the first course of Cooperative Agrarian Industrialization for Rural Leaders from Brazil, the first course specifically structured for leaders of Brazilian NGOs (non-governmental organizations). Taking part in the course in summer, 1996, were 30 agrarian leaders - members of cooperatives, extension professionals, rural activists - from several Brazilian states.

Mr. Igal Szir, Director of the International Institute's Division for Latin America and the Caribbean, with three of the 30 participants in the First Course in cooperative Agricultural Industrialization in Portuguese. The course was specially designed to meet the requirements of cooperative leaders of Brazil and received a very favourable response. It will be followed by two similar courses in 1997

The Concept: Creativity

The focal concept of the course was to improve the well being of agricultural producers through agroindustrial development, through a process born from the very basic cells of society such as cooperatives and similar voluntary organizations. During this last decade of the 20th Century, rural industrialization will, of necessity, follow innovative models, because reality has changed - and in the opinion of my interviewees, nowhere more than in Brazil - making imperative a change in approach and a turn towards unconventional solutions.

We have as our legacy an accelerated rate of change and the consequently short life cycle of most products and technologies. This transitory nature of things implies that the keys to success are flexibility and the capability of rapid response to the changing nature of the market.

The cardinal idea is to approach industrialization of the rural areas through original models leading to unconventional and innovative branches of production, which generally are also more profitable and may serve as springboards to new economic and social achievements.

An example of appropriate economic activity for the next century can be found in the service sector - specifically, tourism. The rural environment holds a monopoly of ecological resources, and the diversity of its animal and plant life, its natural beauty, may be exploited to develop a prosperous, agroindustrial tourism.

There is a growing national and international demand for services that only the rural area is capable of providing: outdoor sports, hunting and fishing, exploration of nature, expeditions to remote and exotic places, kayak and riverboat navigation, mountain climbing, surfing, etc. And the tourist wealth hidden within Brazil's natural environment - unique on the planet for its richness, variety and exuberance - certainly represents a highly exploitable resource, whose economic potential is not inferior to the resources underwriting Brazil's past wealth - rubber, coffee, cattle ranching, timber extraction.

Israel offers numerous examples of unconventional agroindustries: farmers who, beginning as machinery and tool users, went on to manufacture and market spare parts and then the entire piece of equipment that traditionally they had been buying; farmers whose livelihood had been based on growing crops are now are processing and marketing sophisticated canned foods directly to urban consumers.

Brazilian Cooperatives: Hard Times

Edmar Goncalves Padilha is Manager-President of the Canoinha Agricultural Cooperative, an important rural organization. "The Brazilian cooperative movement is going through a period which is not easy. But for me, cooperation is like a second religion and I intend to be faithful to its tenets even during these difficult times. My impression of Israel is that here a person instinctively knows that in order to survive, he has to be part of a group. In our country, we are still in need of more education.

"There has been a change in the nature of the economic environment surrounding our cooperative movement. The government no longer supports us. Cooperatives are forced to operate in the same manner as all other economic entities - within a capitalist environment. This means that they have to be profitable. As with any other kind of enterprise, we have to invest today hoping that we may be able to reap the fruits of our investments in the future.

"In my area, we grow sorghum, soya and tobacco, and we have milk cows. My cooperative collects and refrigerates the milk and also manufactures cattle feed. Our agroindustries are based on the association of small farmers within a framework of "rural condominiums." Property is individual but production is common. Only this way can a small producer increase his profits.

"The course offers a wealth of ideas for the development of our own area. In addition, it puts us in personal contact with Israeli producers, manufacturers and technologies, allowing us to establish partnerships and technology transfer agreements directed to introduce new concepts and new products into our own environment."

Cabral Paulo, PhD in Agricultural Development, works for the Ministry of Agriculture. "The course is a micro-laboratory of the problems we find in our own country, and it allows us to develop solutions that may be implemented upon our return. One of the things that most surprises me is that the problems we are identifying today in our own country are precisely the same ones that you had here just a few years ago. Here you enjoyed the luxury of time during which these problems could be analyzed, alternative approaches tried out and decisions made about which solutions worked and which ones did not. We now have the opportunity to receive from you a ready-made and field-tested solution, and thus to save ourselves the calvary of having to experiment on our own skins."

The Curriculum: Cut to Measure

This is not the first time that Brazilian cooperators have taken part in courses at the International Institute, but this is the first time that all the participants are from Brazil and that the course has been specifically designed for the requirements of that country. The Institute maintains ongoing links with the Brazilian cooperative movement and its work schedule for 1997 contains two additional courses for rural leaders.

Among the special attractions of the course was the opportunity to establish personal contacts with Israeli counterparts with records of creation and management of successful cooperative agroindustries.

And no less important, the course opened the doors of Israeli society to the participants, introducing them to the political and economic organization of this country, with its very special social structures such as the kibbutz (collective agricultural settlement) and the moshav (cooperative agricultural village). Participants also enjoyed a chance to combine duty with pleasure, climbing to the fortress of ancient Masada in the Judean Desert, swimming in the extremely salty waters of the Dead Sea, 400 meters below sea level, and making pilgrimages to biblical sites in the Galilee and Jerusalem.

Participants met and worked with the best of Israeli experts, got to know the workings of world markets for agricultural produce and learned how to access them. A central part of the program was the formulation of agroindustrial projects, with the assistance of well-known expert Michael Froilich. The perspective brought by distance allowed them to reflect on their reality from a different angle, as in the roundtable discussion on "Industry in Rural Areas: The Brazilian Experience."

Within the framework of the course, the participants visited a number of agroindustries such as the Tnuvah milk and dairy products processing plant at Rehovot. At Kibbutz Na'an they surveyed the agroindustrial centre and visited an irrigation equipment factory. During a whole week, the participants resided at Kibbutz Bror Hail, founded by Brazilian immigrants. In the houses of the "haverim" (kibbutz members), the visitors felt at home.

The course also offered the chance of a glance towards the future. During a visit to the hi-tech Industrial Park at Tefen, in northern Israel, the participants saw factories operated by robots. And the future cannot be mentioned without a word on computers: The participants took part in an executive computer simulation game called "Tasi-Yeda," which allowed them to weigh alternative courses of action and to adopt decisions and the check consequences on the "virtual reality" of the model.

The course "works" on the individual - strengthening him as a leader, training him to make decisions, teaching him to formulate projects, encouraging him to perform within a group and to evaluate objectively his own effectiveness. The participants returned to Brazil having completed a final project, which is a plan of action conceived and developed around a central subject, of a practical character and linked to his reality. The experience of former courses shows that many of the projects refined at the International Institute attain actual implementation at field level.

Important: Reports that Convince

Participants arrived knowing that a significant part of the course is the presentation of a report on their home situation. Consequently, everybody came well prepared, and meetings were of a high level and subjects of real interest to the participants were discussed.

But that is not all. Today's rural leaders also interact with executives from loaning banks who decide the financing of agroindustrial development projects. "In these years, Brazil's environment has turned frankly capitalist," observed Edmar Goncalves Padilha. "In economics, there is a kind of Darwinism. Cooperatives lack support and we have to compete in the market at the same level as any other economic entity, but we cannot betray our humanist essence nor sell our cooperativist soul for a handful of coins. In order to survive," he concluded, "the cooperatives of my country are evolving towards forms definable as capitalist cooperatives." Their agroindustrial projects have to seek resources in competitive financial markets, and their leaders have to be able to speak the language of those markets. Projects have to be "bankable," "feasible," with positive "cash-flows" and an attractive "cost/benefit ratio." During the course, participants learned the concepts and the language, as well as how to formulate and to present their projects in a convincing manner in order to obtain financing.

Brazilian Leaders: The Way We See Israel

"I am impressed by the survival and the vitality of the collective ideal in Israel. We visited a kibbutz and learned about its organization, its internal division of work and we felt the significance of the collective experience on Israeli society. Only within the framework of the collective can difficulties be surmounted. There is no chance for agroindustries to succeed at the individual level. Only agroindustries based on group effort and economies of scale are feasible."