Last year, we started the quest to find land that had been managed under conventional agriculture. We were looking for degraded soils due to decades of mono-crop farming and chemical use. Since this would be our first iteration we wanted a piece of land that was degraded but not entirely devastated. The Nangu model is quite a grand experiment already and we wanted the agricultural challenge to be somewhat moderate. We were looking for land with access to clean water, in a bioregion suitable for fruit trees and a vast diversity of crops. Relatively close to a mid-size city with good road access, reliable internet and electricity. After months of visiting several options, we got an email from one of our scouts, we immediately recognized that this was the land we were looking for. 227 hectares of land, crossed by 7 bodies of water, a hydroelectric plant, full of plains and soft hills. Located exactly in the bioregion we pref, next to a small rural village. For decades it has produced three main mono-crops: coffee, sugar cane and cow pastures. It was the land of our dreams.

As we learned more, surprises kept coming. We met Aaron, the current farm manager, a strong and kind soul who was born next to the farm and had worked there most of his life. We learned that the farm was the pride and joy of a former agricultural minister. He came across it in the 40s when the Inter-American highway was under construction. He was appointed to feed the oxen that would carry construction materials in what used to be very remote farmland and jungle. He chose this farm because the grass was green even in the dry season. The minister, affectionately known as Yoyo spent most of the rest of his life in this land. He was known as the patron of small farmers. Famous for his genuine care for the underprivileged, humanity and ingenuity. He was a man ahead of his time and the farm is a testament to that. The hydroelectric plant was used to feed the coffee processing plant. Next to it, he built a one-of-a-kind vacuum boiler to efficiently reduce cane juice into whole sugar. He introduced the farming practices that were the spearhead of innovation at his time. Sadly, this meant the introduction of the “Green Revolution”, in other words, heavy plowing, agrochemicals, mono-crops and mechanized farming. I can see how this was done with the best of intentions and full of unintended consequences. In his final years, he started introducing intercropping, agroforestry and sustainable practices, sadly this only happened in some tiny areas of the farm. The vast majority remains as extensive mono-crops.

In 2009 Yoyo passed away, leaving behind a great legacy and a great farm. Conscious that his spirit was all about farming innovation, support of small farmers and food security, the family felt compelled by Nangu’s vision. They became fantastic allies in our journey and agreed to sell the land progressively to make the economic burden manageable for Nangu. We will start by buying a 15 ha plot where the first two years of operations will take place. Nine families will begin a 3-year learning journey to plant and establish a productive food forest.

Walking through the farm we learned that it is home to two “sacred stones”. Big boulders with ancient indigenous carvings in them. We heard the stories of how decades ago burial sites were found and looted. Impressed by these boulders and the story of burials we realize that we are stepping into sacred land. We sincerely believe that bringing back balance to the ecosystem, treating the land and the plants with respect, and bringing opportunities to the local community will be a great way to honor the sacredness of this land. Tragically, the indigenous population of this place was displaced a long time ago. Nevertheless, we will make sure to invite indigenous leaders to ask permission to do our work in harmony with nature, the local community, and the spirits of the land.

Governance

Since day one, governance has been one of the main focus areas of Nangu. We understand that to build a decentralized global movement it is imperative to have a clear definition of the “rules of the game” that give structure to the members participation in the network. We have prioritized a democratic, worker owned and purpose driven organization as the formula to achieve our goals. For a long time we have considered coops as the most promising way to structure and incorporate organizations within the Nangu Network. The coop approach has taught us many valuable lessons and at the same time it showed us some key limitations. Every country has a very particular interpretation of how coops are meant to operate. Some allow multi stakeholder coops while other countries don’t even consider this format. Coops have limitations on how investors can participate, how to reward founders and how to organize decision making. These limitations have good reasons to be like that, but it made us realize that they don’t cover all of Nangu’s needs.

In broad terms we think coops are great, but we have struggled to find strategies to make it more entrepreneurially focused and have the possibility to give monetary incentives to founders and members who add an extraordinary amount of value to the organization. Through B-corp and purpose-economy.org as examples, we’ve learned that there are other formats of purpose driven, market oriented and worker owned organizations. This broadened our perspective of the range of organizations that can be a part of the Nangu Network. It sounds quite basic, but it was a big “aha moment” for us and it will have profound implications in our governance design. In short, coops are great, we will use them, but they are not the only organizational choice for Nangu.

Core Team

Since the last update and improving our social media presence we received a lot of interest from remarkable people that share our dream of a better way to live, do business, relate to nature and each other. We feel extremely honored to receive support from people of this quality, selflessly working to achieve the Nangu vision and being an early supporter of the movement. Let me introduce them.

As a regenerative agriculture and agroforestry expert we have the honour to work with Itai Hauben. He has led many regenerative agroforestry and permaculture projects in Costa Rica and abroad. A brilliant and critical mind paired with a huge heart makes him ideal to undertake such a challenge. We are already fine tuning the agroforestry plan to be converted into financial projections in the upcoming weeks.

Sabrina Baron Cohen is joining the core team as a U-Peace intern. She is conducting research on two main topics, first she is exploring organizations around the globe that work with landless farmers to learn from their success and failures. The second topic is the reality of landless farmers in Costa Rica that ended up working at industrial farming estates. We want to better understand how they got there, current living conditions and the perspective of joining Nangu.

Silvia Majo is helping us define the Learning Journey that each aspiring member will have to undergo to become part of the Nangu Network. Silvia’s passion is to facilitate community engagement processes, being the bridge between the supporting organization and the people being empowered.

Karl Hutt is defining a new communication strategy and brand identity. His enthusiasm and passion for Nangu is contagious! With his help we will soon improve the way we interact with our global network of supporters and allies.

Since the beginning of this journey we’ve had the key support of Bram Van der Lec and Paul Bernstein through our sister organization Polis. Although they are not a new addition to the team, we felt it was fair to recognize the work and leadership to define the governance architecture of the Nangu Network. Without their support, it is hard to imagine all the progress we’ve made so far!

As usual, let me give a quick update on our community development. If you just joined the Nangu journey I want to wish you a warm welcome 🤗! As of today, 451 people have joined us on Facebook and 84 people are part of our Instagram community. It is heartwarming to see that our community is slowly but surely growing.

Now, you might have seen that there was no update for two weeks. Let me explain what happened: It turned out that we needed to focus on our planning and we felt that there was no noteworthy update to share with you. Because of this, we also decided to rename the “Nangu Weekly” to “Nangu Update”. The Nangu Update will continue to be a regular update, and also allows us to prioritize other topics when we feel like that is the right thing to do.

Nangu Planning

As mentioned above, we have been deep down in our planning process. The last Nangu Update already highlighted some of the areas we were looking at. Let me share some insights into this and how “Planning” at Nangu actually works. First of all, everything starts with our vision and our long term goal to launch the Nangu MVP. From this, we have built a roadmap which is a “best guess” at how we think we can get there and what steps we believe are required. We believe that roadmaps are not there to be followed exactly to each step. Roadmaps rather represent a snapshot at a given point in time of how we can reach our goals and stay true to our vision. It is OK for the roadmap to change, because we and our environment changes all the time. Our vision is our north-star, not our roadmap.

Nangu Planning Process

Based on our roadmap, we then plan our work in cycles of 6 weeks. 6 weeks is long enough to make meaningful progress on significant topics and yet small enough to help us stay focused.

Our planning process works as follows: We first have a retrospective of our last cycle and review what went well and what areas we think we together can improve to become a stronger team. The result is a list of 1-3 items which we will review weekly in the cycle to come. Note that those are not the actual goals for our cycle.

We then start reviewing our Roadmap and propose a list of topics we want to focus on. This is a fairly scrappy and disorganised process which feeds from three places: 1. Previous work which was not done, 2. The roadmap, 3. Ideas which we didn’t have in the roadmap and which we want to discuss. We collaborate on this in a shared document and then slowly distill clear objectives and goals for the upcoming cycle. Once we have agreed on the scope for the cycle as a team we freeze the cycle planning. We then move all goals including their objectives into Basecamp, the tool we use to do our project management.

From here on, we are back to working on concrete items. We review our priorities on a weekly basis and have clear tasks for each of us.

So how does the current cycle look like?

Current 6-week Focus

In our planning we decided that we will be focussing on two areas for this cycle: 1. Core Team and 2. Nangu Whitepaper. Both topics go hand in hand, so let me dive into some of the details.

Core Team

Nangu is an ambitious project with a vision which we hope will impact many many people all over this planet and the planet itself in a positive way. Already today, as we progress on our roadmap, we need to dive deep into a broad range of topics, so that we can continuously get more clarity on our next steps. Those topics for example include our Agroforestry Plan, which is a key component to our strategy. Other topics are our Economic Modelling, the Nangu Governance which we have already written about and many more. To accomplish getting clarity in these areas, Nangu is dependent on great people with deep experience in those respective areas. And thus, we are building the Nangu Core Team.

We have been incredibly fortunate already today that we are allowed to work with what we believe are some of the greatest people in their field. Over the coming weeks we hope to share more about our team.

If you are interested in joining Nangu and feel like there is a way for you to contribute, please reach out to Francisco. Even when you think that there might not be an immediate way to contribute but you are still interested, please reach out! To make Nangu happen, we need your help.

Nangu Whitepaper

The Nangu Whitepaper on the other hand will be the artefact which describes each and every relevant aspect of Nangu. The whitepaper will be for us, for interested partners, advisors, investors, etc. and for you so that you can get a deep understanding of our journey. It will cover our Vision and Mission, the Nangu Strategy, our Agroforestry plans, our Values, our Governance Vision, the Team and many more areas.

To get our whitepaper to a point where we can say, “this is a strong foundation” – we need the expertise and deep knowledge of the Nangu Core Team, each with their respective strengths. So together we are creating the building blocks of what will become Nangu.

Over the coming weeks we expect to get clarity in a range of areas which will be covered by the Nangu Whitepaper – and we can’t wait to share this work with you!

For now, this concludes this week’s summary. Please follow us on Instagram if you are interested in our next steps. Take care!

This week, we have continued our focus on our governance vision and how we can translate this into a strategy for the incorporation of Nangu. We envision Nangu to be democratically governed by its members. We also want its members to have a real stake and ownership in the organization. For this, the legal structure of a co-operative is very attractive as amongst other factors, it allows each member to have one vote. This is different to classical shareholder businesses, where your voting “power” is proportional to your economic investment. At the same time, there are some limitations with this legal form. It is for instance more difficult to attract outside capital to fund a project like Nangu.

Over the coming weeks we will translate our ideas into a concrete proposal of incorporation. Stay tuned!

Further Disambiguation

As part of our roadmap review, we have highlighted several areas which we think are important to get more clarity on. For each area we have defined an “outcome” which will help us drive those items. In the next week, during our “planning cycle” we will prioritize our upcoming work. The items below in combination with our roadmap will inform how those priorities will be shaped.

Governance

Outcome:
Nangu as a legal entity / entities exists. Next to being incorporated, the constitution and bylaws for Nangu are defined. It also includes mechanisms and relationship definitions for founders, early employees, employees and investors.

Land

Outcome:
We have a document / matrix which defines the criteria we are looking for when it comes to the land for the first Nangu village. With this document / matrix we can then review the different options available and make an informed choice. We will use this to kickstart our research into available plots of land in Costa Rica.

Core Team

Outcome:
We have role descriptions for each of the roles required for the Nangu Core Team. They will likely align with the topics listed here. We will use those role descriptions to help us gain a better understanding of where we need help and at the same time as potential descriptions for potential candidates.

Agroforestry Plan

Outcome:
We have a high level 3-5 year plan of how we envision to turn degraded land into a productive, regenerative food forest. This plan in form of a document is dependent of the actual land. This means that we aim to get a macro view of our approach and leave enough room so that we can adjust as we zoom in on potential plots of land.

Economic Model

Outcome:
We have an understanding and a high level plan of how Nangu will operate from an economical perspective. This means that we have understanding of basic variables which shape the economic future of Nangu. Those variables amongst many others include, cost of land, worker compensation, revenue models of farming produce, operational modelling and a P&L forecast over the coming years.

Funding

Outcome:
We have a document which summarizes why investing into Nangu is an attractive, and sustainable vehicle for potential investors. Next to sharing our vision in an easy to digest form, we also expect that the items in this list will play a central role in highlighting our thinking around building Nangu.

For now, this concludes this week’s summary. Please follow us on Instagram if you are interested in our next steps. Take care!

So without further ado, we continued to focus on the following two areas this week:

1. Internet outreach and 2. The Nangu governance model.

Internet outreach

We began our online initiatives about two weeks ago and are really excited to welcome so many people who are interested in Nangu. Let me share the highlights: At the time of writing 328 people 🥳 from all over the world joined our Facebook page and 62 people subscribed to our Instagram profile. It is heart warming to see that so many people are interested in our journey, thank you all for this and welcome to Nangu 🙏.

Francisco posted a video which answers the question “Why Costa Rica?”. Our vision is to create a replicable model to restore degraded land all around the tropics and convert them into productive food forests, conservation areas, an economic powerhouse and the home to millions of people living a fulfilling life. And it turns out, Costa Rica is a really great place to call home. Have a look:

For folks who prefer to read about what makes Costa Rica such a special place, you can dive right into the details here in written form.

The Nangu governance model. Radical Transparency and Clarity as core values

Radical Transparency as a core value has been incredibly important to us since the beginning of Nangu. While we believe that individuals have a right to privacy, we also believe that organizations are different. We think that organizations need to be transparent and accountable for their impact on both people and the planet.

The “Nangu Weekly Update” for instance is one example how we strive to be radically transparent with our progress, thinking and vision.

As we explored the implications of transparency we realized that it is also a tool to provide clarity. Despite being intimately related, transparency and clarity are not the same thing. When our thoughts and ideas are disorganized and messy – and they often are in the early stage of disambiguating a step on our journey – being transparent for the sake of transparency can be counterproductive. It will put the burden of finding clarity in the chaos onto the recipient. This is not good. Clarity without transparency has its own set of drawbacks, scheming would be a great example of this and would ultimately create a toxic organization. So in addition to Radical Transparency, we asked ourselves this week, should we include C_larity_ (or a phrase with such spirit) as a core value?

We also wondered, are we spending too much time on small details like this one? Our response was No. Our values have great implications on the governance systems that will be put in place, the income sharing mechanisms, the terms for early worker owners and the conditions to establish healthy relationships with everybody who will be part of Nangu. How we define Nangu today will have long lasting impact on its future.

What are we reading and watching this week?

Here an overview of what we are currently reading, watching or studying in the context of the Nangu journey:

The Green New Deal, by Jeremy Rifkin.
The Green New Deal describes how the third industrial revolution, renewable energies, pension funds, the sharing economy and cold heart finance are rendering the petrol industry obsolete and opening opportunities to a more ecological, fair and distributed way to organize human life.

https://platformdesigntoolkit.com
Platform Design Toolkit shares great tools, educational videos and links for people interested in creating platforms that serve communities of users. It can help shift an organization’s structure from a top down pyramid to a web of stakeholders.

https://purpose-economy.org/
Purpose Economy is on a mission to shift from shareholder controlled, profit maximizing corporations to stakeholder controlled, purpose driven businesses. Their well tested and practical approach is worth considering as an alternative to more traditional worker owned coops.

For now, this concludes this week’s summary. Please follow us on Instagram if you are interested in our next steps. Take care!

Intro

About a year ago, the idea of creating Nangu was born. We started to imagine a replicable model to restore degraded land all around the tropics and convert them into productive food forests, conservation areas, an economic powerhouse and the home to millions of people living a fulfilling life. Research, interviews, endless conversations and a healthy dose of optimism convinced us that our best chance to ignite a movement is through local networks of coops that grow, process and distribute forest products to eco ethical markets. Nangu acts as a platform that facilitates the interactions between coops, upholds the core values, provides support and witness as people and forests grow together. As we clarify and envision the intricacies of such an organism, one thing seemed clear from the beginning. The first Nangu Village will happen in Costa Rica. I’m aware that I suffer from ”proud Costa Rican bias”. Nevertheless, I sincerely believe there are more than enough reasons to start there.  In this article we will explore the good and bad things that make this small nation a great place to start a global scale forest regeneration project.

 Cover photo and this one from Tortuguero National Park by [Pucci](http://www.photographyincostarica.com/#/nature/)

Environmentalist at the core

In 2009, the Costa Rican government first declared the goal to become CO2 neutral by 2021 under much criticism for unrealistic expectations. We are just one year away and the skepticism proved to be right, the goal is impossible for the next year. The day that the current president took office, instead of driving an executive limousine, the young Carlos Alvarado took a hydrogen fuel cell bus developed by a Costa Rican astronaut that drove the new government team to the National Museum for the ceremony. The museum used to be the military headquarters where seven decades earlier, Costa Rica abolished the army. In his speech he honored the country’s bold decision to abolish the army and announced that the great legacy of our generation will be to decarbonize our economy. An official decarbonization plan was launched to attain a modern, resilient, inclusive and net-zero emission economy by 2050.

In the 1970’s the National Park System was created to protect the last areas that remained untouched by humans. In the 80’s the country saw the greatest deforestation in our history, reaching approximately 21% of forest remaining. Since then the trend was reverted and today CR has approximately 52% of the land with tree dominated landscapes (plantations and real forests combined). To the best of my knowledge, Costa Rica is the only country in the world that has been able to significantly increase forest areas and the GDP simultaneously in the past 3 decades.  Since the late 1980’s, forest areas more than doubled and GDP per capita has more than tripled!

In addition to decarbonizing the economy and increasing forest areas, Costa Rica has also banned hunting, mining, zoos, and fossil fuel exploitation. The electrical power grid works almost all year round with 100% renewable energy sources.

In the last two decades the country has seen an explosion of permaculture farms and educational centers, organic farming associations, ecological markets and shops, green energy entrepreneurship, an organic farming law, electric vehicle stimulus laws and a stronger environmentalist movement.

Pioneering spirit

Costa Ricans are proud of living without an army in one of the most violent regions of the world. Shifting our resources from tanks to teachers and doctors, we became known as the Central American Switzerland. Elementary education became free and mandatory and public higher education became world class and truly affordable. There is a tradition to do unconventional, hard to imagine projects that are designed to benefit the majority and not only a few. We have achieved an unusual balance of left leaning social democrat policies with a strong right leaning market oriented economy. Today, in times of Coronavirus, our public and universal health system has put Costa Rica as one of the best Latin American countries to deal with the pandemic. Not only slowing the curve, tracing the virus spread and saving people’s lives, but also developing its own research programs to create a treatment and a vaccine.

Agrarian society gone wrong

Despite so many remarkable accomplishments, when it comes to farming, Costa Rica still behaves like a banana republic. We gain global notoriety by producing world class coffee in relatively diversified fields. Back then, we were mainly focused on food sovereignty and a noble cash crop to export. Sadly, the banana industry became our number one export product, cutting down tens of thousands of hectares of primary forest.  More recently pineapple became the biggest culprit, with illegal forest land grabs and responsible for polluting ground water, making it undrinkable for generations to come. Recently our “green” government approved a massive pineapple project in Sierpe that would destroy thousands of hectares of primary forest, compromise one of the last RAMSAR mangroves in the world and destroy archeological sites where famous stone spheres have rested for centuries. Permits were given in record time based in a questionable environmental assessment.

Luckily, the public pressure was capable of halting the project. It is a sobering reminder of what happens when unscrupulous businessmen and politicians get together. People and planet lose. With the rise of industrialized monocrop farming and an entire generation of agronomists sold into the “green revolution”, Costa Rica became the country with the highest use of agrochemical per square meter in the world, and the agrochemical abuse is only getting worse. In short, we went from self-sufficient plantations with diverse coffee fields to hyper toxic monocrops that destroy primary forests, pollute the ground waters and hurt rural communities. It is like switching windmills for faulty nuclear stations and pretending to be “green”.

Nangu is an opportunity for the country to do what it is good at, taking a bold idea that benefits all of us and strike a balance between market driven economy, nature conservation and socially responsible actions. It is one piece of the puzzle that will allow the shift to a regenerative society that takes care of nature, people and the future.

Window to the world

Travelling the world I’ve been surprised by the positive reaction that rises when I say that I am Costa Rican. People constantly talk about beautiful nature, how green the country is, that we abolished the army and Keylor Navas (the PSG goalkeeper). I often see viral videos praising our policies and environmental accomplishments. Costa Rica is a window to the world and this makes it the perfect laboratory to develop a replicable model for the tropics. If a small country in a violent region can do it, any other country can choose to follow the example. Once we have a couple Nangu villages restoring degraded land into food forests, with hundreds if not thousands of worker owners of productive coops and a thriving local economy; the Costa Rica effect will amplify the reach and inspire tropical communities around the world to establish their own Nangu coop network. We hope to unite the dreams of millions of people to have a meaningful, enjoyable, regenerative and abundant life. We will start to grow a forest to call home in Costa Rica and then continue to grow them around the world.

Please follow us on Instagram if you are interested in our next steps. Take care!

This week, we were focussing on two areas:

1. Internet outreach and 2. The Nangu governance model.

Internet outreach

Francisco posted a 3 minute introduction to Nangu, “Welcome to Nangu“. If you wonder what Nangu is and how we envision a future with Nangu, please have a look – and if you have any questions, ideas, after watching the video, please reach out.

We have launched the Nangu homepage at https://nangu.eco and also set up the Nangu Blog at https://nangu:8890/. If you are interested in staying up to date on the blog, head over there, you can subscribe to a newsletter which we will send out when new posts go live.

Next to our homepage, we also created social media profiles on Instagram, Facebook, Youtube and Twitter. You might wonder, why so many channels? We want to make it easy for you to join our journey, no matter where you are on the internet. Follow this link if you are curious about how we are tracking and planning our outreach on those platforms here.

The Nangu governance model

We are spending a lot of time on defining the governance model for Nangu. This is a topic with a lot of depth and many moving parts. We’ll cover more details on this blog, but for now, here is where we are: Our vision is, that Nangu will be a democratically governed network of co-operatives. Why democratically governed? Because we believe that everybody at Nangu should have a voice to influence the direction of Nangu. Why a network of co-operatives? Because the model of the co-operative allows everybody involved in Nangu to have a stake and ownership in their venture.

Over the past weeks we have reviewed several examples, from Haier to the Dutch “Buurtzorg”, to Italian co-operatives. It is incredible to see that there are so many organizations experimenting outside of the traditional hierarchical, venture funded shareholder model. We are fortunate that we can work with Paul Bernstein and Bram van der Leqc who have extensive experience in the governance space.

Here is a snapshot of our current thinking around how Nangu will operate on a high level. Please note, that this can and likely will change a lot.


What are we reading this week?

If there is one thing which is important at the current stage of building Nangu it is this: we are reading a lot! This because there are so many great people out there thinking about similar challenges/ideas. Here a short list of what we are currently reading / reviewing:

Pedagogy of the oppressed by Paulo Freira
This book is a fascinating read about how Paulo Freira thinks that education can transform oppressive structures by engaging marginalized groups of people.

Solving Organizational Complexity With Simplicity
This article by Corporate Rebels analyzes why the Dutch organization “Buurtzorg” is successful with a self-driven system of small cells.

Essential Components in Workplace Democracy
This article by Paul Bernstein, who we are lucky to work with, dives into how organizations can ensure and nurture workers participation.

For now, this concludes this week’s summary. Please follow us on Instagram if you are interested in our next steps. Take care!

The fall and rise of a community forest

Deep in the countryside of Thailand, the community of Khao Din and their neighbours stand out as 100,000 acres of community forests contrast with the endless sea of monocrops surrounding them. These communities were established by a wave of migrants that settled in the 1960s in a land full of lush and bountiful forests. Initially life was very abundant, with trees becoming timber and plenty of forest products to harvest, eat and trade. As the years went by, most of the forest was cut down and substituted with industrial monocrops. The community eventually became dependent on fluctuating markets of rice and cane sugar. By the 1980s the once abundant communities were struggling with scarcity and rising social issues as they became one of the poorest districts in Thailand.

During the 1980’s a community leader, affectionately known as Uncle Nawm became aware of a plan to privatize one of the last forests in his community. The land grab was organized by a questionable alliance between a local well-off family, a city businessman and local government officials. Uncle Nawm with the support of the local community denounced the fraud taking place and together reclaimed the public forest even facing gunpoint threats! Eventually the villagers won and the forest was officially declared a community property.

In 1986 the NGO Save the Children came in support of the community and made them aware of how their lifestyle had been directly determined by the health of the forest. Protecting their community forest and slowly establishing small agroforestry systems in their land, the community shifted again to produce food and building materials for their own use as a priority and then selling surplus products in the local market.

Three decades later, some villagers continue to practice the legacy of the agroforestry training in the form of diversified integrated farming. I visited a couple of sisters who own a successful mushroom farm amongst fruit trees, Uncle Nawm’s tropical fruit orchard by a fish pond and a diversified family farm with mango trees, rice, ducks, fish, shrimp and rats (yes, farmed rats). Although agroforestry seems to be the main activity for only a few, everyone in the village benefits from the protection and management of the community forest.

Managing the commons

The community forest provides a supplementary income to the local community members and even to neighboring communities. There are defined harvest seasons for bamboo shoots, wild mushrooms and the tender leaves of “sweet vegetable tree”. During the harvest season, local community members can freely harvest these products, while members of neighboring communities have to pay a daily entrance fee to the forest. The harvest is sold to middlemen that wait at the forest entrance and pay a small fee per kilogram directly to the community representatives in addition to what they pay to the harvesters. Volunteers keep strict records of the people entering the forest to harvest, the amounts harvested, the payments in entrance fees and the middlemen’s commissions. During the harvest season the community can generate around USD $10,000 that is used mainly to pay uniforms, food and transport for the local voluntary patrols that ensure that no one is illegally harvesting. Patrols are composed by groups of 5 local villagers that volunteer for one day a month.

All the rules and regulations to manage the forest are democratically established in a monthly village assembly. I had the privilege of joining Uncle Nawm for the monthly meeting were agroforestry, a children’s party, a university research on traditional practices, a women’s empowerment project and a pension fund were all discussed with almost 100 villagers in attendance.

In the last two years climate change brought unseen droughts and high winds that damaged the precious “sweet vegetable trees” and other wild harvest crops. As a result, the community decided to suspend harvesting seasons and give the forest a chance to recover. I asked Uncle Nawm if they had tried to plant trees for human consumption in the community forest and therefore increase the diversity and productivity. They did planted other trees in the past but interestingly, those trees did not survive, only the ones that naturally propagate grew strong.

The example propagated

Neighboring communities from other six sub-districts were inspired by the establishment of the first community forest in Khao Din and went ahead to establish their own. As a result, nine different community forests now cover 100,000+ acres and give thousands of people access to harvest seasonal products.

The management of community commons expanded to establish a series of common water reservoirs. During the rainy season the level of a network of reservoirs rises and temporary canals connect them as a network. With that in mind they chose one lake that does not completely dry during the summer and banned fishing from it. The purpose is to keep a “seed bank” of fish that can swim back to smaller reservoirs during the rainy season when the seasonal canals connect. At first, some community members that opposed the measure and people from neighboring villages kept trying to fish there. An organized response from the community combined with fines eventually deterred the renegades and changed the local culture. Nowadays, if a village assembly makes a decision that affects others communities, like a harvest ban, the message is communicated to the leaders of surrounding villages. The local leaders then use megaphones in the village center to spread the message and let it propagate by word of mouth.

Persisting challenges

Many of the villagers still depend on rice fields as their primary source of income. Unsurprisingly many remain poor. With the help of Japanese cooperation and the leadership of Uncle Nawm, they created a farmers’ association that operates a rice mill microfactory where farmers can store their rice at a very affordable price. The project included five different rice mills, each one operated by different communities. Today only one remains in operation. The main reason according to Uncle Nawm is that the teams set up to manage them were unprepared for the collective governance dynamics and ultimately became too inefficient to remain competitive. The only one microfactory that remains open went through a crisis after three democratically elected managers stole money and brought it to near bankruptcy. Uncle Nawm, had to bring the bad news to the community and saw no other option but to close the operations. Nonetheless, the community insisted to keep it open, appointed Uncle Nawm’s daughter as the new general manager and restructured the operation. Today the rice mill stores and processes small farmers’ rice in almost charitable terms, charging barely enough to break even.

Despite the rice mill supporting small farmers, decades of agroecology workshops, nine community forests and the impressive management of the commons by the villages, people are still struggling to make a living from the land. The younger generations are migrating to the city in search for better paying jobs. Small farmers struggle to get a good price for their products. It seemed that for most of the villagers, the forests were only capable of supplementing their economy and not sustaining it.

Lessons from Uncle Nawm

I learned about the power of good leadership by hearing Uncle Nawm’s stories and witnessing the great reputation and respect he got from other villagers. I saw how a small group of committed people was able raise awareness on the importance of protecting community forests and act on it. They stood up against threats and challenges that seemed impossible by keeping their conviction and unity.  The community history also shows how other small group of people, with selfish and immoral intentions, brought several community projects to the ground.

During a feast offered by Uncle Nawm’s family I asked for advice for Nangu. With no hesitation he said that every project based on agriculture and forests needs a good market. If there is no place to sell the products the initiative will fail. This reminded me of Nangu’s strong focus to reach eco ethical markets.

The second advice was the need of a committed leader with the capability to convince instead of forcing decisions on others. He continued: to convince people every leader must understand that there are three kinds of people.

1. The energetic and proactive that act fast. You want to involve them first.

2. The skeptical who either wait and see what happens or straight up oppose you.

3. Those who go with the flow. Neutral people. They could be good or bad for your cause.

He continued: to convince people it is necessary to make them understand what is in for them. They must understand the benefits from the initiative, otherwise they will lose interest and withdraw their support.

His advice was both simple and sobering. His life’s work shows how blending passion and dedication can yield results that benefits entire communities for several generations. Thank you Uncle Nawm for your open heart and example to the world!

Navdanya

Navdanya is an Indian organization led by Dr. Vandana Shiva.  Their work revolves around native seed conservation, promoting agro ecological farming practices, education, women empowerment, fair trade and most notably, advocacy against industrial farming, in particular monocrops, agrochemicals, GMO seeds and biopiracy.

Navdanya means “nine seeds” (symbolizing protection of biological and cultural diversity) and also the “new gift”

In collaboration with millions of farmers in India, Navdanya is helping preserve thousands of varieties of native seeds that represent mankind’s food heritage.

Who is Vandana Shiva?

Vandana Shiva is a world renowned thought leader and activist advocating for the conservation of native seeds and traditional ecological farming practices.  She gives lectures around the world about the dangers of losing seed sovereignty and the effect of industrial farming on the health of consumers, farmers and rural communities. Known as the nemesis of companies like Monsanto and Syngenta, she has won legal battles preventing  these biotech companies from patenting seeds and introducing GMO’s to India. To many people, she is a true hero defending traditional knowledge and ensuring the access to seeds that can be freely reproduced and shared.

One organization with three branches

Navdanya is organized in three sister organizations that operate with independent teams and funding sources.  Navdanya Foundation, Earth University and Navdanya Store.  Each plays a different role in the bigger picture of biodiversity conservation and ecological farming practices.

Navdanya foundation

The foundation is the platform in which Vandana Shiva gives her talks around the world, follows lawsuits against biotech companies, publishes books and funds research projects. You could say that this is the think tank behind the organization.  It is funded mainly by Vanada’s talking fees. The foundation is also the heart of advocacy and activism efforts.  They are currently working against biopiracy. A practice where biotech companies introduce a genetical change into a seed and then patents the seed as their own invention. Some of Vandana’s arguments against this practice is that you can’t patent life, that the seed itself already existed. Furthermore she explains that privatizing seeds forces farmers to buy new seeds each growing season, preventing the free reproduction and sharing of seeds that farmers have practiced for millenia. Biopiracy doesn’t recognize the food heritage that thousands of years of breeding produced the seed that was modified in the first place.

Earth University at Navdanya biodiversity farm

Seven hours north of New Delhi, close to Dehradun, you can find a 50+ acre farm.  As you enter the campus you see an orchard with almost 20 varieties of mango.  Nested in herb gardens and surrounded by flowers there are red brick buildings that serve as offices, residences, lecture halls, library, dining hall and open classrooms.  Farther away into the farm there is a soil lab, seed bank, food processing areas, sun dryers and small warehouses.

The farm is a living collection of 740 varieties of rice, 240 of wheat, 27 of barley, 150+ of vegetables and the unbelievable diverse list continues. The seed bank is a true biodiversity treasure using both traditional and modern methods to preserve the seeds. It is runned by Sheela, a hardworking beautiful woman with dark skin, deep eyes and a contagious smile.

During my stay at Navdanya I noticed that the people working at Navdanya where surprisingly self reliant, self directed and seem to have an unusual sense of ownership and care for their work. Everyone had a clear role and responsibility and fulfilled it without the need of a manager telling them what to do and only paused for twice a day to have a sweet and spicy chai.

The farm is organic, with a strong focus on traditional practices like plowing the fields with oxen instead of machinery, flooding the paddy fields to grow rice, managing pests using extracts from their own gardens and planting crops in beneficial association like the “three sisters” maize, beans and squash. Walking with the different in house farmers was an exercise of discovering complex natural relations and diversity that only the knowledgeable eye could tell. It is a testament to the wisdom of traditional practices developed over generations to work with nature rather than against it.

For interns, the mornings were spent doing community work or shramdam, followed by farm work like harvesting, sowing seeds or drying herbs. In the spirit of self directed learning, the afternoons are devoted to sessions that cover subjects and teachers that the interns choose based on their interest, for example farm walks, medicinal plants workshops, soil lab 101 or hindi.

I had the privilege to see three different women’s groups come for three days to learn agroecology, talk about their own experiences, share seeds, address the challenges they faced and being celebrated for the knowledge and experience that they already have without being fully aware. In India, the role of women is extremedly undermined and you could tell by the dominant role of the few men that accompanied these women. To see them being empowered by other powerful and accomplished women was very inspiring and a reminder that we have a long way to guarantee equality of opportunities to all.

Navdanya store and farmers network

Navdanya developed a third branch of operations which is a non profit distribution center, a retail store and a restaurant. It is connected to 2.8 million farmers network across India and sells some of their products at a fair price. To ensure the ecological standard of the products, there is a network of a 160 coordinators that visit farmers’ villages on a monthly basis.  The coordinators visit the farms, spread the seeds, solve agricultural challenges and teach best practices to the farmers network. If a farmer is experiencing a crisis, he or she can call for an emergency visit and a senior coordinator can step in to help. The farmers cover the cost of the visits. In this way Navdanya runs a guarantee system that is different from the traditional organic certification programs that tend to have a more policing approach, demand a lot of paperwork from the farmers and typically limit to report back the problems found, instead of actively accompanying the farmer to better their practices.

New Delhi is the main distribution center and the biggest market for the network.  From there, produce is also distributed to smaller distribution centers in other cities.  The demand for agroecological products seems to be growing in India, yet it still represents a relatively small niche market.

Reflections

The importance to conserve native seeds that farmers can  reproduce, improve,  save for the next season and freely share with others seems of vital importance. It honors a treasure that humanity has inherited from thousands of years of agricultural selection breeding and care. Yet humanity is losing seed varieties that took thousands of years to develop because they don’t fit our current economic models of commercial crops and standardization.

In a world facing climate change and extreme weather events, keeping a wide biodiversity of food crops is a matter of survival.  It is food biodiversity that offers us a chance to adapt to changing climatic conditions. It is food diversity that will allow humans to have a healthy and nutritious diet.

Navdanya Seed Bank at the Earth University

Nangu believes that technology has an important role to play in reshaping our food systems for the better as long as it is used to improve ecological practices not replace them with industrial ones, protect biodiversity instead of patent it, support farmers instead of replacing them and promote values of sustainability and wellbeing instead of centralizing profit.

Navdanya has been able to reach and influence millions of farmers in a distributed way.  Farmers retain their autonomy and simultaneously have access to a support network.  Instead of policing farmers with certification protocols Navdanya’s coordinators are accompanying them to improve their agroecological practices. When discussing the use of a blockchain based tracking platform I was surprised to hear that this approach would be against their values, which prefers to trust that the farmers are taking to heart Navdanya’s noble cause. Such a tracking technologies would undermine that. In their view, the relationship between farmers and coordinators is strong enough to guarantee the legitimacy of the produce. It makes me wonder how to reconcile the importance of following core values and self regulation with the use of transparency tools that give supporting customers the trust that the products they buy are legit. Ultimately, living the core values is the greatest of guarantees. Nonetheless, organic farmers also face many temptations to cut corners to either deal with a situation out of their control or to make an extra profit by mixing conventional products with organic ones. The answer to keep ecological standards and trust intact must be somewhere in the middle.

Navdanya has created a network of millions of farmers preserving hundreds if not thousands of varieties of seeds. Established an educational program in the villages and the Earth University, based on traditional practices, self direction and learning by doing. They built a bridge between production and supporting consumers in the cities,publish books and educational material and defend seeds against biopiracy and extinction. To see a relatively small group of committed people orchestrate a global movement, with millions of active farmers and influence policy making in India and abroad is a testament to the power of commitment and belief in a noble cause.

During a visit to Udaipur, Rajasthan I had the pleasure of spending a couple days with the educational rebel and community leader Manish Jain. He has been living for about two decades following the principles of gift economy.  In practical terms this means that he offers his services with no fixed charge. Instead, a relationship of trust is built between the giver and the receiver of the “gift” and there is an implicit understanding of mutual reciprocity. In other words, the receiver of a gift asks for his services, for example a talk, a lesson or an event, then Manish provides this service as a gift and then the receiver of the gift is expected to reciprocate accordingly. When costs are associated with a gift, for example an airplane ticket, the receiver is expected to cover that upfront. But for the service itself, or the gift, the response is voluntarily determined by the receiver.  This principle of trusting the receiver of your gifts and not fixing a price upfront is a true act of confidence and interdependence.  The gift economy principle is also applied to the projects he co-founded and leads.

In the gift economy, the more you give the richer you are
— Charles Eisenstein

Manish has been a long proponent of redefining education away from factory schools into “recognizing the infinite potential of each human being; and enabling people to continuously ‘learn, unlearn, and relearn’ by developing their capacities for deep thinking, reflecting, feeling, understanding, sharing, creating, and taking personal responsibility”

Shikshantar The Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development

Shikshantar is a movement operated from an “Unlearning Center” where children and teens are welcomed to spend their days and create a self directed learning experience. In some cases the kids face big life challenges like a mental health disorder or being an orphan.  They can also be school dropouts that did not fit the educational system or simply children going after school to have the opportunity to explore education in a different way.

The center has a library, cinema center, organic gardens, musical instruments, kitchen, art materials and an upcycling station. It counts with the support of a small group of committed adults trusting the kid’s interests and thirst to learn. During my visit I tried to have a one on one talk with Manish to hear about their methodology and vision but found our conversation interrupted about 100 times an hour by enthusiastic kids that wanted to show him their latest creations, resolve a dispute, get advice, ask for money to buy new pants, crack a joke or just hang around. Meanwhile, the facilitators of the center also had questions and updates for Manish, add to that a few visitors that came in to talk to him and consult on other events they were organizing together. Not to mention that the phone rang about 10 times. I was overwhelmed by the amount of topics, consultations, kids, noises and interruptions. Meanwhile, Manish was completely at peace, giving every single soul the same sincere and  kind attention he was giving me, celebrating each small accomplishment that people came to show him and evidently having fun at it!

Swaraj University

Swaraj (self-rule or rather, rule over oneself) is inspired by Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, a call for people to lead and create their own models of development that are holistic, pluralistic, sustainable, liberating, collaborative, socially just, and anticipatory.

Hidden away half an hour south of Udaipur’s city center is an ashram that serves as a campus for Swaraj University. The university offers a two year program where roughly 15 students at a time go through a process of exploration and discovery. The students and a small group of facilitators live on campus and undertake the journey together. Students stay for a few weeks at a time on the campus defining and exploring their interests. Then they go out to practice, learn and explore their interests within a support network of people, organizations and businesses that are already working in their field of interest. After a few weeks out they come back to the campus, share their lessons, reflect and continue their journey.

The students are free to explore their interests and self direct their learning journey as long as they focus on community oriented and ecologically minded projects or inquiries. The campus has many organic gardens, bioconstruction buildings, stunning landscapes and open classrooms as a result of previous alumni’s explorations.

Swaraj University also works under the principle of gift economy.  They disclose the operational costs to the parents and students to have a reference on what it takes to make the program happen. Then the program is offered as a gift, and therefore, students pay whenever and as much as they decide to reciprocate. The university also receives donations from the support network of allies, alumni and the wider community.

Swaraj Jail University

Following the same principles of the Swaraj University, Manish with the help of Diken Patel, an ex financial analyst turned into an educational rebel, opened an educational program at the local jail. They support a group of inmates into their self directed learning journey. The inmates are learning organic farming, yoga, computer tools, photography, filmmaking, painting and music. As a result more than 50 murals have been painted inside the prison. One group decided to explore music and  practice 6 hours every day.  I had the pleasure to hear their performance at the Organic Farmers Association of India’s national congress. The music was beautiful, and the love and appreciation that they publicly expressed to Diken and Manish was heartwarming. The love and support of the crowd towards them was also extremely inspiring.

When I asked Diken about his job description, his answer might as well describe the essence of what I saw in all projects inspired by Manish:

“To make sure that love is the driving force behind everything we do!”

The problem

Planet Earth is rapidly falling out of balance and urgent action is necessary. The magnitude and complexity of the planetary challenges is daunting. CO2 levels threaten to warm up the planet and to make large portions of Earth uninhabitable for mankind. We have lost a third of the arable land in the past four decades due to destructive farming practices. If we continue to lose soil at present rates we have 60 years of harvest before complete breakdown of our food systems. By the year 2025 two thirds of the world will live in water stressed areas. Earth is facing the 6th mass extinction of biodiversity. Under these circumstances, there is unparalleled social unrest and suffering on the horizon. This is a man-made crisis and perhaps the only silver lining is that humankind may have a chance of solving it as well.

How did we get here?

In the industrial revolution we drastically changed our relationship with Earth. We built a society fueled by coal and petroleum and supported by a centralized infrastructure to extract, process and distribute these energy sources. In the mid 20th century, the “Green Revolution” followed the trend and began a shift from small biodiverse farms working with the natural cycles to industrialized farms using a mechanistic approach based on monocrops. We fed the crops with petroleum based fertilizers and then use an adaptation of WW2 nerve gas as pesticides. After decades pests became so resistant to the poison sprayed on our food, that they have grown stronger into megapests. Farmers stopped working with nature and started working against nature. Today, if you stand in the middle of a soy megafarm in Brazil you’re baffled by the silence and monotony of the landscape. No trees, birds, insects, weeds, grass or creeks. Just a lifeless carpet of soy until the horizon. Industry’s efficiency relies on scale, centralization and standardization. Accordingly, we’ve reduced our agricultural biodiversity to the point were today “75% of the world’s food is generated from only 12 plants and 5 animal species”. We have effectively converted nature into a factory.

We overlooked the fact that soil is a living community of microorganisms and creatures vital for healthy crops to thrive. We combined heavy machinery that compacts the soil with poisons that kill most living creatures. The result is dead soil. Plants don’t grow well in dead soil. It makes them more susceptible to disease, droughts and floods, and therefore more dependent on agrochemicals to keep them alive. Dead compacted soil is also incapable of absorbing enough rain water. This prevents recharging aquifers and lets precious topsoil full of minerals and organic matter erode. The runoff ends up in our rivers, lakes and seas creating dangerous dead zones.

The soil can be an important carbon sink and by using sustainable farming practices can sequester around 10% of man-made emissions. Cutting primary forest, poisoning soil and water, using nitrogenated fertilizers, intensive cattle production and industrial farming practices are emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases. According to a recent report from the IPCC the food system overall produces up to 37% of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. More than any other industry. Yet we waste 30% of all food produced and ship it on average 1200km to reach our plates. If carbon emissions continue as usual we are looking at a catastrophic 3° degrees celsius global warming by 2100. That means life on Earth will look nothing short of apocalyptic.

Social impact

The social side of our food system is equally discouraging. Small local farmers around the world are outcompeted by subsidised, foreign commodity food and large scale industrial farms. A common story is that after a few bad harvests, these farmers ran into a spiral of debt and lost their farms to find themselves either working in near slavery conditions for industrial farms or joining an exodus of people moving into the cities, with small chances of improving their life conditions. Chronic disease and despair are common in communities that followed the recipe of industrial farming by using patented seeds and expensive, toxic chemicals. Many have lost access to drinkable water for decades after their watershed was poisoned with agrochemicals. Indigenous children are urinating pesticide residues. With the dramatic loss of pollinators farmers need to pollinate by hand. We are farming our own destruction by promoting and subsidizing these practices. The common argument to defend the industrial food system is that “we must feed the world”. However, the facts do not support this claim, research shows that 70% of the world’s food comes from small farms and that “small farms tend to achieve higher yields per hectare than larger farms”.

There is a failure in our economic system that allows companies to profit without being held responsible for the natural and social destruction that they cause. We have allowed industrial farms to externalize much of their negative costs to society and to offer their products below the true cost to society. We have created a system that rewards destructive practices, making it really difficult for small farmers to feed us using regenerative practices.

Towards a solution

In the field of alternative food systems we find a wealth of agro-ecological practices. It is a small but growing movement that applies organic agriculture, regenerative agroforestry, permaculture, biodynamic farming or syntropic farming just to name a few. These initiatives tend to work in isolation and often miss the competitive advantages of large-scale food production. Nonetheless, ecological farms are known to produce more food and create more jobs per hectare, regenerate soil, avoid the use of toxicants, are champions of agrobiodiversity, carefully manage water, save and share heirloom seeds and produce safer food. They also perform better in drought and flood events, are safe for neighboring communities, strengthen the local economy and tend to be respectful of the local culture and traditions. Their success is based on the health of the ecosystem and the people.

You are probably wondering, if agro-ecological farms are so great, why aren’t they our everyday choice everywhere in the world? Well, it is complicated, but it comes down to economics. The nature of the agro-ecological approach results in a very diversified variety of products with smaller volumes of each product and less predictable times of harvest than an industrial monocrop system. It is harder to standardize and achieve large economies of scale.

Price, scale and diversity

Let’s talk about price. Small ecological farms walk the extra mile to protect the environment, water and community. By covering the true cost of production they are at a disadvantage competing against industrialized farms that externalize the cost of their impact. Farms often need a certificate to access markets willing to pay higher prices for ecological and healthy foods, to prove their higher standards. This means paying for an organic, fair trade, biodynamic or sustainability certificate and backing it up with a lot of paperwork to show that you are doing things right. In addition, they need to keep a protective perimeter to shield their farm from airborne agrochemicals. They also need to keep strict controls to avoid their product being mixed with others during distribution and storage.

A small ecological farm has a very diverse range of products. The products with a short “shelf-life” need to be transported and sold quickly in local markets like farmers markets and health food stores. This can often be a sizable portion of the production and the local markets are often not available or big enough. Another option is to process the produce into higher value products with a longer shelf-life. It is a challenge to do this efficiently and comply with food safety regulations for small batch production. The commercial food grade infrastructure and tools necessary are typically expensive. The permits to register and sell processed food can also be costly. As a small farm you probably have many different products in small amounts, making it hard to justify the time and money to make each product legally compliant.

If the immediate local market is not big enough there is the logistical challenge of sending products to other markets. If the farm has access to a truck (that is a big if in the global south) then the farmer and probably someone to help will need to spend one or two days selling at farmers markets and/or delivering to restaurants and stores. This is valuable time not spent on the farm. If the farmer has no access to transportation, it is sadly common to fall prey to unscrupulous intermediaries that will pay a price near or below the production cost and resell the products elsewhere making most of the profit.

Nangu: A new story

We chose the name Nangu because it means “home” in Chorotega, a disappeared indigenous language from Central America. It is a reminder that when you don’t take care of what you love, you risk losing it, just as the nearly 200 species that go extinct every day. It is a calling to take care of mother Earth and all living beings. Now, let’s explore how!

Imagine the predicament of a farming family who had lost their farm. What if instead of underpaid labor or city slums there was a third option? Let’s imagine an alternative where the family is offered access to land, the resources to turn it into a productive food forest, the education necessary and a marketplace to sell their products.

It would all start with a “Stewardship Education Program” using a hands on farmer-to-farmer methodology to transform old degraded farmland into a vibrant food forest. Using well tested regenerative agroforestry recipes the soil would first be enlivened using microorganisms, compost and biochar, hand in hand with pioneering plants to break the compacted soil and build precious organic matter. Next, the trees that will provide food, habitat and materials in the future are strategically planted next to fast growing beneficial plants that provide protection and nutrients to the trees as well as food and cash crops to the forest stewards in the early years.

Now imagine the family farm turning into an established food forest. A diversity of healthy foods, medicinal plants, bioconstruction materials and enough to share with the wildlife that will also claim it as their home. The neighbors in all directions will also be forest stewards, growing food under the same ecological principles and a common production plan. Zoom out and see hundreds of small food forest farms, collectively creating a large scale forest where it used to be only degraded land and dead soil.

The land would be owned collectively as a commons, and each family would have exclusive use of the land assigned to them so they can care for it and plan for the long term. To work in a commons entails agreements on the way the land is used, putting in place incentives to keep the members aligned to the core values and the noble cause of the community. It is a self balancing distributed system, in tune with the ecological and social boundaries of the place. It gives a great deal of autonomy and self determination to the different stakeholder groups within their area of influence while simultaneously ensuring that the collective’s core values are respected.

Having a network of stewards producing according to a common production plan opens the opportunity to economies of scale. It becomes possible to create a series of local micro factories that can process the diverse harvest from the forest into high quality products. For example, if the stewards have cacao trees, it is easy to bring the harvest to the local micro factory where a world renowned chocolatier has trained the community to produce a spectacular chocolate. The value of fine chocolate is far greater than selling the dried beans as a commodity. The potential of local microfactories extend to all kinds of food, medicinal plants and eco building materials. A distributed green industry can sprout from the creativity of the steward network in cooperation with world class chefs, scientists and eco builders. A microfactory network can solve the common challenges of isolated agro-ecological farms by combining the output of the farms and transforming it into a diverse range of high quality products, guaranteeing regenerative standards. The combined volume also facilitates the logistics and access to eco ethical markets at local, national and international level. It is an organized steward network that farms, transforms and sells the products of a regenerative food forest to multiple markets.

Now picture the other family in this story. The one that will enjoy amazing, healthy and regenerative forest products. Knowing that their purchase is helping restore the Earth’s balance and supporting the families of the forest stewards. The “enjoyers” will be able to scan a code in each product that will reveal its origin, the people that produced it and the transformational story of the place that grew it. With the same spirit of radical transparency, the selling price will be disclosed to all the stakeholders that contributed in the creation of the product and the income will be shared transparently amongst all of them. No matter how far away both families are, they will be connected.

Nangu envisions the use of technology in the service of the core values and as an enhancer to traditional practices and wisdom. The elder’s knowledge on how to grow food and overcome agricultural challenges can be systematized in an AI knowledge base to be shared amongst stewards across nationalities. Traditional practices of governance and decision making inspired in the commons, will be supported by a voting app. The trust built between farmers and enjoyers at a local market can be extended through distances by the use of a blockchain based tracking mechanism linking the product to the farmer as well as their story and production ethics. The meticulous measurement of trees to calculate the growth and carbon capture of a forest can be enhanced by drones scanning and rendering a forest 3D model in a fraction of the time. It is worth emphasizing that technology is a tool to serve people and values and not the other way around.

Nangu’s special interest is to use the regeneration of vast food forests as a protection barrier to old growth forest that are currently under threat of being swallowed by the industrial farmland expansion. We embrace the commitment to protect the remaining reservoirs of biodiversity held in tropical forests by reverting the damage around them and making sure that the forest stewards in charge thrive doing so. Let’s turn the dire concerns brought by the climatic crisis into inspired action that addresses the global challenges in a responsible and humanized way. This is an invitation to change the course of history with a down to earth approach.

Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come. – Victor Hugo

In summary, Nangu is developing a replicable model that enables local community to become stewards of food forests that they will grow on degraded land creating a buffer zone around forest conservation areas. The Nangu community will enable access to land and education to selected landless farmers for the opportunity to become forest stewards. Nangu’s democratic governance system will enable the network of small farms to work together, to manage an array of local micro-factories and to gain access to eco-ethical markets. The value chain will be made radically transparent using blockchain technology to track forest products from farm to fork and fairly distribute income based on the value that each stakeholder provides, from investors to farmers.

We created this crisis and we have a chance to solve it. It is going to take reforesting an area the size of the USA, about 1 billion hectares of land to erase 100 years of man made emissions. We join a movement of several other promising projects to help reduce emissions and to plant trees. Nangu aims to take responsibility for 10% of that effort, with the goal to plant 100 million hectares of food forests and to help bring tens of millions of people out of poverty. The forest stewards will create a better life for themselves and for all of us by farming with nature, enhancing the soil and preventing water stressed scenarios by revitalizing watersheds. We are running out of time, but we can still make it. Tomorrow is in our hands. Together we can bring Nangu to life and grow a forest to call home!

Please follow our blog for more details on Nangu as it evolves.

If you want to contribute to the propagation of food forests around the tropics please reach out at francisco@nangu.eco

After half an hour boat ride from Balikpapan in Borneo we arrived at the site of the ARSARI Environmental Industries. A few years back, an Indonesian businessman, that Willie knew through his support for animal conservation, bought a logging concession of almost two hundred thousand hectares in what was previously a large scale logging operation. The enormous fires of 1998 destroyed 70% of the forest, an area roughly 14 times the size of inner Paris!  Now in the hands of a world leading conservationist with the backup of a powerful business group supporting his vision the story has dramatically changed.

ARSARI is now cutting the secondary forest that grew after the logging disaster. This forest is composed mainly of pioneer species—species that grow after a forest is cut—that are now decaying because they are at the end of their biological life, therefore releasing CO2 back into the atmosphere. The group is harvesting the dying wood and turns it into biochar and biocoal, a stable and inert form of carbon that looks like common charcoal but is profoundly different. When the biochar is mixed with compost and integrated into the soil it sequesters CO2 for thousands of years. Biochar becomes a host for a complex community of microorganisms and fungi that enhance the fertility of the soil, retains nutrients, retains water in the soil, builds organic matter, lowers the acidity of the soil and filters out toxins.  Biochar can also be fed to cows to lower methane emissions.

On top of all these amazing qualities, the biochar miracle is not over.  Waste organic material can be converted to biocoal pellets that can then be processed in an industrial facility to produce syngas and biochar through a process called torrefaction and gasification.  This creates the building blocks to a carbon neutral green chemistry industry that promises to replace many of the industrial products currently made out of petrol like fuels, plastics and fertilizers. By adding the biochar to the soil the entire system becomes carbon negative.

Back to the forest. After carefully clearing the secondary forest leaving the few valuable trees standing and the vegetation on the steep slopes to prevent soil erosion, a carefully planned regeneration recipe is put in place.  One of the many recipes starts by planting cassava and legume family trees to provide shade and nitrogen to the next superhero in this story: The sugar palm. The cassava provides a short cycle crop that brings income quickly and provides the starch to produce the biocoal we just talked about as well as animal feed. The sugar palm will take about seven years to grow to maturity and be ready to provide on average 25 liters of sugar juice per palm every day for the next 3 to 5 years! In addition it produces valuable timber, fibers, fruits, medicinal products, biomass and many industrial by-products. The sugar palm has deep root systems that pull nutrients to the surface, build organic material into the soil and contribute to water retention.

After harvest, the juice is boiled into a stable syrup for storage and transportation.  It can then be further boiled into sugar with each palm yielding on average 3 kg of sugar every day.  It can also be used to produce ethanol, first by fermenting the syrup and then distilling it to make the ethanol.  The CO2 emitted by the fermentation is fed to algae that then is used as animal feed.  After the distillation the two byproducts are pure water and a sludge that goes to a biodigester mixed with cow manure. The biodigestor ferments the mix to produce methane that is burned for heat necessary on the distilling process and the solids that are used as a fertilizer for crops.  Biochar is also produced on site and the heat exhaust is used in the distillation process and wood drying for the next batch of biochar.  It is an ingenious zero waste operation that uses forest products as an input and recirculates energy and materials to produce ethanol, methane, fertilizer, pure water, heat and biochar!

In additional to the cassava, legumes and sugar palms, every hectare of agroforest also contains many other species of plants and trees yielding fruits, food, medicinal plants and a home for wild and farm animals. Planted and executed with the same brilliance, it creates a zero waste and multiple outputs system. The list of plants comprises some 150 species as part of the agroforestry recipes. Every component is carefully planned to give different economic returns over the years, maximizing the energy gifted by the sun and in profound respect for mother nature.

Willie kept surprising us with more innovations. Knowing that the new capital of Indonesia will be relocated very close to the ARSARI project. They anticipated a great demand of drinking water. Therefore ARSARI will build a strategically placed dam to create a lake reservoir capable of supplying fresh water to 2.5 million people and a booming industry.  The water will be filtered with the biochar produced locally, capturing nutrients in the water that will then go back to the soil. Since the water will flow downhill they will install hydropower turbines to produce electricity and avoid electricity for pumping water. On the lake there will also be a floating solar farm that will use the cooling effect of the water to operate at greater efficiency.  It is important to note that the supply of this vital amount of water is actually provided not only by the agroforestry areas but also by an additional 53,000 hectares of conservation areas that will remain as a sanctuary for wildlife and notably for orangutans. This creates an unusually explicit awareness of the importance of preserving the forest to support human existence and development.

I could continue talking of the tissue culture lab, the sustainable fish farms, the bird nest farming, the experimental growing plots for different crops, the brilliant DIY experiments, bioclimatic constructions, the onsite villages, the ecotourism project, the tire recycling program, the guano harvesting, the gorgeous caves, the cassava industrial facilities, the happy goats and cows, compost facilities, wood drying technology, the stone mining, the satellite monitoring, the fire fighting brigade, the poacher monitoring system, the health studies, perfume making, amazing greenhouses and the list continues.

I rather talk about the orangutans.  We had the immense privilege to visit Iskander and Bento in a pioneering program. The visit was brief and the experience was profound in ways difficult to put in words. Turns out that zoos with orangutans keep only one dominant male to several females in the groups on display. That leaves many “surplus” male orangutans sentenced to a life in small cages. In nature, the non alpha males would normally create a band of brothers and will not become dominant males as long as other alpha males are roaming there. Willie is now creating a pioneering program to rescue these lonely males with impressive cheek pads. They are placed in spacious cages a few meters across from each other were they have time to be isolated and get used to each others presence. After some time they are moved into a large facility all together to let them fight and sort out who is the dominant male. The system includes escape routes and medical assistance for the losers safety. After the leader is determined and the band of brothers consolidated they will be moved to an island with no females where they can live freely. Macaques and other primates will also be introduced on the same islands to steal the orangutans food from feeding stations and keep life interesting.

Conscious of the complexity of the agroforestry system, the 40 years of experience on his shoulders and that he will not be around forever, Willie is also working to create a digital knowledge base to share his wisdom with other people with strong common values. The aim is an artificial intelligence system that will be able to diagnose a piece of land and consider soil quality analysis, weather forecasts, topography, biodiversity, vegetation, hydrology, available labor, geolocation, etc.  Then laying out a plan or recipe to convert the land into a successful regenerative agroforestry project to restore the land and support a prosperous local economy.  If he can accomplish this vision, he truly will continue to grow a legacy beyond his lifetime and beyond the already impressive accomplishments to date. I wish we are blessed with many more years of Willie Smits and when the time comes, I hope we can all continue to make use of his brilliance in service of the ecological and humane values that drive his life today.