Many tea plantations around the wold have a hard time to sell their tea worldwide. Agriterra helps local agri-culture projects to global markets. We spoke with Ingrid Koedijk, agripool recruiter of Agriterra.
What does Agriterra do?
Agriterra is an agri-agency and we support farmers organizations and agricultural cooperatives in emerging markets in order to professionalize them in a way that they can grow in entrepreneurship so that they’ll become good partners for agribusinesses abroad.
Do you have certain examples within industries that you are already successful with?
Well, for instance in the dairy industry we support projects in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and we try to establish partnerships with agribusinesses in Europe to attract their employees and board members to share their knowledge and experience with the farmers cooperatives in a way that they can learn and practice it themselves. So, it’s an exchange of good practices and it’s on financial management, on business development, and on governance so that they can become reliable partners for future buyers for instance, and they can add value to their members, the farmers.
Do you have certain brands that you work with that are already successful?
A recent example is in Nepal, where we work with the CTCF (Central Tea Cooperative Federation) and they have about 100 primary cooperatives that are members and one of their cooperatives, Tinjure Tea, has been very successful in establishing a business relation with a Dutch company from Maas. So, now the tea from our Nepali cooperative is for sale here in the Netherlands.
What is the goal behind Agriterra?
We want to stimulate a better position for farmers, and that can ultimately lead to a structural transformation in which there is a growing industry, with processing, with services around them, that we’ve professionalized in a way that can lead to a sustainable way of doing business. We want to make sure they have good financial management, a good governance system, and a good business model in which they can attract money from the market in stead of receiving funding support from Europe.
What do you precisely do within Agriterra?
My role is to establish and to grow the number of partnerships that we work with. We already have numerous cooperatives from the Netherlands, like Friesland Campina, Rabobank and AVB to name a few. We’re having talks with their employees who are interested in sharing knowledge in an assignment that takes about 1-2 weeks that focuses on actual challenges that we face with the cooperatives that we work with. So we are trying to match the best available candidate for each of the assignments that we have available.
