PROGRAMS>JOINING>COOPERATIVES

Privatisation will take it’s own course…

Traditional hunters and gathers…today these tribal communities residing in forests have marginal land but mostly love to gather food and financial resources from forests. Men would gather jamun and women would sell it, in summer men groups would collect honey from deep jungle and share the profit, everyone from village would help cultivation of almost everyone’s land.

Illiteracy and happy nature of tribal communities was ideal deal for big corporate based on forest produce. The valuable forest produce are being collected through tribal communities at negligible prices and sold at good prices with little value addition.

There is no way to fight with big corporate who are doing business with their own mission & surely contributing in terms of creation of jobs & financial resources. The real problem started today when cooperatives or small businessmen who have some sympathy towards grassroots level workers slowly start losing their battle with corporate. Example: honey bee keepers & small businessmen who spend their entire life to build their business and now paying good prices to traditional honey gatherers are almost on death troll due to introduction of Patanjali honey which gives negligible money to their honey collectors.

Some space there…

YOJAK found that there is still some space/hope for cooperatives in this time. There are various examples of cooperatives managed very well by NGOs along with cooperatives managed by their members and empowering their members. The requirement of cooperatives in terms of forward-backward linkages has to be smartly catered for their survival.

Our own way…

As we are working with tribal communities from Raigad and Pune areas, over the period of time we have build relation with bee keepers, jamun & karonda gatherers, fishermen from these areas. With a view to give best prices to their forest produces, we are helping them with branding, framing & registering cooperative structure.

Today we working with two cooperatives; one fishermen cooperative and one forest produce cooperative. The produces are marketed under brand “raw.foods”.