| One of the fastest ways to get additional income into remote rural communities is to use the Fair Trade scheme for marketing their existing products. However, whilst the Fair Trade system has many advantages for increasing incomes in communities in developing countries, the scheme was not developed with any specific conservation benefit in mind. The Rainforest Alliance has developed a similar scheme, which has additional restrictions on how the crops can be grown (non use of herbicides and pesticides). However, even this scheme does not link price to the wider conservation performance of the whole village. Indeed there is one village in the Cusuco National Park buffer zone at the Op Wall Honduras site, which has achieved Rainforest Alliance approved prices for its coffee products, yet this village is the one most involved with illegal hunting in the adjacent reserve! To overcome this problem the Operation Wallacea Trust has trade marked a new scheme called Wildlife Conservation Products where communities can receive Fair Trade equivalent prices for their commodities only if they have signed one of these conservation agreements. If there is evidence that village members are continuing to hunt or log then the scheme is suspended until the community can exert the necessary pressure to prevent this activity. However, the payment of prices significantly above market rates in these communities provides a strong positive incentive for ensuring 'their' forest is protected. |
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The main difference between the Wildlife Conservation Products scheme and both Fair Trade and Rainforest Alliance is that the enhanced price is paid not to a producers' co-operative which normally comprises only a small percentage of the whole village, but to a village level co-operative that must have 90% membership. The products are bought by the village co-operatives from the local farmers at the normal market rates but are then sold onto the exporter at the enhanced WCP rates, which can produce a village level premium of up to 70% over the farm gate price. Coffee from the villages around the Lambusango and Cusuco sites run by Operation Wallacea are now being marketed under the Wicked Jungle Coffee brand and cashews are also being exported under this scheme to the UK. By cutting out middlemen and dealing directly with the farmer co-operatives, the prices paid for the products to the villages can be considerably higher than the Fair Trade rates but the final sale price in the western market can be comparable with Fair Trade. This scheme has great potential to substantially increase incomes in communities that are committed to protecting their adjacent forests and provides a market driven way of conserving forests |