Amendment no. 8 to the AID cooperative agreement no. OTR-0192-A-00-9052-00 with Agricultural Cooperative Development International to support a cooperative initiative project focusing on facilitating trade ties between farmer-owned organizations in the US and Latin America (APTLINK) as well as to provide support to an Afghanistan (Ghaziabad) farm study

marketing cooperatives and farmer-owned organizations in Latin America and the Caribbean. The APTLink project will establish linkages between small/medium farmer-owned associations capable of agro-processing in two Latin American countries with U.S. cooperatives interested in marketing their processed goods. By project end, four trade agreements will have been negotiated between Latin American agro-processors and U.S. marketers, at least two of which will be U.S. cooperatives. The amendment also finances a study, for USAID/Pakistan, of the potential for reorganizing the Ghaziabad State Farms in Afghanistan as private cooperatives. The farms were originally established by the Soviet Union after the collective model.