Project assistance completion report : agricultural services and union development, implementing agency -- American Institute for Free labor Development (AIFLD/Costa Rica)

The period of the OPG is not specified. The project has provided real benefits to rural agrarian union members, and yet there have been serious problems, not yet resolved, in the area of financial management. The benefits of the project include: (1) alternative production and marketing opportunities for several crops, inter alia, blackberry, ginger, pumpkin, tuber, and cassava; (2) increased incomes and marketing margins for farm groups, who have been empowered to assume processing and marketing functions -- e.g., washing, sorting, packaging, transporting -- otherwise assumed by middlemen; (3) improved interinstitutional coordination among development organizations, increasing the technical and political influence of organized rural trade unions. Financially, however, there are three troubling aspects to the project. First was the management of the credit fund, valued at about $225,000. CNT accounting records were inadequate to identify all the farmers who owed money on loans and how much each one owed. This condition was detected toward the end of the project, at which point CNT asked each member union to sign a note to pay back to CNT the total owed by the individual farmers of the union. A.I.D. accepted this solution, but has now received a formal complaint (which is being investigated) from one union that its members did not receive the loans. Second, CNT loaned money from the loan fund to some of the project's marketing operations. Third, the marketing and loan program were too small to cover the staff costs on a sustainable basis. Part of the reason for this was that many staff were involved in union organizing, an activity not directly related to the project. It is doubtful that the project's financial problems will ever be resolved, since CNT no longer exists, its assets and records having been passed on to FEDETAICO.