This is Development: Bolivia

This note highlights the story of an entrepreneur, Abednego Alipaz, who created a successful coffee trading business by organizing his colleagues into a cooperative. The paper traces the development of the coffee cooperative initiative covering:

• The problems faced by the coffee exporters with respect to quotas;
• The formation and failure of the National Association of Coffee Producers (ANPROCA);
• The formation a new export initiative called Center of Associates of Ecological Promotion (CAFE).

The new association, CAFE:

• Consisted of 220 small coffee producers, including Alipaz;
• Suffered from a lack of quality and market instability.

The document outlines USAID's involvement in the process which provided grants for:

• Technical assistance to the growers for using coffee pre-processing plants;
• Purchase of additional pre-processing equipment.

The note captures the follow up developments due to the grants:

• CAFE got in touch with an entrepreneurial builder of coffee-pre-processing plants, Pedro Rodriguez;
• CAFE currently exports 85 percent of its coffee through him;
• Pedro Rodriguez is now Bolivia's number one coffee exporter.

The note concludes by mentioning that Alipaz was elected director of a proposed technical assistance unit to support the 20,000-member ANPROCA in recognition for his rich experience, and his secret recipe for success includes knowledge of the sector and reliability.