Why Villages First?

Article by: Dale Hampshire
Date Posted: April 25 2010.

In 1993, I set up Vanuatu Coconut Products Ltd in Vanuatu, an island nation in the southwestern corner of the Pacific. Within a few months we were producing 25 tonnes of coconut oil-based soap for the local market and took the market away from the imported Chinese soap. In 1995, I left Vanuatu and returned to Canada. The soap factory was a successful example of the gaining an economic advantage by adding value to a local resource to make a product that substituted an imported one. But as I reflected on what had been accomplished, I was bothered by the fact that very little benefit had gone to the smallholder farmers who actually produced the coconuts that the factory purchased as raw material.