Marketing of livelihood products”

FAITH, HOPE AND CHARITY
Ka Iking Seneres

After all that is said and done in the area of social housing and community development, everything boils down to the challenge of marketing the products that are coming out of these project sites.

This is the challenge that Bliss Marketing Corporation (Blissmark) took on about thirty years ago as an agency of the defunct Ministry of Human Settlements (MHS). I joined Blissmark as a Group Product Manager when I was recruited from the private sector, along with other marketing professionals from the operating divisions of San Miguel Corporation (SMC). The challenge was very simple, but we realized later on that the job was easier said than done.

The idea for a government owned marketing agency came after the MHS realized that the livelihood projects in the housing sites needed professional marketing support in order to be able to sell their products. The original idea was to provide affordable housing, but it became very obvious that without livelihood projects, the housing beneficiaries would not be able to sustain their amortization payments. As it turned out, the easy part was to fund the livelihood projects, but the hard part was to market the products from the projects.

Going back farther, the root challenge is really poverty alleviation and poverty reduction. On one hand, providing affordable housing is a means of poverty alleviation on the other hand, providing sustainable livelihood is a means towards poverty reduction. These two goals are not one and the same, even if they sound similar. On one hand, poverty alleviation is the goal of making poverty more bearable, like applying a pain reliever.

On the other hand, poverty reduction is the goal of removing poverty (or reducing it), like a surgical procedure. As the world has changed, there is now a huge market for products that could pass global standards for fair trade and organic grade. Consumer marks are now being used to identify the products that have passed these standards, and enlightened consumers all over the world will not buy anything that does not have these two marks.

In addition to these new marks, there is also a global system of identifying products that have passed halal standards. Finally, there is now a new trend to identify products that have low carbon footprints and more often than not, these are locally produced products that do not travel too far from the source.

There are many factories and cooperatives that could produce goods for the global markets, but not unless they could carry one or more of these four marks, they would not have a chance of selling anything in big volumes abroad. By the way, the fair trade mark is not only for food products, it is also for anything that is produced using human labor, and that is just about everything. That means that even arts and crafts are included, and that broadens the possibilities for small producers to take advantage of this opportunity.

In cooperation with the National Greening Program (NGP) of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), the CSR Coordinating Council (C3) now has the opportunity to award homesteads to poor families that would want to start a new life by cultivating tree farms in former logging camps and idle military reservations. This is really a livelihood project at the outset, but it will also have a social housing component, along with other social services in the context of an overall integrated area development (IAD) framework.

The main product in the homesteads would still be trees, but aside from trees, the families would also be growing cash crops and raising poultry and livestock with some fish and crustaecians in between. This is the essence of the forest biodiversity approach that C3 members Joseph Reynolds and WynSandico have perfected in Mindoro.

They are already producing moringa and turmeric capsules. C3 member Howie Mijares has also developed a system of growing eels and crabs in Cagayan Province. My former boss at Blissmark, C3 member Tito Osias is also ready to deploy bamboo growing technologies to these sites. We have many more “walk the talk” members at C3, but too many to name here for now.
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