Celebrating World Bee Day: Excerpt from an upcoming story featuring Educe Cooperativa in Mexico
Few species are more important to our food system than bees. Carrying pollen from one flower to another, 75% of the fruit, nut, and vegetable crops we eat depend on bees and other pollinators. Though essential contributors to producing nutritious food, bees are often underappreciated and are under threat due to human-caused environmental change.
With May 20 observed as World Bee Day, we’ve been thinking about a conversation our team had with Miguel Ángel Munguía Gil, a director of Educe Cooperativa. Educe Coop is an umbrella cooperative representing 750 beekeepers in 30 cooperatives on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Miguel passionately explained how bees and the honey they produce have brought vital social, economic, political, cultural, and environmental benefits to communities.
We spoke with Miguel as part of our latest Beacons of Hope cohort. Since 2019, these stories of transformation have provided inspiring examples of how individuals and organizations are addressing food systems challenges in visionary ways.
On 24 May, we’ll share six new stories that show how creative investments of money, energy, knowledge, and more are shaping the future of food. Educe-Coop has been in the vanguard, obtaining Fair Trade certification to express solidarity with the values of the cooperative movement and to secure greater financial stability for its beekeepers.
Here’s an excerpt from that upcoming piece:
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Educe-Coop’s member cooperatives range in size, from a handful of farmers to up to 150 producers. Educe-Coop has built processing infrastructure that serves these member cooperatives, including a series of 20 regional processing centres created with support from the UNDP GEF Small Grants Programme.
Producers bring their raw honey here for processing, saving them the time and money of travelling to Educe-Coop’s main processing plant in Merida. The plant was constructed between 2010–2019 and it can today process at least 1.5 thousand tons of honey. Miguel estimates this in-house processing translates to a further 25% increase in revenue for the cooperative and its beekeeper members.
Significantly, Fair Trade certification has enabled Educe-Coop to provide working capital to its farmers. Fair Trade importers in Europe pre-finance up to 60% of invoices, which Educe-Coop uses to make an interim payment to its producers at local market value.
Rather than awaiting final payout once their raw honey has been processed and exported, farmers can use this upfront capital to invest in new beehives, agricultural inputs, and other essential costs such as education, household sanitation, and healthcare.
Anecdotally, Miguel says these advanced payments have provided an incentive for beekeepers to join a cooperative, and have helped to reduce rural-urban migration. “This has been very helpful to preserve the social fabric of our communities,” he adds.
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In recent years, Educe-Coop has leveraged its Fair Trade certification to access financing from philanthropic foundations, international ethical lending initiatives, and a national development bank in Mexico. The group’s creative approach to financing has helped the cooperative grow in an intentional and sustainable way, while continuing to provide benefits for its beekeeper members.
Miguel also talks about how beekeeping can be not only a source of income for subsistence farmers but also a means to defend the territories and culture of the region’s Indigenous Mayan population. With World Bee Day 2022 dedicated to celebrating the diversity of bees and beekeeping systems, we can’t think of a better story to highlight than that of Educe-Coop.
Watch this space on 24 May to read more about Educe-Coop’s incredible work.
In the meantime, here are a few actions you can take to recognize the importance of bees and other pollinators, on World Bee Day and throughout the year.
