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Adopting Globalization to Local Social Development & Ecology
By Talli Nauman
At the grand opening of a small, cooperatively-owned cosmetics factory in Mazunte, a town of 1,000 on Mexico's Pacific coast, the owners dubbed their factory the "Miracle of Mazunte" because it would replace jobs lost by the closing of the town's sole employer – Mexico's largest sea turtle slaughterhouse.
Photo courtesy Bioplanet Network
Hector Marcelli examines a sea turtle coming ashore in Mazunte to lay eggs during a nightime landing
Now the Mazunte Natural Cosmetics factory owners would have to prove that their environmentally friendly venture would be a commercial success. "We have the factory; we're producing; now we have to sell," said project coordinator, Gabriela Jimenez.
Just one year later, a hurricane leveled the village and halted the factory's production. Fortunately, the factory rebounded, returning to business after three months.
Since then the Mazunte Natural Cosmetics factory has become a cornerstone of the entire region's economy – making it even more of a miracle than expected. How did this struggling enterprise succeed against such long odds?
There are several reasons. The factory is building a growing base of customers by continually diversifying its product line.
Photo courtesy Bioplanet Network
The Mazunte Natural Cosmetics factory
faces a road leading into Mazunte
Besides providing manufacturing jobs, the cute little, palm-shaded adobe cosmetic factory doubles as a tourist magnet, drawing additional revenues to satellite businesses. And it is strengthening the local economy by setting aside a portion of its profits to serve as startup capital for other local business ventures.
Mixing Globalization, Environmentalism and Development
Ultimately, the factory's success is due to social innovator Hector Marcelli's two-track marketing formula, which he shares with 55 other small businesses through his three-year-old, non-profit Bioplanet Network (Red Bioplaneta).  Bioplanet's primary mission is to train local residents to create ecologically- and commercially-sustainable businesses.
The genius of Bioplanet's scheme is that it emphasizes the need for a timely return on investment so that fragile new ventures will not founder. This is achieved by using the techniques of big business, while simultaneously rekindling residents' latent desire to protect their environment and enhance social development.
Thanks to Bioplanet's successful efforts, the Economy Secretariat of Mexico (formerly known as the Dept. of Commerce and Industrial Promotion) is on the verge of signing an important agreement to give federal money and logistical support to Bioplanet so that it can help its members export their products.
"For the first time in the country's history, they are putting down money to support fair trade and organic commerce for communities to export," Marcelli said. "The politicians are seeing that the products seem successful, and they want to be in the photo."
Mexico is one of the world's most enthusiastic participants in free trade agreements, boasting accords with some 30 countries. Unfortunately, the terms of these agreements typically favor established, mainstream and multinational corporations over small producers – so the government's agreement to support Bioplanet's small producers is a significant breakthrough.
The fair trade movement establishes a consumers' product seal of approval based on producers' adherence to standards for fair wages, decent workplace conditions and environmental sustainability. For now, the goods and service providers that belong to the fair trade movement remain on the fringe of Mexico's national development policy, but the Bioplanet Network system gives them hope of achieving prosperity.
Serving Bypassed Rural Communities
The Bioplanet Network consists of an expanding collection of cooperatives, non-profit societies and locally-owned small businesses that are concerned with community development. They are linked to a group of ten technical-assistance and support providers, including philanthropic and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
There are of four types of enterprises in the network: agricultural producers; producers of utilitarian items and food processors; artists and artisans; and ecotourism attractions. The Las Cañadas Cloud Forest is a typical ecotourism attraction in the network. It offers lodging in fantasy-design cabins, meals featuring produce from an onsite, organic garden, guided tours, and a fair trade gift shop, the proceeds of which go to preserve and restore Las Cañadas' woodland watershed.
Photo by Miguel Ángel Torres
Architecture is part of the tourist draw
at Las Cañadas Cloud Forest eco-resort
All enterprises receiving support from the Bioplanet Network must meet its basic requirements for participation: they must be located in a priority ecoregion; demonstrate a commitment to conservation; be organized for social benefit; and offer commercially attractive goods or services.
Bioplanet Network members are located in rural communities that have been passed over by Mexico's entry into the globalized economy. Most of them were founded in the late 1990s.
Some date back 15 years, to a time when Marcelli started working with them as a founder of EcoSolar, one of Mexico's first environmental groups. Ecosolar provided the orientation and capacity-building needed to help launch businesses like Mazunte Natural Cosmetics.
Photo by Miguel Ángel Torres
Richard Romero in the organic garden that feeds his guests at his Las Cañadas Cloud Forest ecotourism project in Huatusco, Veracruz, Mexico
When other NGOs began extending similar support, Marcelli saw the need to unite these separate efforts – by encouraging horizontal and vertical market integration – to ensure the survival of the newly emerging entrepreneur class. He concluded that participants who made investments would reap the timely returns they required only if they: 1) purchased inputs from one another, 2) shared both their expertise and their earnings 3) added value to their individual efforts by transforming or refining raw materials and 4) shrewdly marketed their finished products to targeted consumers.
Making World Trade Serve Local Interests
Marcelli founded the Bioplanet Network to serve as an ombudsman for sustainable development. Today, Bioplanet staff members analyze market demands and international standards in order to advise their business clients.
"Instead of taking to the streets and blockading the World Bank offices, we say we're going to use the world trade strategy in favor of the social ecological process," Marcelli said.
Photo courtesy Bioplanet Network
Current Mazunte Natural Cosmetics cooperative
members at the factory
This means helping the little guys' operations create more value. To do this, Bioplanet has added a commercial wing that finds development grants, volunteers and clients. It also provides environmental education for producers and training in appropriate technologies, raw materials processing, quality control, and labeling.
Bioplanet's staff members help secure income for network members by helping to arrange trade fair exhibits and contracts with big buyers, and by providing a Web site (www.bioplaneta.com) that lists members. This makes Bioplanet "an able interlocuter in helping us with marketing, expositions and commercialization of what we produce," says the literature of the Pepper and Cafe Producers Organization cooperative in Puebla's Northern Mountains.
Biplanet's Web site profiles members' goods and service and explains the network's mission. Most important, it provides an efficient online ordering system that is similar to the purchasing process popularized by Amazon.com. It allows users to click a button to "Go to the Store," choose bulk or retail sales, select pictured products or services, put them in a virtual shopping basket, make recommendations to friends, request more information, and specify payment and delivery options.
Cosmetics, Crocodiles, Coffee and Vanilla
The residents of Mazunte had lost all sources of income before they launched the Mazunte Natural Cosmetics factory. Mexico's ban on killing endangered sea turtles closed the slaughterhouse on which they had depended for their livelihoods. Likewise, the economy of nearby Ventanilla, once based on crocodile hunting, collapsed along with crocodile population due to over-hunting.
Ventanilla's response was to launch a crocodile nursery run by Ventanilla Ecotourism Services. Bioplanet arranged to have a tour operator in the nearby world-famous beach resort of Huatulco bring busloads of visitors, with a stopover at the Mazunte Natural Cosmetics factory, in exchange for a 15 percent commission from Ventanilla's earnings.
Photo courtesy Bioplanet Network
Baby crocodile at the Ventanilla nursery, Oaxaca state, Mexico
The contract with the tour operator provides 3,500 visitors a month, each of which pays a US$3.50 admission fee to Ventanilla. This generates monthly revenues of some US$12,250 for the cooperative.
Marcelli estimates that another 350 to 700 tourists visit the network's ecotourism sites each month. In addition to paying Ventanilla's admission fee and buying products at Mazunte's store, at least 15 percent of the tourists stick around to spend money in shops, restaurants and lodgings run by local people.
Bioplanet's work with coffee growers provides another example of how it has boosted incomes. By identifying buyers and providing training in organic agriculture, processing, quality control, and labeling, Bioplanet has helped increase coffee growers' income from US$0.10 per kilogram for unprocessed coffee beans to US$4 per kilogram for organic, shade-grown coffee, marketed under the Bioplanet label. Today, cooperatives in all five of Mexico's coffee-producing states are selling this coffee to offices of the Mexican government's Environmental Secretariat.
Bioplanet's consultation process helps businesses learn how to increase their profits by transforming crops into more finished goods. For example, a group of 200 indigenous Totonacas, whose ancestors have cultivated vanilla beans since the 1200s, now are assembling the tools and know-how to distill vanilla extract.
Photo courtesy Bioplanet Network
Vanilla beans resting atop other ingredients for a sweet confection, including coffee beans and cinnamon sticks
Through Bioplanet, "we are discovering the opportunity to train our organization and increase the range of commercialization through sales of a manufactured product," says the literature of the non-profit May First Local Agricultural Association of Vanilla Producers.
Some enterprises have used the network's expert advice to diversify their product lines and create multi-purpose projects. Mazunte's cosmetic factory periodically introduces new bath and beauty items. Quali Traders has expanded the products it generates from its crop of amaranth, a high-protein native grain, to include flour, beverage mix, cookies, and various snack foods.
The network's 55 members have responded to Bioplanet's encouragement to build supply chains among themselves. They sell some US$100,000 worth of products annually to each other.
Mazunte Natural Cosmetics has signed a contract with Sanzekan Tinemibuys to sell its holiday cosmetics baskets on consignment, and it buys sesame oil from Tomatal Ecological Producers. Like Mazunte's adobe cosmetics factory, Tomatal's thatch-roofed adobe processing facility doubles as an ecotourism attraction.
Photo courtesy Bioplanet Network
Ten workers at the Tomatal Ecological Producers processing plant, where they produce sesame oil for Mazunte Natural Cosmetics. The plant doubles as a tourist attraction.
Marcelli predicts Bioplanet's members will enjoy a growing number of export and ecotourism opportunities in the coming year. Meanwhile, an equal number of organizations with hopes of joining in are requesting the network's evaluation.
Doing Big Business One-Better
Beyond working to make conventional wisdom about money-making trickle down to grassroots enterprises, the Bioplanet Network encourages participants to fulfill their noblest desires, such as sharing and caretaking.
When members receive seed money for a business, they are not asked to re-pay the donor. Instead, once they are operating in the black their stakeholders must agree to give an equivalent amount – either in money or services – to another start-up fair trade venture.
"In these projects, the marvel that we have achieved is  that people have this real conscientiousness – they are always making ecological improvements, supporting other projects, and networking," Marcelli said.
The Mazunte Natural Cosmetics factory received some US$10,000 in start-up funds from the Canadian Embassy, the British Council, the U.S. Agency for International Development, The Body Shop Foundation, the Oaxaca state government, domestic and foreign universities, the Foundation for the Protection of Children, and other donors.
These underwriters didn't ask for their money back. Instead, the factory cooperative agreed to make an equal contribution to other community developments.
This promised investment has financed a visitors' center to help the  nascent Ventanilla Ecotourism Services cooperative. Today the entire 25-family community of Ventanilla makes a living from its multipurpose crocodile reintroduction project.
Ventanilla is paying off the value of its investment from the cosmetics factory by giving tourism courses to the Tuxtlas Community Ecotourism Network. This network consists of projects in four villages that work together under Bioplanet's umbrella.
Last year, the Mazunte Natural Cosmetics factory won an international award for successful women's projects. It allotted the prize money to the chocolate confectioners of the San Rafael Toltepec Producers Union so they could complete their own factory.
Photo courtesy Bioplanet Network
Mazunte Natural Cosmetics gave its international award money to the chocolate confectioners of the San Rafael Toltepec Producers Union to finish this factory of adobe and tile, which doubles as an ecotourism attraction.
In this way, leading enterprises set an example that inspires other producers. "At first we had only dreams, and some who bought them," Marcelli said. "It's easier now, because some of these dreams are functioning."
Sharing Risks Creates Commitment
Fair trade industries require at least three years on average to generate a profit for their investors, Marcelli said. The experimental nature of Bioplanet's cooperatives ventures creates risk for the outsider donors who usually provide their start-up funding.
It also creates risk for the small producers themselves, because they must contribute the hard work required to operate the venture. They face the specter of putting in years of elbow grease, suffering and sacrifice only to fail at turning a profit.
For example, if a Bioplanet staff member advises sesame producers that seasonal market conditions indicate they should grow flowers instead of seeds, the challenge can be daunting. "They know that they are going to sell sesame, although at a very low price, because they always have," Marcelli notes. But sowing flowers constitutes a risk, even though this risk is based on good information.
Nevertheless, it is important that workers share the risks and rewards of a venture. This creates commitment.
Photo courtesy Bioplanet Network
Mazunte Natural Cosmetics bath products
"It's all that work that's an important part of being a lasting success," Marcelli said, "because if I arrive with a million dollars, build a factory, obtain an expert and tell people, 'Okay here's the factory,' – they don't appreciate it – it didn't cost them a thing, and that doesn't work."
Jealousies can arise when residents who are not involved in Bioplanet's network see new enterprises flourishing. They are a much bigger threat to success and can lead infighting within families and communities, Marcelli said.
Church and political parties' manipulations are another major deterrent, he said. Local officials often try to undermine emerging enterprises when they involve people from the political party that is not in power.
Missionaries who preach that environmentalists are the devil incarnate create problems when the fair trade movement attempts to organize a community. This interference "is a terrible strategy that is a worse problem than the economic part," Marcelli said.
Protestant evangelists, many from the United States, espouse this type of religious fanaticism to gain followers, according to Marcelli. The preachers aim to undermine competing community leadership by frightening residents with the notion that ecologists are messengers of Satan, he said.
It's Not Just Earning Money
More than the latest market technologies, it is Bioplanet Network's reaffirmation of human dignity that helps to overcome obstacles.
"Money is important – very important," Marcelli said. "If there's no money, a project is going to fail after awhile. But when you don't have values, people resist."
The Mazunte Natural Cosmetics factory provides a good example. "The women of Natural Cosmetics were beaten, mistreated, and very, very, very poor," Marcelli said. "Their self-esteem was low. Before they wore dirty clothes. Now they are businesswomen, they dress up, they care for themselves, and they can tell their husbands not to hit them because they have their own money. They have changed a lot.
Photo by Miguel Ángel Torres
Founding members of Mazunte Natural Cosmetics at the factory in Oaxaca, Mexico
"But what's more, they are conscious that theirs' is a very important project for all of Mexico – even on the international level. It's not just earning money, it's helping others. It's a new dignifying of the person, and sharing knowledge and earnings. People want to do that."
A New Vision of Globalization
Marcelli's father, a guru in Eastern spiritual philosophy, imbued him with a belief in working for others in order to achieve a more harmonious society. When his older brother was arrested and tortured for participating in the student movement for social change during the late 1960s, Marcelli decided to pursue alternatives for a more just and environmentally balanced system. This led him to found the Ecosolar and Bioplanet initiatives.
Marcelli envisions achieving a form of globalization that is the opposite of the system that predominates today. Today's free market, which was created by neoliberal politics, is really a restricted market, he says.
"I personally am an absolute fan of globalization," Marcelli said. "It is the dream that I had since childhood: a world without boundaries, global communication. The problem is how it works."
Photo by Miguel Ángel Torres
A view of the Pacific coast at Mazunte, Oaxaca, Mexico
Marcelli would change the system so that, in response to the model pioneered by the Bioplanet Network, Mexican government policies that put the network members' needs at the forefront of trade and development strategy. Increased official support for Bioplanet members will encourage investor partnering.
It will also help enroll more community-oriented enterprises – the total number of which is double the number that Bioplanet can serve with technical assistance at this time. It would help spread the Bioplanet model from one-third of Mexico's states to all the remaining states within five years, if all goes well.
The impact could be breathtaking. For example, in one state alone Bioplanet has identified 3,000 rural production initiatives that would benefit from the types of tools the network offers – but it can only enroll about 30 of those projects at present.
Marcelli envisions a day when Bioplanet's members have benefited sufficiently from its efforts to say they no longer need help; when they all will have managed to make money from protecting their environment, and can continue sharing their wealth.
Many people have told him it's a utopian vision. He replies: "Well, I only like to do utopian things, because everybody else does the other, so what's the point?"
Photo by Miguel Ángel Torres
Pacific coast sunset at Mazunte, Oaxaca, Mexico
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