In Praise of Preda Fair Trade Dried Mangoes

There was great happiness in the villages of the Zambales and Mindanao mountains this year- the mango trees produced an abundance of mango fruit. The small-scale Filipino farmers and indigenous people were delighted. Happy, beaming farmers brought their crates of mangoes to the Preda Center where they were weighed, sorted and tagged and the farmers were paid a high price for their fruit. In Mindanao, the harvest was also good. The farmers in the Preda association of mango growers brought tons of fruit to the processing plant for Preda.

It has been three years without a mango harvest in the mountains of Zambales and low mango yields in Mindanao. Both areas have unique sensitive climates. They had been badly affected due to the drastic changes in the world climate and global warming caused by emissions of CO2 gases.

The farmers supply their mango fruit to the Preda Fair Trade project which delivers the famous Preda dried mango and mango puree products to the World Shops and supermarkets in European countries, Japan and Korea. They love them because the Preda puree products and dried mango slices are unique. They are different in taste and are of very high quality. Once the customer tastes them, they want more. That is the success of the Preda dried mango. All others taste artificial from many additives.

The Preda mangoes are processed without any added chemicals, artificial coloring, preservatives or other ingredients. They have a wonderful natural sweet taste and are healthy nutritious snacks important for children and adults when we are all striving to avoid the commercial snacks that are so dangerous to our health.

The Preda mangoes are very special and they are produced to fair trade standards. There is guaranteed no child labor, exploitation, no pesticides or toxic fertilizers used and fair trade prices are paid to the farmers. Besides, any earnings from the sales are donated by Preda to support needy children in the Preda-run homes for abused children.

The mangoes that are processed into mango puree are certified as organic by an international certification group because they meet the strict inspections and verification of a clean and chemically-free mountain environment.

In Davao province, Mindanao 127 small farmers in remote areas care for over a thousand mango trees scattered across the hilly country. Last month, Donard Angeles, the Preda coordinator, went to these villages and ingeniously loaded school supplies, bags, notebooks, pens and pencils on a hired motorcycle and distributed them to hundreds of school children of the farmers.

Besides paying the farmers a generous bonus for their deliveries of mangoes, the harvest of one big mango tree will also support a child in school for one year. This keeps teenagers from going to the city where they could become victims of human trafficking. The women are the empowered leaders and manage the money in the families. They start small businesses.

Josie has four children and with her husband care for about 50 mango trees. She used her bonus for one year to start a small village store. It supplies many needs of the villagers and she is prospering. Michelle bought a sow and started pig-raising. She and her family are doing very-well. Most of the farmers are now free from dire poverty as a result of the livelihood that came from the sale of dried mangoes.

The growing and supply of Preda dried mangoes distributed by our dedicated partners has helped to provide funds for the supply of village communal toilets and water wells and hand pumps in the remote villages of the Aeta indigenous people. These are subsistence farmers. Their ancestral rainforests were cut down and the trees shipped to Europe and Japan to help rebuild those countries after World War II.

They turned to hill farming of vegetables and root crops but they did not earn any money from harvesting and selling the pico mangoes that grew in abundance but are not commercially  in demand unlike the popular carabao mangoes. When Preda and our partner in Germany experimented in processing the pico mango, it was a success and the taste is excellent. Since it is grown high in the hills and mountains where there is no chemical farming, organic certification became a possibility.

After three years of organizing and holding seminars for the mountain farmers and training local inspectors and meeting the many bureaucratic requirements, we applied for organic certification. After many visits by international experts in organic certification and local inspectors, the mangoes were finally approved as organic, a great success indeed.

Every year, there is an inspection by the certification body to see all standards are maintained. Even when there were no harvests, they had to be inspected. This year, they passed and qualified as meeting the strict organic standards. This is a big success for indigenous people in remote areas with little access to education.

There are 414 in the program. The latest Preda Fair Trade action now is the planting of trees all over the mountains including 3,958 mango saplings of carabao variety, which produce a favored variety of fruit that is of higher value. For every three packets of dried mangoes bought, we can plant another mango sapling. That is helping to reforest the denuded hills, absorb CO2 and prevent global warming.

This is a great way by which people can offset their CO2 footprint. Also, buying Preda dried mango helps farmers and children since we donate a percentage of earnings to the children’s homes. Preda dried mango is a fair trade, healthy food that helps many people including the consumer.

Fair Trade - A Taste of Justice

I love to go to the villages of the Aeta indigenous people of Zambales where I have worked for the past 45 years. These original Filipino people have survived for millennia on the northern island of the tropical archipelago, as long as 30,000 years, some anthropologists say. I climbed the grassy hills which were once their ancestral homelands and were deep in the primeval rain forest but since the turn of the century, the rain forests have been under logging attack and are almost gone. Their demise has made global warming all the worse.

The Aeta people would have been gone too since they are the people most badly affected by this loss of habitat. Most of the wildlife have disappeared or has been greatly diminished. So the Aeta people lost their traditional means of survival. But they learned to plant and nurture the logged-over land. They are a gentle, peace loving people and until the forests were cut down they were forest dwellers, hunters and gatherers. Now, they live in small tribal groups in small villages.

Their life was far from idyllic, they had nothing else but the unique skills of an ancient people to survive in the harshest and most difficult of environments. They live for the most part in lightly built, low wood framed huts with walls of bamboo and matted grasses on the roof; the long grass grow in abundance on logged over hills. Deforestation is one the greatest ecological crimes against the Filipino people.

They have learned from their ancestors great knowledge of medicinal, herbal plants and remedies that helped them heal wounds, kill infections, resist or overcome malaria with the ground bark or sap of a tree, to cure colds and flu with a mixture of herbal juices and teas. They learned how to build up their immunity against many diseases by a healthy diet of wild berries, honey, vegetables and mango and other fruit and they feast on forest chicken or wild pig occasionally.

The most beneficial fruits for their health they said are mango, guava, guyabano, calamansi and coconut. Rice is their staple. The Aeta have adapted to every situation: climate change, social upheavals, white man's diseases, wars and land grabbing, sickness and malnutrition, isolation and racial discrimination. They adapted to the loss of their forests and ancestral lands. They are truly an amazing people.

In the village of Batiawan, I met a wizened old lady who beamed with happiness when I and my two companions, volunteers, accepted her invitation to sit outside her small bamboo and grass hut and share a cool drink of coconut water. Then she reached into a woven basket that she had made herself and took out a mango fruit. This was harvested from the towering mango tree that dominated the village, gave shade from the intense morning sunshine and protected the little bamboo and grass roofed houses during typhoons.

The mango was still green with a hint of yellow, it was just ripening. She swiftly sliced on both sides of the large flat seed and handed me and my companion a piece of the fruit. We tasted with relish that tangy sour and sweet taste mingled together, nothing like it in the world, I thought. “You have so many mango fruits here, growing wild, you must be able to get rich by selling them, they fetch a good, high price in the local market?", I asked Aling Maria.

"It is not possible, the dangerous work of the young men climbing the trees gathering the fruit and carrying them in sacks many kilometers to the markets earns so very little money. It is not sufficient to buy even a few kilos of rice. We leave them to fall to the ground and we eat what we need", she told me.

I stood up and walked around the area and indeed it was littered with mango fruit rotting away. What a terrible loss, I thought. What cheating and unfairness this is, the Aeta are truly exploited I thought. I wanted to help but didn't know how.

Then many years later, I discovered that there was a big market for dried fruit and I thought of the many thousands of mango fruits scattered on the ground all around that Aeta village and many other villages also. I found a business partner with a factory drying fruit and bought the mangos from small farmers and the Aeta.

The Aeta and small farmers got organized and now they get a high fair trade price for their mangos which is 200 percent higher than what some commercial traders will pay to them. There are development projects for them too. Also, there is a bonus payment given to the small, lowland farmers.

I had a quality dried mango with no added chemical, coloring or preservative and to last a long while. There is also one that is totally sugar free and yet retains a tangy naturally sweet taste. They all sell quickly and we can even help abused and exploited children with some of the earnings.

It's not only great to taste and improve one's health, vigor and immunity but it is spiritually good too. What I mean is, not only does a buyer of fair trade goods help small farmers and Aeta and abused children, but it's a better way to live.

Above all, the Preda Fair Trading brings economic justice and opportunity to the poorest and most exploited of all. It lifts up their lives, sends their children to school and makes this world just a better place for all. And all can be part of making the change by being a fair trade buyer, doing right with a shopping bag and getting a taste for justice. 

Dried Mangoes Could Prevent Cancer - New Medical Discoveries

It's great to get good news about the wonders and benefits of nature for once after all the natural disasters experienced in the past few months around the world. Scientists at the Texas A&M University have discovered cancer retardants in the delicious mango fruit. The extract of mango, a naturally sweet tropical fruit can prevent, if not stop, the growth of cancer cells especially breast and colon cancer. The scientists Dr. Susanne Talcott and husband and co-researcher Dr. Steve Talcott released the scientific data recently saying the mango extracts "demonstrated some cancer-fighting abilities when tested on lung, leukemia and prostrate cancer cells". When tested on breast and colon cancer cells, they had an even more robust anti-cancer effect, they said "In fact, the mango extracts caused the breast cancer and colon cancer cells to undergo apoptosis or programmed cancer cell death", they said. The results of the studies have been posted on the Philippine Cancer Society's web site.

This is a wonderful breakthrough for the Philippine mango which is already a strong export product; however, the real future in the world market is organic dried mango. NGO's, developing agencies, investors would be wise to invest and help farmers to go organic and work for certification. Preda Fair Trade is training farmers how to convert and meet the criteria for certification. Buyers abroad are ready to pay more for the organic mangoes and donate towards the certification costs. But winning farmers from chemical spraying is a massive task. They are dependent on the contract sprayer, they cannot see how better-off they would be by going organic.

Mango is the one Philippine fruit among many that I love and together with indigenous Aeta farmers here in Zambales we are going organic. That's because the fair trade project of Preda has been helping small impoverished farmers for the past 16 years to get higher prices for their mango and offers an added percentage payment if the mangoes are organically produced. There was a time when a price-fixing cartel controlled the industry for years and there was no competition until Preda fair trade teamed up with an emerging company called Profood in Cebu and began to create a shortage as it bought thousands of kilos of mangoes and so the shortage drove up the price and the price-fixing cartel broke up. The Preda-Profood partnership developed and marketed the delicious chemical-free dried mango that is soft, tasty and naturally sweet. It has no preservatives or any artificial additives. Pure goodness and now they are even better with the good news that this humble fruit has healing power.

Of course we all hope and pray that the health and life-giving scientific discoveries are duplicated and authenticated. But no matter what, eating Preda chemical-free dried fruit is good in itself and we all know that a healthy body and life style need lots of fruit. Dried fruit is blessed with life giving minerals and ingredients as just proven. It takes 8 kilos of fresh mango fruit to make one kilo of dried mango fruit, so the benefit is greater when eating dried mangoes. That's what Preda fair trade has made available in many big supermarkets in the UK and Ireland and around Europe. The World Fair Trade shops are famous for selling the Preda dried mangoes and helping save children from abusers, pedophiles and pimps. In the UK and Ireland, they are sold through the Forest Feast brand with the Preda name predominately displayed on the packet.

The new scientific breakthrough has added a great new dimension to eating this dried fruit. It's now the wise, smart and medical sound thing to do. It's a healthy welcome gift to give to others. When you read this tell your friends the good news.

Preda FAIR TRADE project pays for the planting of over 1000 mango trees a year to help the indigenous people in the Philippine climb out of poverty. It protects the environment, cut-back CO2 and becomes a living forest habitat for all creatures, great and small. The price of mangoes has risen in recent years bringing a bonus to poor farmers. Sales keep their children in school and in the villages and safe from the traffickers and sex tourists. A percentage of sales also goes to help the victims of trafficking and abuse, while the project rescues hundreds of children and gives them a new start in life. So what greater good can one do than buy the Forest Feast/Preda brand! You never know the scientists might be right and I don't want to miss out on the benefits so please pass me the bag of Forest Feast/Preda dried mangoes. THEY TASTE GREAT!