(I wasn’t able to find internet my first night in Zacapa, so
here are my blog posts for the past two days)
June 18 - Hola
from Guatemala! Yesterday morning I
arrived in Guatemala City, and all my luggage was cleared through Customs
without incident. Sasha from Mani+
picked me up from the airport and dropped me off at my hotel located in “la
Zona Viva”, which is the cultural/entertainment center of Guatemala City. Even though it was Sunday night, the night
life was very active and I was able to explore several bars/discotecas within a
few blocks of my hotel.
This morning, I was picked up from my hotel by Carlos Giron,
who is my main contact within the Mani+ organization, along with Robert Tauscher,
a rising Senior at Vanderbilt University who is volunteering for the Mani+
organization this summer. I will be
travelling with them for most of my trip in Guatemala, and we are working
together to set up contacts with local peanut farmers in Zacapa, to teach them
both aflatoxin-reduction techniques and also ways to increase the yield of
peanut crops in general. Because Carlos’
father is from Zacapa, he knows the area very well, and he travelled with us on
our trip from Guatemala City to Zacapa, about a 4 hour car ride.
On the way to Zacapa, we stopped
by first in a nearby small town called Estanzuela. There, we had a meeting with the mayor,
Julio Giron, who is a semi-close relative of Carlos and his family. Although the mayor was friendly, he was not
entirely receptive to our project because he doubted the economic feasibility
of growing peanuts as a cash crop. While
Zacapa has traditionally been a large peanut producing region, in recent years
the majority of farmers have been growing watermelons and cantaloupe instead
because these crops tend to be more profitable.
However, the main concern that the mayor raised was the high cost of
peanut shelling, which we believe can probably be solved by the introduction of
a UNS. The next few days, we will be
travelling to both large and small peanut farms around Zacapa, and from talking
with farmers directly we hope to get a better sense of the current situation and
the main costs/problems that they are facing to grow peanuts.
June 19 - Hello
again, tonight is my second night staying in Zacapa, and I am borrowing Carlos’
Tigo device to connect to the internet here.
The conditions at the hotel here are fairly rustic; there is no hot
water sink/shower, and Carlos’ window has a large bullet hole in the
middle. However, it is a convenient
location to visit peanut farms all around the region, and we're only about 15
minutes away from Estanzuela, which is going to be the base town for most of
the Mani+ operations in the Zacapa region.
Today Robert, Carlos, his father, and I visited a 3 acre peanut
farm in Chiquimula, which was approximately 1 hour south of Zacapa. We traveled with two farmer representatives
from Estanzuela, Juan and Amilcar, who are interested in introducing the peanut
crop to new farms in their region, and they wanted to see an example of what
Guatemalan peanut farmers are doing now.
In Chiquimula, we saw the entire line of peanut production, from growing
the plants in the fields, to storage in a warehouse, to shelling and
roasting.
 |
| Mountain View from Chiquimula |
From our visit, we found that
all steps of the process used very low-level technology, with very
conservative practices overall. The
farmer was not adding any fertilizer/pesticides/herbicides to his crop, and he
did not use irrigation either because he believed that was unnecessary. Since the farmer was satisfied with his
current yield, he told us that he wasn’t interested in changing his growing
practices unless there was a specific market demand for that.
Afterwards, we visited the peanut storage site in
Chiquimula, which was essentially a wide open concrete house with a few piles
of peanut storage bags stacked in the corners.
Overall, we were happy with the setup of the storage facility, which was
breezy and had a few electric fans for ventilation, and also a roof and
concrete barrier to prevent rain from getting into the peanut bags. The main storage practices that worried us
was that peanuts were kept on the ground of the facility before shelling, which
exposed them to various bacteria and fungi, and also the type of storage bag
that was being used. In the Chiquimula
storage site, they had plastic threaded bags which tend to trap moisture,
contributing to fungi growth and increasing the likelihood of aflatoxin
contamination. We purchased a 50 lb bag
of unshelled peanuts from the warehouse to test for aflatoxin, and we also plan to run
some tests with the UNS and UV scanner after we set those up in the next few
days.
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| Plastic-threaded peanut storage bags in Chiquimula |
The last part of the process that we saw in Chiquimula was
the shelling and roasting steps. The
storage facility had three motorized peanut shellers in the same building, and
the shelled peanuts were brought to a different concrete house for roasting and
salting. In the second house, the
peanuts are first spread out on a large plastic mat, and a woman goes through
the nuts one basket at a time, picking off the inner red skin. In addition to the pictures I took of
Chiquimula, I also recorded a short video of the woman handling the shelled
peanuts, who ran her hands constantly through the pile of peanuts like the
hand-shelling style common in Africa.
After the red skin of the peanuts is removed, they are roasted in a wood stove and then
salted, all in the same concrete house.
Overall, all of us were surprised to learn how condensed the
entire peanut production process is in Chiquimula, and that many of the
important steps of the process are located in the same place. Tomorrow, we are going to visit some small
farmers nearby Estanzuela, and talk to them about setting up a peanut
production process similar to Chiquimula, but with many improvements. We are also going to test the 50 lb sample
bag of peanuts for aflatoxins using the UV scanner and AflaCheck test, and also
prepare some initial aflatoxin test samples that we will send back to the lab in
Guatemala City to determine the exact ppb concentration that we are starting
from. Good night for now, and I'll be in touch soon.
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